Sometimes when a relative has been very ill and is making a valiant effort to recover you talk in hushed tones around them.

Phrases like, ‘plucky person’, ‘always showed spirit’, ‘just won’t give up.’

We all know what the next step will be.

From its very first origins I have been a great supporter of the Palm. I first saw it in 1996 at a presentation made by Donna Dubinsky aided by Ed Colligan, two of the three inventors — although most of the credit must go to Jeff Hawkins who was not present.

Donna demonstrated the Palm, taught me a new phrase in the term ‘reality check’ and changed my life. Until that time I had maintained a written diary using the Filofax system which I had known since my army days. The Palm was an electronic Filofax only a hell of a lot better. As the years went by the Palm dropped the word Pilot — someone else owned it — and then mobile phone features were added so that it became the Treo.

In 20/20 hindsight with which we are all blessed, that was a mistake. If the Palm Treo should have emulated anyone it was the Blackberry from RIM. As it happens, with great regrets and after a serious reality check, I gave up the Palm and switched to the Blackberry.

What I wanted was push email. Automatically transmits e-mail messages that have been received by a server to a mobile device.

The mobile phone Palms which were the Treo 680 and 700p both have a built-in e-mail application called VersaMail that has to be scheduled to pull e-mail out of a server every few minutes. And that, honestly, is not the way I or any business executive wants to go. If information about our company is valuable we want it now. Not later.

And so the Palm as a Treo lurched on a bit but the Blackberry was where the glamor was.

Too late, the doctor has prescribed quite serious medicine. With the latest update, Treo users get automatic wireless delivery of e-mail, calendar, and contact information. It can directly access Microsoft Exchange Servers, but IT organizations need to have deployed Exchange Server 2003 SP2 or Exchange 2007 although this is not great problem.

The update has a lot of security and central management and if you work for a major company you will find that the IT department knows it is paranoid, but is it paranoid enough?

And the name has been changed to Garnet which is a common replacement for silica sand in sand blasting.

Do I think the new version of Palm/Garnet will attract the all-important business push?

Giving it the famous Donna Dubinsky reality test I have to say I think we will soon hear the requiem. Palm truly seems to have followed Delillo’s idea: ‘We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.’ Sadly, it ain’t enough.

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Entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 9:49 am under Uncategorized.

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