Technology: A Palm You Wear On Your Wrist

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Love your Palm but tired of carrying around (and occasionally dropping) yet another untethered piece of hardware? Now for the first time, somebody has squeezed the Palm operating system into a wristwatch. Fossil's Wrist PDA goes on sale this month for $295 on Amazon.com and it has almost everything you have come to expect from its big brothers, including a USB connection to synch with a PC and an infrared port for wireless data transfer. There's even a backlit screen and a tiny stylus hidden in the band.

As a watch, however, it's a little clunky. It weighs as much as an iPod, and with just 2 MB of memory, two hours of battery life and the old Palm OS 4.1, it can't be as quick and versatile as a full-size PDA. Fossil recommends that you stick to applications "designed for the smaller screen size." You'll have to cut it some slack for not having the latest Palm features like Wi-Fi connectivity, a built-in camera or a color screen. Still, it will free up space in your increasingly crowded pockets, and it's a guaranteed conversation starter--at least in some circles. Oh, yes, it also tells time, with customizable watch faces. --By Wilson Rothman