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The Palm m125 offers a compelling value proposition (continued)
The new cards are scheduled to be available in November. The 12 PalmPak cards range in price from $29.95 to $39.99 (estimated U.S. street pricing). That's a lot of content, and that's just what Palm itself is offering. Many other companies offer expansion media content cards, including the following:
The SD card is a low cost memory option, one of the main reasons Palm chose it as its expansion standard. The small size of the card was another important factor in their decision, along with the high speed of data transfer and the amount of storage room available in these small chips. In fact, executives at Palm expect that in the near future a card capable of holding up to 1GB of information may be developed. Palm also chose the SD card because it has broad support from a wide range of companies, meaning it will be possible to take your card from your Palm handheld and put it into such devices as MP3 players, digital cameras, printers, etc.
To discuss the real boon expansion cards can be for the enterprise, I'm going to quote myself for a moment. As I said in my article on the m500 line of handhelds:
Things will get really interesting when companies begin developing proprietary software and placing it on SD cards. You can use your personal digital assistant to store all of your personal data, and when you need to, you can pop in your company's proprietary SD card to access your corporate data without taking up valuable space on your device. This may even turn into a security feature for companies, as they can require sensitive information to be stored on an SD card that you'd then check at the door before leaving the office at night.
Universal Connector
The Universal Connector was another innovation introduced as part of the m500 line, with the promise that it would become the standard across all future Palm products. With the release of the Palm m125, the doubters can now be silenced. A universal standard for connecting Palm handhelds to cradles and accessories is a major innovation. No longer will you have to start from scratch, buying a whole new set of accessories when you upgrade to a newer model of Palm handheld.
This is a valuable change when it comes to enterprise deployment as well. The various cradles positioned at PCs throughout the office will soon be interchangeable. For example, suppose you're in charge of a factory floor and you've assigned Palm handhelds to your floor workers who are moving about collecting data. You have a central PC in a back office where you intend for them to download the information they collect. If you have a cradle with a Universal Connector hooked up to that PC, all your staff members will be able to perform their HotSync operations with that computer, whether they carry high-end Palm m500 series computers or more rugged Palm m125s.
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