HAVE WHOLE WORLD RIGHT IN YOUR HAND.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

Maybe a Palm isn't handy enough for you?

There are plenty of other options, from near-toys that cost maybe $30 to near-laptop computers that cost $800 or more.

On the top end of the hand-held business is the Blackberry. It looks like a pager with a tiny keyboard, one that you type on using your two thumbs.

How cool is it? At a recent panel featuring eight top entertainment and technology executives, two of them tabbed the Blackberry as the most transformative technology they'd seen in the past year.

It lets you send and receive e-mail, synchronized with your computer e- mail manager, and has a full-featured organizer with a calendar, address book and to-do list that synchronizes with your computer as well. The wireless modem keeps you in constant touch with the network, all while the device sits on your belt loop. Palm has created some of its own competition by licensing its devices to a number of companies. Qualcomm produced one of the most interesting products so far, the pdQ smart phone, then sold its consumer cell phone business to Kyocera Wireless Corp.

The founders of the easy-to-use Palm operating system left the company some time ago to start their own business, Handspring. They, too, licensed the operating system from Palm and recently released their first product, the highly regarded Visor, which costs $149.

It comes in a variety of colors and has an expansion slot that accepts plug-in modules that give the device new abilities, like playing music encoded in the Net-beloved MP-3 audio format.

A much more imposing, though so far less successful, competitor is Microsoft, which has been trying for a few years now to establish a variety of devices, both organizers and ``palmtop'' computers, that use a slimmed-down version of Microsoft's operating system called Windows CE.

On Wednesday, Microsoft took another run at Palm's pre-eminence with the release of version 3.0 of its Pocket PC collection of WinCE-based software.

The latest Pocket PC software includes an improved set of organizer capabilities, and adds a Web browser, programs to play video clips and MP-3 music, and ``Cleartype'' technology to better read electronic books.

Microsoft has had little luck heretofore establishing WinCE-based devices, made by such heavyweights as Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Casio, but all those companies also announced new machines Wednesday that use the latest Pocket PC software.

The new version is designed to fix complaints that its predecessors were clunky battery-eaters that did too much, too clumsily and slowly. The initial reaction by analysts and other observers has been positive, though they point out that Palm still has a huge lead in both market share and range of available software and other products.

If spending a lot of money isn't your idea of fun, maybe you should look at the very bottom of the price scale, where you can find a range of little organizer devices from companies like Tiger Electronics.

Some of these are used to pass notes in class, others to keep track of busy young lives; still others combine several functions, like Tiger's Snapshot Organizer, with an organizer and a cheap digital camera that takes 24 shots.

For Web sites for some of these products, log on to dailynews.com.