The SuperPilot Memory Boards aren't cheap relative to the price of your 3Com connected organizer itself, but TRG also offers upgrades to existing memory boards for substantially less money. The drawbacks? You may have to go a few days without being able to use your organizer while they solder more memory onto your existing board. If that's not acceptable, there is a bizarre sort of organ-donor program set up where you pay an extra $100 deposit (on top of the charge for the additional memory) and wait for an upgraded board to become available. This can take a few weeks (yes, weeks). When one is ready to be transplanted into your organizer, they ship it out to you and you send in your old board. If they can use your old board as an upgrade for their next order, they will refund your deposit. Too bad they can't do that with kidneys.

If you'd rather play Dr. Frankenstein and add memory to your existing board yourself, TRG will sell you the additional chip. Just don't call us if the patient dies on the table-- doing this kind of operation will definitely void your warranty.

Pager Card for the PalmPilot
Okay, there are some of you out there who like to play Batman and put all your gadgets on your utility belt. You're never without a cell phone and numeric pager on your left hip and your PalmPilot organizer in its belt clip case next to your alphanumeric pager on the right . Well, for the rest of us who don't want our belts to drag our pants down, we can soon use the Pager Card addition to our Pilot and PalmPilot organizers and get rid of our beepers.

3Com/Palm Computing is developing the Pager Card along with Motorola and PageMart to enable your PalmPilot or Pilot device to receive alphanumeric messages. Now, this of course lets you replace however many pagers you're carrying around with you (the most I've seen on an IT guy is four), but because you are receiving the messages on your PalmPilot, there's so much more it can do for you. For instance, if you got a numeric page on a regular pager, you would have no idea whose number you've received. When you receive a numeric page on your PalmPilot equipped with the Pager Card, however, the number is checked against your Address Book to report who exactly is paging you (if you have the number in your Address Book, of course).

Don't think of the Pager Card simply as a smart pager tucked into your PalmPilot device, though. Developers are able to create applications that leverage the Pager Card to put wireless data to work potential areas such as e-mail, financial news, or dispatch information. You can even receive automatic updates to your PalmPilot Address Book.

The Pager Card, as announced, can be used in PalmPilot Personal and Professional organizers as well as Pilot 1000/5000 organizers. It will come with a specialized memory door, which allows for more space for the slightly larger board. It will also upgrade your memory to 2 MB, so you can store all those extra wireless messages with no problem. It should be available in the near future at an estimated street price of $169. It will not work in the Palm III.