Toshiba takes aim at Palm. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Palm is still the number one PDA maker... .and one of its key advantages has been price. But now it is being challenged on that front by Toshiba. The Japanese electronics company is launching a new PocketPC, the e310, priced at 399 dollars... .

"It's really about driving the PocketPC operating system down into a completely new price category."

Toshiba VP for worldwide product planning Oscar Koenders. The e310 is light on memory...for a PocketPC... just 32 megabytes, and does not have a Compact Flash expansion slot. But that is twice as much memory as Palm's m515 for the same price... and the PocketPC can be used as a portable music and video player as well. Toshiba believes it can take business away from Palm...with the under four hundred dollar price...

"The only thing you're going to miss here is the additional Compact Flash expansion slot. But we still offer a great expansion because of the SD IO slot which we integrate. The SD IO slot will allow you to expand your memory with modules up to 256 megabytes at the moment, but that will soon grow into cards which allow you to upgrade with 1 gigabyte of storage. And on top of that, that IO slot will allow you to wireless connect through Bluetooth."

There are still Palm models selling for considerably less and it still has an edge when it comes to ease of use. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.