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A Palm Pilot can
be useful for tracking appointments, making notes, to do lists,
calendar and calculator functions, managing a list of contacts
and playing games. Palms can also be used to alert you of
appointments/meetings and wake you up. If you are looking
for PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) that will synchronize
with PC based Microsoft applications such as Outlook, Word
and Excel the later version Palm Pilot models have these capabilities.
Palms are also coming out with email capabilities, Bluetooth
technology and vibrating alarm features. In the world of PDAs,
Palm Pilots are right up there.
The Palms use a hand writing recognition software called
Graffiti. A lot of the letters are written in normal pen style,
although there are some letters that are written differently
- you will have to learn the strokes to get the desired letter.
A newer model Palm Pilot will have a later version of Graffiti
called Graffiti 2 and this allows a more natural print alphabet
style. Some Palm PDAs will have handwriting recognition software
that allows you to write words and sentences as you would
on paper.
Battery life on Palms will generally last for several days,
but will depend on the length of time each day they are used
and the intensity of the work being done. You will find that
a mono screen Palm Pilot preserves battery life longer than
a color screen. PDAs running multimedia applications will
also shorten the battery life.
As PDAs get smaller and lighter there seems to be a trade
of between features and size. The more features you want the
heavier the Palm Pilot will be. Screen size is an important
feature to most people and will probably influence how small
Palms can get.
The price of all PDAs and of course Palms is coming down
all the time, but generally speaking a lower end Palm Pilot
is cheaper than a Pocket PC. If you were interested in playing
multimedia applications such as MP3s, Movies and voice recording,
you would have to look at getting a higher end palm.
As there are many PDAs out there, don’t overlook the
Palm Pilot. The simplicity of the Palms OS is amazing and
the learning curve is small for you to become an expert -
therefore novice computer users might tend towards the Palm.
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