The data entry burden associated with a new organizer is also a big headache. When a friend recently gave his mother-in-law a Palm IIIxe, he told me he actually gave her two gifts: the organizer, plus the gift of retyping all her information from her old electronic planner into her Palm desktop. The second gift cost him a lot more than the actual hardware. This hassle is probably the second most common reason that Palm organizers wind up as paperweights. Now, I'm no engineer, but maybe Palm, Inc. can get newbies over this hurdle by offering software templates that allow a scanner to automatically scan in handwritten address listings, at least for common types of organizers like, say, the DayRunner. Scanners are becoming common since they're regularly given away with new PCs. On the other hand, they're about as easy to use as programming your VCR. Palm's solution would need to be very simple.

All-in-all, though, other than the price, I think the real reason Palm organizers aren't catching on with regular folks is that Palm, Inc. isn't selling them to us; they're selling them to engineers and expense-account executives. Sure, Santa granted my wish and killed off the company's advertising campaign with the naked woman ("Kate Hunter, dancer"), but Palm marketing is still squarely focused on the Lives of the Rich and Geeky. Most Palm advertising shows up in places like Wired and those in-flight magazines read only by laptop-toting road warriors. TV commercials recently ran on The X-Files, but you gotta know anyone still watching that show is as familiar with their Windows System Registry as they are with the little grays of Area 51. And while ads recently started appearing in venues as mundane as Time Magazine, they tend to hover around technology-related articles. You'll know that Palm has changed tack and is thinking about the rest of us when ads start showing up in Parenting, Redbook, and People.

On the other hand, maybe it's just where I live. As everyone who lives near the Beltway knows, the PDA wilderness of Washington, DC is, well, different. One of the ways it's different is that there seems to be a kind of glamour to ignorance in this town. Self-effacement has a twist here, in that it's fashionable to portray yourself as ignorant or incapable, at least when it comes to technology. A laugh, a wave of the hand, and an un-self conscious, "I could never figure that stuff out!" is a common saying at cocktail parties of the powerful. I suspect it's a primal sort of defense mechanism; instead of being behind the times you're actually too important to waste your time on such things. If one of these powerful Neanderthals were caught with a Palm organizer, their cover would be blown. They might actually have to use the office photocopier themselves once in a while. The plague of ignorance spreads, however, as the minions of the powerful endeavor to emulate them.

"But wait," you say, "Al Gore has one!" I can assure you that the Vice President's Palm unit spends way more time being seen than used. Al undoubtedly has, as they say in this town, people for that sort of thing.