.FLYINGHEAD SPECIAL REPORT
.TITLE Palm III software, a first look at Palm OS 3.0
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY Learn all about the software inside 3Com’s new Palm III organizers in this in-depth special report. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz got to play with two of the very first Palm III device prototypes and shares with you the results of his extensive examination. This article also includes 16 screen shots captured live off a brand new Palm III device so you can really see it up close and personal.
.FEATURE
.EDNOTE Three days ago, we were issued two Palm III devices by 3Com — just days before the official, scheduled product announcement. The devices examined here are not final production models, but are quite similar to what will eventually reach store shelves. Since we’ve had only three days to completely examine these devices before going to press with this special report, we’re giving you our subjective impressions along with early test results.
The Palm III device may be a disappointment to some because it does not include any radical new software elements. However, it does include a number of nicely thought out, welcome additions to the familiar PalmPilot user experience.
These new features in Palm OS 3.0 include a completely new Applications Launcher, an additional font, beaming capabilities, improvement to the desktop applications, a new game, and a few other subtle additions.
.H1 Software compatibility
Although we were excited by the new functions of the Palm III, we were most concerned about software compatibility. One of the first things we did was install a whole load of existing PalmPilot applications and see how things worked out.
.H2 Stressing the OS
First, we installed HackMaster and virtually all the system hacks from PilotZone (http://www.pilotzone.com). These included AppHack, MenuHack, CaseToggleHack, ClockHack, CorrectHack, GlowHack, PowerHack, SafeHack, SelectHack, and SwitchHack.
Our reasoning here was that if the new Palm OS 3.0 could withstand all of these hacks, compatibility was pretty well assured. It worked pretty well. While combining all these hacks made for a pretty funky little Palm III, everything worked just fine.
.H2 Loading up on the apps
Then we decided to load up on the applications. Since there are so many available applications, we decided to load Bob Freud’s favorites, from his article "Great add-on software for your PalmPilot". The article showcases a pretty fair representation of the variety of applications available. We loaded the following applications (in addition to HackMaster and all the hacks):
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Agenda
.BULLET AportisDoc
.BULLET BrainForest
.BULLET Check-In
.BULLET Dinky Pad
.BULLET Giraffe
.BULLET HardBall
.BULLET Doktor Badura
.BULLET LaunchPad
.BULLET MineHunt
.BULLET Puzzle
.BULLET SubHunt
.BULLET TealPaint
.END_LIST
Once again, everything seemed to work well. There was no evidence of instability or the other typical red flags of a new OS release.
Based on our test results (admittedly, only two days worth), we are reasonably comfortable saying that if it ran on the PalmPilot, it should run on the Palm III without difficulty.
.H1 Applications Launcher
The most visible software change in the Palm III is the new Applications Launcher, shown in Figure A.
.FIG A The Palm III has a new Applications Launcher.
You can choose to display the application list as icons, or as a list, as you can see in Figure B. To change the style, choose Preferences from the Options menu and then choose either View By List or View By Icon.
.FIG B You can view a list of applications.
The new Applications Launcher contains a menu that allows you to delete, beam, categorize, or get information on an add-on application, as shown in Figure C.
.FIG C Manage applications from the Apps menu.
One immediately useful addition is the ability to put applications into categories, as shown in Figure D. While there are a number of third-party launcher applications that provide this functionality, it’s nice to see it added into the operating system. Hopefully, we’ll new third-party launcher utilities that go even further beyond the Application Launcher.
.FIG D The Category menu groups applications.
To assign an application to a category, click the menu icon in the Graffiti writing area, and select Category. After a few seconds, the dialog shown in Figure E will be displayed. With a bunch of applications loaded, the Category dialog took four seconds to be displayed on our prototype unit (although subsequent requests for the Category dialog were much faster). Once the dialog is visible, you can use the pop-up menu to assign any application to any category.
.FIG E You can place an application into any category.
.H2 Losing your Memory
Although the Palm III adds a number of new features over the earlier devices, the one thing that you won’t find is a Memory application. The Memory application has been replaced in favor of the Info dialog in the Applications Launcher. To view the Info dialog, shown in Figure F, select Info from the Apps menu.
.FIG F The Info dialog takes the place of the old Memory application.
Although the Info dialog is very similar to the older Memory dialog, there are a few subtle changes:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET There’s a new scroll bar on the right side
.BULLET There’s no delete button (this is now a menu item in the Apps menu)
.BULLET There’s now a version tab that tells you the version of each application
.END_LIST
It’s important to remember one thing now that Memory isn’t a separate application. If you replace Applications Launcher with another product, you’ll need to be sure you can check your memory.
.H1 Beam me up
Either you’re going to love beaming, or you won’t care. I’m beginning to think I’m going to love beaming. The idea is that you can send stuff from one Palm III to another, simply by selecting a Beam item from the menu. The key, of course, is that the person you want to beam also has to have a Palm III (because of the new IR port).
