Palm announced a new device today. I have been a devoted Palm user since my 1000, back in the day when they were called palmPilots and were owned by US Robotics (there’s some geek street cred for you beyatch).

My only thought on this is that it’s not about the hardware. Instant on is pretty cool but aside from that it’s a bunch of apps that may or may not work with my office docs, etc. If I’m going to the trouble of carrying a big screen the two most important things for me are to be able to handle every file type I might run into in a crunch, like tweaking a brochure design in Adobe, editing an audio file in Goldwave, or yes, just reading email.

The other major point that I didn’t see anything on was media files. If I’m traveling I want to watch movies and listen to podcasts, if the device can’t do that I’m not interested - and be able to download pics from my digital camera’s media card so that I don’t have to carry around more than one card, and can check them out on a bigger screen.

I wish them the best of luck because I am a diehard fan, but I don’t see myself throwing down $500 for it.