Product: PalmOne Wi-fi SDIO card Price: $1,010 Pros: Works like a charm; smaller adapter size Cons: A little pricey
If you own a Tungsten 3 or Zire 72 handheld, you can now get a wireless local area network connection, or Wi-fi. I tested a PalmOne Wi-fi SDIO (secure digital input/output) card with the Zire 72 and it was a breeze to install and set up.
An Install Wizard guides you through the steps and, after a HotSync operation, the Wi-fi setup and virtual private network setup utilities and the Web Pro browser application were installed on my personal digital assistant.
Tap the Wi-fi setup icon and the utility spots a list of Wi-fi networks in range. I selected a network and was connected within seconds. The application also checks for signal strength, establishes disconnect time and sets up WEP (wired equivalent privacy) encryption.
Connected to the Web, I opened the device's installed Web Pro browser. It took about 15 seconds to load Yahoo! Mail's website. Web Pro uses a proxy server, which you can disable, that formats web pages to look better on the small PDA screen, but this function could delay loading times.
While you can use both a Wi-fi and Bluetooth connection at the same time, PalmOne recommends disabling Bluetooth since it may interfere with signal quality. Wi-fi also saps a lot of power, so keep an eye on the battery life.