My name is Palm and these are my favourite downloads Though it's barely four years old, to millions of users the Palm handheld is more than an organiser: It's enlightenment. We've tossed our little black books and notepads. Said sayonara to planners crammed with business cards and Post-it notes. Our Palm gives us instant access to phone numbers, e-mail, memos, and a calendar. It's the glue that holds our lives together in the digital age.
Play God: Create a metropolis in SimCity, shown here on the Handspring Visor Prism.
There's much more to the Palm -- and its cousins, from companies including Handspring and Sony -- than just names and dates. Web sites like Handango and PalmGear H.Q. are home to thousands of Palm programs -- some practical (exercise planners), some fun (travel guides), and many free (film schedules, for starters). Play the piano? You can turn your Palm into a tuner or metronome. Artistic? Try a download that turns it into a sketch pad. As with so much else in the digital age, suddenly we're confronted with almost too many options. Here are 10 top choices.
News you can use
You can snap a modem onto your Palm and connect straight to the Net, but once you've checked reality, you'll realise that Web pages don't belong on its small screen. Enter AvantGo, a free service that delivers Web-based content to your Palm and formats it so that it's quite readable. Each time you sync your Palm to your PC, AvantGo downloads your preselected channels -- whether The Wall Street Journal or Fox Sports or the Weather Channel -- using your computer to fetch the data from the Net. Choose your content. But if you're late for the bus, skip syncing -- it can take several minutes to download your morning reading.
Size: 307K plus space for content
The Little Picture Show
Get that stack of tattered family photos out of your wallet and into your Palm. Album To Go, a picture viewer that's an offshoot of the photo album service Club Photo, lets you store and view as many snapshots as your Palm has memory for. The resolution is limited, and obviously a colour Palm makes for a better electronic album than a monochrome model, but we know you'll look swell in black and white.
Size: 52K (45K for colour) plus photos
Must. Shop. Now.
Which is more truly impressive: an even-faster computer chip, or the ability to shop from your toilet seat? Enough said. Amazon.com: Anywhere is a download that works with the wireless Palm VII. You can buy books, music, toys, tools -- pretty much anything Amazon sells, except new cars -- from practically wherever you might be sitting. You can also get personal recommendations and monitor online auctions.
Size: 13K
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