Beam me up, beam me down and call me a Klingon, but I gotta tell you that a pair of sleek new 3Com hand-held computers bring something we haven't seen much of lately here at the cusp of Y2K on the Binary Beat, namely fun.

A new duo of power-packing miniature computers (Palm IIIx and Palm V) made their debut last week, weighing in around 4 ounces apiece and the spitting images of Mr. Spock's tricorder communicator.

Taking about the same pocket space as a package of bubble gum baseball cards, Palm IIIx brings relatively huge amounts of additional memory and a vastly improved screen display to the popular Palm III.

Palm V aims for the Cadillac crowd, putting the whole Pilot package in an ultrathin anodized aluminum case that is sleek enough to fit in the pocket of your Brooks Brothers three-piece pinstripe without the trace of a bulge.

Packed with anywhere from 2 megabytes (Palm V) to 4 megabytes (Palm IIIx) of random access memory, IIIx ($370) and V ($450) are capable of holding the entire phone book of a good-sized town.

You can also load in -- as I did in tests of both new gadgets for this column -- the full text of a couple of books, a chess game, a spreadsheet application and a whole raft of other diversions and tote the whole lot about in your shirt pocket.

If you want to jot down a note while riding a cab or commuter train, all you need to do is pull out the plastic stylus and use an easy technique called Graffiti to quickly write it in on the screen. For that matter, you can use the edge of a fingernail to trace out words and letters with splendid results.

Graffiti works by having you write letters in a small box at the bottom of the screen.

All you do is write exaggerated capital letters such as a tent shape for A and two tents for M or a curly E or a dogleg right for L and dogleg left for F. The Palm software translates to computer text on the fly and I was getting all but 100 percent accuracy after the first 20 minutes even using my fingernail. With Graffiti you print rather than write, and if the Palm gets a letter wrong you simply draw a horizontal line to backspace over it. Capitals are made by stroking up once and then making whichever letter you want using the abbreviated capital technique.

The vast bulk of input is done on your regular desktop computer using Palm's own software package or some pretty terrific third-party software, particularly the Ascend 97 package by Franklin Covey Inc., which emulates the popular, paper-based Franklin Day Planner.

Data get moved between the PC and the Pilot by way of an included docking cradle that plugs into the serial port on a PC or through the serial/modem connection on a Macintosh (you'll need a $15 Mac converter).

You can also move data in and out of the Pilots using an infrared beaming feature that lets you point one Pilot at another Pilot and perform high-speed wireless transfers. 3Com's E. Michael Lunsford, product manager for Palm V, told me the idea of beaming is to let people exchange electronic business cards on the fly.

I used this feature not only to move name and address data between several devices, but also to load programs such as a shareware spreadsheet and a loan calculator from one device to another.

Once you start messing around with Pilots you find that the Internet is teeming with shareware and freeware programs as well as some very respectable commercial products.

These outside programs do wonders to spice up the built-in Pilot software, which consists of an e-mail package, a small memo-taking word processor, a high-powered address book, a to-do list, a calculator and an expense account tracker.

Check out the Pilot Island (www.pilotisland.com) for a great $35 software package with scores of programs and other content as diverse as the King James Bible, a Pilot spreadsheet and a chess game that I can hardly put down.

You load these programs onto your PC and move them to the Pilot by that docking cradle.

Likewise, the new Palms let you move all your e-mail from Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus cc:Mail, Eudora and other packages between your desktop's e-mail in and out baskets and the Pilot.

Pub Date: 03/08/99