The cameras both draw about 50 milliamps when they're on with the memory empty, but the draw rises as you fill the storage, and tops out at more than 300 milliamps with the memory full. Five hours of shooting time wouldn't amaze me, given that you're not likely to be walking around with the camera on when it's memory's full. In this mode, they act like a normal webcam, ignoring their internal memory, and you can use them to grab long video clips or do time exposures or anything else that your Windows 98 PC can do with a webcam. Add a separate microphone connected to the appropriate input on your sound card and you can record talkie video clips, properly use videophone-ish software like NetMeeting, and so on. The field of view of both cameras is a generous 54 degrees - not really wide angle, but good enough for indoor pictures without bumping into walls as you try to fit everything in.
Cheap webcams tend to deliver washed-out images and have lousy low light sensitivity.
The Aiptek cameras are perfect examples. Here's my Olympus C-2500L's opinion of my multicoloured test target of the moment, a Hoberman sphere folded up. I took this picture without flash, but with a 500 watt halogen flood pointed at the ceiling, so the subject's illuminated a lot more brightly than it would be in a normal night-time indoor setting. I've JPGed the Palm Cam's BMP output, but the quality difference is practically impossible to see. Now, it's possible to wring considerably better results out of a Palm Cam than this, using a bit of post-processing.