Product: Palm Pilot V
Company: 3Com
Website: http://www.palmpilot.com
Estimated Street Price: £350/$449
Review By: Byron Hinson

Palm Operating System, Programs & HotSync

The Palm V comes with the Palm OS Software version 3.1. The operating system is very easy to update, you just have to visit the palm website and download any updates, then use the installer to put them onto the Palm Pilot. Nothing like installing an Operating System onto a PC thankfully.

The Main Programs

The first time you turn on the Palm V you will be greeted with the following programs on the Palm Desktop.

• Address Book

• Calculator

• Date Book

• Expense

• Graffiti

• HotSync

• Mail

• Memo Pad

• Preferences

• Security

• To Do List

• Welcome

All of these programs come with the Palm V and don't need to be installed. The first thing I did was to HotSync the Palm V with Outlook 2000 on my PC. In theory this option means that Outlook 2000 will transfer all of the addresses, dates, mail, post it notes etc onto my Palm V. To HotSync the Palm V with your PC the first thing you need to do is to click on the new HotSync icon on your PC's taskbar. From there you can setup your serial ports, modem and network etc...You can also customize what files you want transferred from your Desktop to the Palm V or vice versa.

As you can see above, I decided to leave my e-mail files on my PC as transferring over 2000 of them onto the Palm V might have killed it...Everything else though I left on default. Synchronizing the files means that if you edit say an address on the Palm V that you have transferred from Outlook 2000 then the next time you HotSync the Palm then the address will be updated in Outlook 2000...The same goes for all of the others.

Once you have decided what options you want to set, you put the Palm V back into its cradle on your desktop and then press the HotSync button that is at the bottom of the cradle. The HotSyncing feature then begins to transfer over the data (Shown Below) between the PC and the Palm...Depending on the amount of data you have to transfer it tends to take about 5 minutes the first time and then 30 seconds each time after that.

Address Book

Once the HotSync has completed its work I was ready to look around the Palm V's other software. The next place I went to was the Address Book (Shown Below). The Palm's HotSync feature had transferred over all of the addresses from Outlook Express onto the Palm V without an trouble. Notice the little "Note" symbol next to certain names, you can write up special notes about specific people in your address list if you want to.

Adding new contacts is also very simple, you just click on the new button in the bottom right of the screen and take it from there.

E-Mail

Next I went to the e-mail section (Shown Below) From here you can read and write e-mail. I tested out the feature by writing an e-mail to a couple of people here at ActiveWindows and it worked like a charm, I did this by creating the e-mail in the Palm V, adding the addresses by using the Lookup option when creating the mail, this means you can use names from your Palm V address book on the mail. Once I completed writing the e-mail, I checked on the details and I was able to add a few other options to it too such as a read receipt, signature and what priority I should set the mail as. Once that was done I clicked on Send and the e-mail was ready to go.

You may now be wondering how the heck I can send the e-mail when I have written it on the Palm V. Well it is quite easy once you know how, you need to go into the Mail program and click on an icon that is on the Palm (I can't do a screenshot of that one) the icon brings up a drop-down menu, from here you can setup the HotSync settings so that the e-mail will be transferred to your Outlook 2000 outbox the next time you HotSync. This makes it very easy to write or reply to e-mail when you are not near the PC.

Date Book

The date book is just like a calendar program that you may have on your PC. As I have mentioned before, the HotSync feature transferred over all of my Calendar information from Outlook 2000 over onto the Palm V. So I'll give you a quick run down of its features.

The above date is when I was organizing to go to the ECTS show in London, UK so I setup some meeting dates and times into the Palm V's Date book.  Buy clicking on New on the Date book screen you can set a time for your meetings (Shown below). Once you have set the time you just need to enter in the name of the meeting etc into the date book (Above)

There are many other programs such as the memo pad (A small program from which you can write small sized documents), Calculator and To-Do notes that don't really need any explaining as they are very simple and easy to use straight away.

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