What's in my Palm

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Prelude

I've had a Palm Powered Organiser for at least a year now. I used to own a HP21 (belt slung, student engineer style), then a HP35 (best forgotten - quality glitch in HP's reputation), then a HP41 (card reader, stolen from my car glove box), then a HP42s. By the time I got the HP42s, I had decided not to support the HP calculator programming language - I was standardising on BASIC dialects - CASIO BASIC, QuickBasic, VB, VBA, VBScript. I was programming a work CASIO PB-? and my own CASIO FX-702P, later CASIO FX-8??. I ended up programming my NEC 8201A (Tandy TRS-100 sibling) which was an A4 sized, 8088, 8 line x 40 char notebook.

Initially, I resisted picking up a grey LCD type Organiser - I after all, could they be any better than my experiences with the HP / Casios? Small digital watch type screen, small keys, what use could it be?

I got into the Palm m100. The main thing was that it had enough standard Palm software, was priced below AUD350, is small enough to sling on the belt or put into the shirt pocket. The 2Mb of RAM is a liability but surely I would not have so much appointments, addresses that the problem would arise?

I still have the Palm m100 - well, my wife is using it. In retrospect, the data for appointments and addresses is not the problem. And the small size is certainly much better than the Handspring Visor or Palm III size - it makes the Palm m1xx eminently carriable - and that is I would say 80% of the appeal of a Palm - it's there, with you, all the time. The plastic screen has good points and bad points - it got scratched within 3 months around the graffiti area (my boy was playing games) but the damage did not accelerate. It does not reflect ambient light - the screen is much easier to read.

I gave away the Palm m100 in November, 2001 for the following reasons:

although the screen is very sharp, the size of the text is now a problem because over this year, my eyes have gone farsighted.

the 2Mb was not limiting sheer text data but I wanted to use more and more programs. The shareware / freeware programs had grown substantially - to support the colour devices (Palm IIIc, Palm m505, Handspring Prism). I already have Bonsai and ThinkDB, both of which I use heavily and I was seriously running out of RAM. I also have the SMS and the Casio PC-Unite applications and those are not thin as well.

So I went shopping, with a strong urge to keep the budget low - the new m505 model in Melbourne costs nearly half of a new HP XE3 notebook (14.1" TFT screen, 20Gb Hard Disk, 256k RAM, Pentium 800Mhz processor).

To cut a long story short, with the discounting on older models and my stress on readability, I got a Palm IIIc. The m505 was too expensive, the discount and availability of the Handspring Prism (USD 299) had not impacted Australia and old model HP Pocket PCs were not viable - they seemed slow, crashed even at casual glance at the showroom and looked like they wanted more money to make me completely happy.

So, what's on my Palm?

I have not yet been disenchanted with the built-in Datebook, Addressbook and To-Do List of the Palm. The Datebook does not offer a year view like PocketPC does, and it would be nice to have an Outlook Today or paper organiser day/week summary, sometimes browsing the next week is difficult, but overall, they're not too bad.

Appointments and To-Dos

There are many products available on the market now, as replacements or enhancements.

I'm testing out HotDate - that's GPL freeware.

Syncing and Backing Up

Sometimes, you may have your umbilical cord (sorry, your Hotsync cradle / plug) but you can't install the Palm Desktop software on someone else's PC.

Penguin Backup is a freeware backup utility - it boots off a Linux floppy, you back up. Previous version limited to 2Mb Palms, not sure about current version.