Cheaper Palm VII Debuts Nationwide -- Palm Computing has announced the nationwide availability of the wireless Palm VII device in the United States. The Palm VII, which features built-in wireless Internet access, has been available in the New York City metropolitan area since 24-May-99. In addition to expanded availability, the Palm VII's price has been reduced from $600 to $500. Palm also announced a third option for subscribing to the monthly Palm.net service, required for wireless access: the Volume Plan includes 300K of transferred data for $40 per month (the existing Basic Plan offers 50K for $10, while the Expanded Plan includes 150K for $25). The cost of data used beyond the monthly limits dropped to $0.20 per kilobyte. Although that sounds like a minuscule amount of data, the Palm VII uses a technology Palm calls Web Clipping which can dramatically reduce the amount of data transferred during each transaction. Still, early users have reported that it's easy to burn through several hundred kilobytes of data during a month's time. Palm also announced price cuts throughout the entire Palm organizer product line plus the Palm Vx, an expanded version of the slim Palm V offering 8 MB of RAM (versus 2 MB in the original) and a slightly faster processor. [JLC]

<http://www.palm.com/products/palmvii/>
<http://www.palm.net/>
<http://www.palm.com/products/palmvx/>