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It’s All on your Palm

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Starting this month, we present a mini hands-on series on the

Palm Pilot, so that you can make the most of it. Why the Palm, and not any other

PDA, you may ask? Good question, and two very good reasons for that. First, the

Palm Pilot has become one of the most popular PDAs, with over four million

pieces been sold. Second, I’ve been using it for the past three years, and

even though what I have is a completely outdated model, I’m very happy with it

and am continually amazed by what it can do. I’ve stopped and admired all the

new models, but never felt the need to go in for them. I still feel that I haven’t

fully exploited its capability.

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I’m

not sure how much hands-on we’ll be able to cram into this first issue, since

there are so many things I’d like to tell you about the Palm and its

capabilities. But that’s the reason we’ve decided on a mini-series. So, let’s

get started right away with a quick introduction.

On first looks, the Palm Pilot looks like any other digital

diary with the most important change being the stylus. Rather than having a tiny

little keyboard on which you struggle to type, you can actually scribble stuff

on the Palm screen and it makes sense of it. The second significant difference

is how the Palm communicates with a PC. You can transfer programs and documents

on it for virtually any application. You’ll see exactly what I mean by this as

we go along in this series.

The

Palm uses a script known as "graffiti" to recognize what you scribble

with the stylus. When you start using the Palm, this is the first thing you

would have to learn. Fortunately, the Palm makes it very easy for you to learn

graffiti. Remember the old classic Space Invaders, and how you learned typing

with a variation of the game–"Letter Invaders"? That’s exactly

what the Palm has–a neat little game called Giraffe, which has letters falling

from the sky and you have to quickly scribble the right sequence to shoot them

before they land. As the game progresses, it gets faster and faster, improving

your graffiti skills in the process. In just a few minutes, you get used to the

new style of writing. The downside of this is that the next time you step up to

give a presentation, you’d wonder why the strange symbols you write on the

white board don’t become the letters they represent on the Palm. By the way,

Giraffe is not installed by default, so that’s one of the first programs you

should install.

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Now that you know how to scribble on the Palm, let’s look

at some built-in programs. The basic programs that are installed include a

datebook, an address book, a to-do list, an invaluable memo pad, an expense

manager,



e-mail, a small bunch of utilities, and preference settings.

To take a quick look backwards, PIMs (Personal Information

Managers) have been around for a long time, but they aren’t quickly

accessible. Imagine opening your laptop every time you want to check your

appointments. Another problem is that PIMs normally don’t have e-mail.

Microsoft Outlook, that shipped with MS Office solved the e-mail problem, but it

was still not readily accessible. So along came digital diaries. They were okay

as long as PC connectivity was not an issue. In some digital diaries, the

biggest problem was the fact that the PC interface cost as much as the diary

itself, and it only talked to a proprietary program on the PC. The program also

served as a backup more than anything else.

Palm Pilot changed all that. You could now use your normal

PIM on the desktop and any changes or additions made there would automatically

be "hotsync(ed)" to the Palm whenever you wanted. The best part is

that even mail could be synchronized. The desktop software that ships with the

Palm Pilot provides what’s called a "conduit". I’ve used conduits

for Outlook, Eudora, Lotus Notes and even with Linux-based machines, without a

hassle.

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Essentially, the conduit provides three options–synchronize,

desktop overwrites handheld, or handheld overwrites desktop. Once you get used

to it, you could make changes on the Palm or the desktop. These would reflect on

both whenever you do a HotSync.

HotSync is the process by which your Palm and PC communicate.

It’s normally done through the cradle that comes with it, or better still via

infrared (IR). For a long time, I’d actually locked away my cradle since I was

using IR on my notebook. It’s ideal for traveling.

Tip: Buy yourself a HotSync cable as it replaces the cradle

altogether. It can be used for all kinds of applications like connecting your

Palm to routers, switches, modems, etc.

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E-mail on the move

I’ll assume here that you’re using a Windows machine and

Outlook as your e-mail client. When you install the desktop software of the

Palm, it’ll detect this and set it up as the default conduit. Now whenever you

want, any messages in your Outlook inbox can be pumped into the Palm, and you

can get up and leave, and read your messages on the move. When you reply to

these messages, they sit in the Outbox of the Palm till your next HotSync cycle,

when they’ll be moved to the outbox of Outlook and sent by whatever means you’re

connected. Imagine, sitting on a flight or a taxi, or even a meeting for that

matter, with just a Palm in your palm and reading and responding to your e-mail.

One thing that you should know at this stage is that the Palm

is not really a replacement for your notebook or desktop, but rather an

extension or companion. I know several people who assume that it’s actually a

replacement, and then are very disappointed when they can’t do their

PowerPoint presentations from it.

A good example of this is the Mail program. It isn’t

standalone, and therefore can’t collect and send mail independently. It uses

the conduit for that. But I’ll talk about it in the next issue and also how to

set up your Palm to actually do POP3/SMTP mail without a conduit. I’ve used

this several times at the Singapore Airport IR Kiosk (more on this later).

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with another thought. Ever

wondered why the Palm Pilot hasn’t been officially launched in India? Well, a

very good reason from an extremely reliable source at 3Com India is that they

just can’t seem to make enough of them. No matter how many they produce, they

get snapped up instantly. I’ve been to computer stores several times and asked

for Palm Pilots, only to find them "out of stock". I guess that’s

the price you pay for popularity. I just hope that Palm sees India as a big

opportunity and steps up its production a bit, so that we actually unleash the

Palm on the unsuspecting Indian public. Till next month, then.

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