To Palm or Not to Palm?

Andy Marx, head of an Internet consulting firm in Los Angeles, would not call himself a Palm addict, but his wife, Terry Press, would. She says, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that her marriage hasn't been the same since she "made the mistake" of buying her husband a Palm V handheld personal digital assistant last Christmas. "It's like a GameBoy for 40-year-olds," says Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks SKG. "He went insane when he got it." Her biggest pet peeve is that Marx will be "poking at that thing" while they're sitting together in a restaurant or when their kids are trying to get his attention.

Marx protests that while he uses his Palm religiously, he's not compulsive about it. He keeps it with him most of the time, he explains, because it's good for storing appointments and phone numbers and it's easier than walking around with scraps of paper. When he takes his daughter to her piano lessons, he'll sometimes pass the time reading news on his Palm.

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