Slashdot upicked up a story in ComputerWorld about how the Cenus wants to use $100 gps-enabled, networked handhelds and no paper for the door-to-door tabulation. And they want half a million units.
Sounds like quite a feat to pull off. Then again, this is the same agency that used punched cards to speed up tabulation of the census by 3 years about 100 years ago, and the same agency that received the very first UNIVAC to get those ever-increasing numbers even more quickly.
Does this sound like a job for Palm? Of course it does; the base unit is hovering around $100 today, but will certainly get bigger, more powerful and more featureful over the next few years. The sticking point is the always-on networking and GPS. Those too are likely to come down, and likely to come down faster than a PocketPC-type solution (which can't seem to break the $300 barrier for the base unit...go figure.:-)
