Every month, we’re reminded just how versatile the little Palm computer really is. This month, Keith Johnson, Associate Director of the Fleischmann Planetarium, shows you how you can use your Palm organizer and a few add-on applications to track the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Combine the backlight display and amazing portability of the Palm computer with the applications Keith describes, and when your son or daughter asks you about that bright light in the sky, you’ll be able to provide all the interesting answers.

Did Santa bring you one of those spiffy new GoType! keyboards? He did? So now you want to know how you can do real word processing, writing nice, long documents right on your Palm computer. The Palm organizer’s own Memo Pad can handle about 4,000 characters, but if you want to go beyond that, you’re going to need a power tool like QED. In this interesting and helpful article, Eric Newman shows us how to get the most out of QED while avoiding the pitfalls of big document editing.

January, it seems, is a month for accolades. After all, we’ve just completed our wide-ranging Editors’ Choice Awards, honoring the best and the brightest of Palm computer add-ons. In keeping with this theme, we thought it would be fun to point out to you our favorite articles from the past year. We’ve covered some amazing material in the past year. If you’d like to take a walk down memory lane — or catch up on what you missed — you should read this article.

By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of the forthcoming Palm VII computer. We sent our intrepid reporter into the heart of the Silicon Valley jungle to report on the 1998 Palm Computing Developer’s Conference. In this in-depth trip report, contributing editor Fredlet gives us her first impressions of the Palm VII, points out some of the high points of the developer’s conference, and introduces us to the unfortunate concept of "geek sex".

For a mere $20, you can put your Date Book on steroids. That’s the shareware fee for DateBk3, a program that adds more than fifty new features to the Date Book application including categories, floating events, icons, new views, and more. In this detailed review, Jeff Carlson, author of The Palm III & PalmPilot Visual QuickStart Guide, takes you inside DateBk3 and shows you how you can have a much more powerful Palm computer. There’s also a special treat, a fascinating story, at the end of this article — but you’ll have to read the article to find out the secret.

Welcome to the last key area of our comprehensive Editors’ Choice Awards: Fun Gadgets. In Fun Gadgets, we recognize those products that are fun, are gadgets, or can be somehow tied into the category of Fun Gadgets (hey, some products are a tough fit!). In any case, we’ve got even more products that’ll knock your socks off. So start reading.

It should come as no surprise that our foolhardy columnists have elected to continue their journey into social ostracism. After tackling sex and politics, they now attempt to finish the triumvirate of taboo topics: RELIGION. So, in a last final effort to become disowned by their families and shunned by their friends, they offer a brief and far-from-complete look at a few of the religious resources for Palm organizer owners.

We continue our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards with the Cool Tool Awards. These are those add-on products that smooth out the rough edges, make your Palm organizer more effective, make it more fundamentally capable, and make it more fun.

When we set out to do our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards, it was in part because we had observed a number of new products for the Palm computer that were clearly exceptional. In this first section of the Editors’ Choice Awards, called the Products of the Year, we show you the truly best of the best.