3Com Announces Palm III

This week, 3Com announced the Palm III "connected organizer," an incremental update to the successful PalmPilot line of PDAs. The Palm III introduces a more curved case design with an optional flip cover, 2 MB of RAM, 2 MB of flash RAM, the Palm OS 3.0, and an infrared port. According to 3Com, the $399 Palm III will be available in early April in limited quantities. Prices for the current PalmPilot Professional and PalmPilot Personal units dropped to $299 and $199 (see Jeff Carlson’s recent series of PalmPilot articles). Although not groundbreaking, the new device is seen by many to be an intermediate push against upcoming heavily hyped Windows CE-based "Palm PCs." PalmPower Magazine has published close-up photos and a first-look review of the Palm III. In related news, 3Com’s subsidiary Palm Computing also announced last week that it is suing Microsoft over the Palm PC moniker; the suit was filed in several European countries, where Palm believes it has a better chance of proving trademark infringement.