Not yet. Not yet, that is if you value your PDA battery’s life. Most PDAs with any kind of expansion slot can take a Wi-Fi card of some kind. The problem is that Wi-Fi is a relatively power-hungry technology, and current Wi-Fi cards can drain a Palm’s batteries in less than 2 hours. The PocketPC architecture is a little better, but only some, and reports I trust indicate that a Wi-Fi card cuts battery life by 50%.

This will be changing over the next two years. Texas Instruments has announced a new power-conserving Wi-Fi chip set, and Wi-Fi card manufacturers have begun to realize that you don’t need full Wi-Fi power to reach a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi hotspot when you’re sitting right there in the coffee shop. Transmit power management (that is, the ability to control the power output of a Wi-Fi card’s radio system from software) has always been possible, but most manufacturers haven’t given the user any sort of control over output power except in the crudest way. Eventually, such management will grow sophisticated enough to keep as much of the radio disabled as possible any time it’s not in use, and lower the connection speed for specific applications like email where speed is not essential.