What is Palm to do? My Palm III has been having problems lately. Three weeks ago I turned it on to find six months of un-synced-due-to-hubris data wiped. My own fault; I never back up enough, and had jammed so many goofy apps on my Palm, with so many custom databases, that I was scared to run Backup Buddy in case my PC hung. It's working now, but flakey, and although I don't know the exact problem, I know enough not to squeeze it, lest it be wiped again. Common sense, I suppose: don't squeeze the Palm.

So, I've been looking for something new, and doing a bit of research, and discovered to my horror that Palm is in trouble; in fact, the whole platform, the Palm OS, is in trouble. Handspring is bleeding money, and the Windows CE-driven Compaq iPaq is the new hot thing. The editor of Pen Computing even said he dumped his Palm for an iPaq.