Palm has been the top selling PDA company for years now. It started the whole concept of what we think of as a PDA today. However, its product line-up fell behind fellow Palm OS licensee Sony and Pocket PC vendors like Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba when it came to innovation and features. Palm's fortunes began to look up last year when it divided its product line between the Tungsten, corporate and professional, and Zire, consumer orientated, lines.

With the release last fall of the Tungsten T with its unique compact design and the very basic yet popular Zire handheld, which brought the cost of buying a PDA down bellow a $100, Palm began its comeback.

Last spring things got even better with launch of the Wi-Fi enabled Tungsten C, which included Palm's first attempt at an integrated keyboard and featured the most powerful processor found in any handheld, and the Zire 71, an excellent multimedia orientated PDA that leveraged the slider design of the Tungsten T to integrate an easy and fun to use digital camera. Both of these devices included Palm's best and brightest displays yet.

The company even released its first attempt at a data centric smartphone, the Tungsten W, which looked very similar to the Tungsten C, except for a nub of an antenna protruding from the top, but was otherwise far less powerful. We expect Palm's taking over of Handspring, which just released the highly regarded Treo 600 smartphone, to boost the company's fortunes in this area.

This month Palm finished refurbishing its product line with the release of the Zire 21, the follow-up to the original Zire, the Tungsten E, a PDA in the tradition of the classic Palm V and m500 series that is aimed at budget-minded business users, and the Tungsten T3, which continues to innovate on the Tungsten T line while bringing in the power first glimpsed at in the Tungsten C. This past summer Palm released the first sequel to the Tungsten T with the Tungsten T2, which had twice as much memory, improved performance and a better display. The hallmark of all these PDAs, no matter how powerful, is simplicity.

--Dazzling Display & Power Hallmarks of Tungsten T3

--Tungsten E Is All Business

--Palm Gives Entry Level Zire a Boost