Just a comment on your Palm columns. Mr. Wertheimer ("In order to get the most out of a Palm Pilot, one has to tinker with it... I get grouchy when I have to fuss with things.") is exactly right, as long as you emphasize "to get the most out of." The truth is that my Palm was immensely useful to me from the very beginning. In minutes I was using the schedule planner, memo pad and address book, instantly replacing the DayTimer I've been using for 10 years. Hot-syncing? That's about as brainless as anything can get, and it's mainly for backup unless you want to transfer data or documents back and forth from the PC. In my case, I try to do as much as possible without touching a PC.
But the real beauty of the Palm is how much more you can do with it than those basic functions. With the Palm, I can leave the laptop at home and carry in my pocket an immense archive of memos, reports, and spreadsheets; maps for any place in the country; foreign-language dictionaries; books, games and photos. Then there's the internet access for email & websites (mapquest, travelocity, amazon, cnn, etc.). Aside from the portability, the best part about using a Palm is its boot-up time -- zero to nil. And in six weeks, my Palm has locked up only once. It revived instantly with a push of the soft-reset button.
The more advanced functions do require software downloads and installations. But I have found this whole process to be much easier than typical PC software installations. No setup wizard. No clobbered .dlls or file-extension conflicts. Minimal learning curve. One might respond that Palm programs are much more feature-limited than their PC counterparts. But that's exactly the point -- Palm software simply does what I need it to do 95% of the time. There's still the PC for the other 5%.
So I would describe the Palm, to use a phrase you recently coined, as a graduated experience. While basic functions are immediately accessible, users can tailor the device with increasingly complex functions as they come up the learning curve.
Designers must still overcome the Palm's (and other PDAs') biggest hurdle to broader acceptance, the text-input interface. But they're already miles down the road to changing our conception of a personal computer.
