mitation is still the sincerest form of flattery, and it moves at lightning speed in technology, whipping a market right out from under a successful product if its makers are not very fast on their feet.

Nowhere at CeBIT is this more evident--and more deadly--than in the gaggle of copies of 3Com's hot Palm Pilot (it sold 3 million units in 18 months) presented here by Microsoft and its partners. When I first saw these minicomputers at dinner with some Microsoft executives the other night, my first reaction was that they were a total ripoff of Palm Pilot's look and feel, but about twice as big and three times a s complicated. I started thinking of them as Paw Pilots. Donna Dubinsky, president of Palm, agreed, telling reporters: "Windows CE is fine if you want something big, heavy and slow with all the complexity of Windows 95 in your palm."

But that was Saturday. Now I have seen the real competition, the Nino 300 from Philips, which is the size of the Palm, with a nicely ergonometric curving grip. "But it looks exactly like the Palm Pilot, " I tell the Philips executive. "Oh no," she says, "it has Windows inside." And it's cool.

-- Janice Castro