Considering the “accessibility” of the service to the users, it was hard to expect that i705 would become popular on the world scale. Lack of an integrated keyboard also made work with long messages unhandy (the i750 was supposed to make it easy to send and receive e-mail, wasn’t it?) Handspring understood the last fact quickly enough when they started doing communicators and switched from Graffiti to the keyboard.

Nevertheless, the i705 began selling well enough – about 13 thousand units in the first week. Surprisingly too, most of the buyers also subscribed for the most expensive variant of the Palm.net service that allowed unlimited work with e-mail. It seemed like Palm had managed to interest corporate customers. Moreover, the company also released an application that provided secure wireless connections to SQL-databases via the PDA.

However, the main competitor, Handspring, looked more appealing with its Treo. The device started selling in Asia first, and then, after a short while, came to the USA. The company just once again experienced a severe components shortage that is why they couldn’t assemble enough Treos. Still, this was unimportant as long as the first day of Treo sales in the USA brought about a growth of the Handsping stock by a third. The Treo turned to be a lucky mixture of a PDA with a cell phone, which Hawkins wanted to implement back in the VisorPhone. But this was quite another level of technology. That’s why Handspring also announced that they were going away from ordinary PDAs production.

Meanwhile, Palm, or PalmSource to be more precise, did one more long-promised thing. It held a developer conference. The company showed there a prototype of PalmOS 5, targeted, as the times required, at wireless communication, access to corporate networks, security and similar things. It meant that Palm was catching up with PocketPC 2002, which had officially launched earlier and moved in the same direction.

Software was good, but Palm never forgot its main source of income, which was hardware. The company at last issued a couple of PDAs of the top-end and mainstream class – m515 and m130. They were a good replacement for the m505, with 16MB of RAM onboard, and a cheap color-display PDA for those who were going to buy their first handhelds. There was a nasty scandal with the latter, though. It turned out that m130 had a display supporting 12-bit colors, although the advertisements had promised 16-bit color support. So, there were only four thousand colors per pixel instead of sixty five thousand… At first, Palm just said sorry to the clients who had already bought the m130. When they started suing the company, it presented them a free versions of SimCity.

Meanwhile, Handspring pinned all hopes upon the Treo, and was moving along the only possible course: away from PDAs to communicators. The TreoMail program was released, which provided the most important capability for such a device – e-mail services. In a nutshell, the technology consisted of redirecting the e-mail from the user’s PC to the Treo as soon as the latter is in the coverage area, also when connected to the cell network.