Our judging criteria for the Products of the Year was simple, yet brutal. To be considered, a candidate product had to have transformed the Palm device into something more, something unexpected, something exceptional. There are many products that improve upon the Palm device's functionality and add features. Many of these will be honored in the Cool Tools or Fun Gadgets segments of the awards. But to be chosen as one of those few who had Product of the Year stature, the candidate product had to take the Palm device into new directions -- and do it elegantly, cleanly, and be ultimately usable.

Eventually, we sifted through all the candidates to arrive at five winners: three hardware products and two software products. Without further ado, the winners are:

• AvantGo Client from AvantGo
• GoType! from LandWare
• UniMount from Revolve Design
• Earthmate from DeLorme
• OmniRemote from Pacific Neo-Tek

We'll begin and end with the Software Products of the Year, and discuss the Hardware Products of the Year in between.

AvantGo Client from AvantGo
We have to 'fess up. When we first heard about AvantGo (initially from a company called Bombadier Software, eventually to be renamed to AvantGo), we thought it was, well, a bomb. The idea of downloading Web pages to the Palm computer for offline viewing seemed, honestly, silly. After all, Web pages are full of graphics and color, are designed to be read at resolutions of 800x600 or more (or at the very least 640x480), and were linked to lots of other Web pages. It just couldn't be practical to read Web pages on a Palm device, let alone download them and walk around with them. You'd definitely need one of those 8 megabyte upgrade cards! And finally, why would you ever want to squint to read Web pages on your Palm computer when you've got bigger screens that are easier to read?

Uh, well, we were wrong. AvantGo is anything but silly and the thing really works, as shown in Figure A. Frankly, we were blown away.

FIGURE A

You can read Web pages on your Palm computer.

When you install AvantGo (and the v1.1 client software is free from AvantGo), you also subscribe to a series of AvantGo "channels". These are Web pages that are automatically downloaded each time you HotSync your Palm computer. A whole bunch of channels have been developed for AvantGo, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and, ahem, our competitors, Mobile Computing and Pen Computing magazines.