eChannelLine Daily News 5-December-2002 Friday File: A tattoo on your Palm by Robert Dutt Would you trust your PDA to decorate your body in a rather permanent fashion? According to a 25-year-old Austrian, you should. Or, at least you can. Niki Passath has introduced the world's first tattooing robot, a contraption that looks like it was thrown together by the cast of one of those Junkyard Wars shows that seems to be on The Learning Channel whenever they can find a break between episodes of Trading Spaces. The robot, known to his creator as Freddy, is a Palm handheld with a whole lot of custom-built hardware around him, allowing him to be secured to the body of a willing and brave human, and draw whatever the heck he wants on them. According to interviews with Passath, Freddy has a custom application for creating designs which he can improve and redesign on demand. But he doesn't take requests. "He's an artist, of course, so he always decides what design the person is going to get, they can't choose it," Passath told British news site Ananova, noting that he hasn't had any complaints yet. Thus far, Freddy has been let loose on brave souls at a Vienna high-tech fair, where he offered free tattoos to anyone brave enough to have the work done. Other than that, Freddy's exposure has been limited to Passath himself, the sole beta tester of his own project, which sounds like it could have been effective during the Spanish Inquisition. Passath described beta-testing Freddy using himself as the easel as "painful, but a good incentive to get it right as soon as possible." One person who showed Freddy some skin for him to draw on, apparently quite a tattoo aficionado, told Ananova that he liked the idea that his tattoo was one-of-a-kind. And though the design may not have been the most manly of tattoo-guy tattoos, we're sure that he can make up for that by being able to tell the story of having a tiny computer with a tattooing gun strapped to his back in order to get his new ink. This could, in fact, be just the break that Palm's been waiting for. The company has struggled for a couple of years, after having one of the biggest IPOs ever powered by gadget freaks. Although their latest products have offered new and interesting capabilities, there is always Uncle Bill and his Pocket PC armada leaning on their shoulder on one end, and on the other end, cell phones that can increasingly (just wait for Bluetooth!) get their phone books stuffed directly from a PC. Oh, and somewhere down the middle, there's the group that just says 'Screw it all, I'm going back to my paper daytimer!" But they aren't reading this column, probably. Palm has long argued that its products are much more than a simple calendar, phone book and to-do list machine. And really, what could be much farther from a simple PDA than a device for making permanent etchings on one's own hide? Hmmmm . Come to think of it, the two may not be so far apart. How many times have you heard someone said that they practically have to tattoo something on their forehead to remember to do it -- call someone, attend a meeting, remove the roast from the oven before the fire department arrives, whatever. Well Freddy could allow them to never forget anything again, just by literally tattooing it on their own forehead. We'll see how much wisdom is in that old adage! Likewise, with proper software integration, this could take the grade-school organizer to a whole other letter. I mean, you're guaranteed not to forget to get your permission trip for the big field trip signed if you let your Palm tattoo it on your hand instead of using that unreliable non-permanent marker!