Palm's been the No. 1 player in the handheld device space for quite a while now, but the products the company has released in the last couple of years have left me scratching my head.

First, Palm seemed content simply to tinker with its designs, leaving the development of much-needed new features such as memory card support, multimedia capabilities and sharper screen resolutions to licensees suxh (sic) as Sony and HandEra.

Then, after whetting our appetites with Palm OS 5-a new, more capable, ARM processor-based platform-Palm botched delivery of the operating system by pairing it with the much-too-costly (albeit very attractive) Tungsten T.

Palm then backtracked by following up that first OS 5-based device with a wireless-enabled Tungsten W that ran Palm OS 4.1.1. End users may not care what OS their devices run, but Palm's much-heralded development community certainly does. What good is a new platform without devices on which to run it?

However, with Palm's announcement this week of two new Palm OS 5-based devices--the $299 Zire 71 and the $499 Tungsten C--I think the firm's begun moving back in the right direction.

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