.H2 Beaming applications
In our office, Denise (our managing editor) and I both have PalmPilots. We carry them everywhere. I’ll often download a new application and want to send it to her. With the PalmPilot, I’ll have to email it to her, she’ll set it up for a HotSync, download it, and install it.
With the Palm III, all I’d have to do is point my Palm III at hers, select Beam from the Apps menu, and choose an application to send, as shown in Figure G. Notice the little locks next to some applications. These are described as "copy-protected and cannot be beamed." So far, these seem to be limited to the original applications installed on the Palm III. We don’t yet know if developers have access to this option (although it would be a shame to have applications locked from beaming).
.FIG G Choose the application you want to beam.
The beaming feature is implemented really nicely. After tapping the Beam button, the Palm III displays a dialog saying (in order) preparing, searching, and sending. On the recipient’s Palm III, a dialog is displayed saying "Do you want to accept ‘application name’ into Applications?" Tapping Yes installs the application. No cancels the transmission and deletes the item sent. PalmPilot applications are rather small, so transmission takes just a second or two. Very cool.
We’re a small group, so it’s definitely affordable to get IR-equipped Palms for each of our staffers. Then, even at lunch, we can send information, notes, and applications among ourselves quite easily.
.H2 Beaming an event
You can beam a variety of information from applications. For example, you can beam an event from one Palm III user to another, as shown in Figure H. This is really cool if one person makes an appointment and then sends it to another attendee.
.FIG H Beam an event from one Palm III to another.
.H2 Beaming an address book entry
You can also beam an address book entry, or the entire category, from one person to another. This is shown in Figure I.
.FIG I You can beam an entire category.
There’s a cool twist to this feature that’s just so geeky. The new Palm III introduces the concept of a "business card", which is essentially an address you beam to someone else. When on your own record (one containing your contact information), you can Select Business Card from the Record menu. This now becomes your business card.
You can now beam your business card to someone else equipped with a Palm III by selecting Beam Business Card from the Record menu. The recipient will get your address information. Of course, you need to make sure you haven’t entered in deeply personal information (including your home phone and cellular numbers) in your record or the recipient will get that as well.
What makes this super-geeky is that once you’ve selected an address entry to be your business card, you can press and hold the Address Book button for two seconds and it initiates a beam to another Palm III user. That’s right, you can literally hold out your Palm III with your arm extended, press and hold the Address Book button, and beam yourself to another device. Geekorama! Actually, we think this is just too cool. Just be sure to practice safe beaming.
We tried beaming an entire category from one Palm III to another. Actually, we chose to beam the All category, containing 100 records. The actual beaming process went well and the data moved to the recipient machine in seconds. Once on the recipient machine, the data apparently had to be processed, because it took a full three minutes before the machine was ready to use again. Still, as a way to get all the records from one machine to another easily, it was worth the wait.
One bummer, though: all our categories were ignored. It would have been nice, when beaming All, for the corresponding categories to be recreated on the destination device.
.H2 Beaming other applications
It’s possible to beam from other applications, including the To Do list, as shown in Figure J, and the Memo Pad, as shown in Figure K.
.FIG J Assign tasks to others by beaming To Do entries.
.FIG K Share your notes by beaming Memo Pad categories.
It looks like beaming is a feature that needs to be separately added to applications. As a result, the third party applications you currently have won’t support beaming (they’ll work fine, they just won’t beam). 3Com has released the Beaming API (applications programming interface) to developers, so we’ll probably be able to expect third party applications with beaming sometime in the future. We’re told there are a number of developers hard at work, beaming with excitement.
.H1 A nice, big font
The Palm III adds a nice, big font to the built-in applications. Like with beaming, we expect add-on applications will have this capability over time. As Figure L shows, under the Options menu is a new Font item.
.FIG L Select the Font item under the Options menu.
When you select the Font item, the Select Font dialog shown in Figure M will be displayed. Notice the larger font to the far right.
.FIG M Select the font you wish.
The new font is nice and clear, as you can see from the example screens shown in Figures N and O.
.FIG N Make your Date Book entries large and clear.
.FIG O This font is quite readable.
.H1 Changes on the desktop
There are some minor changes on the desktop. First, the name of the application has changed from Pilot Desktop to Palm Desktop and the software is located in the PALM folder rather than the PILOT folder.
The day view has been changed to provide for better integration between with Address and To Do information. In the lower right corner of the day view, there’s a new pane that can switch between a list of addresses or a list of To Do items, as shown in Figure P.
.FIGPAIR P The day view now has To Do and Address information.
In this day view, you can drag and drop information from one either the To Do list or address list into the day view. For example, you can drag specific contact information like a phone number or action item to an appointment in the Date Book application.
We think this is really nice, but we’ve always wanted to see better integration between the To Do and Date Book applications on the organizer device itself.
Also shown in Figure P is an Install button, located on the lower left side of the screen. This button launches a Windows 95 long file name aware file installer.
.H1 File Linking
There’s a new desktop feature called file linking. We haven’t had a chance to play with this, so all we can tell you is what we’ve picked up from the preliminary materials provided to us by 3Com.
According to 3Com, with the new "file linking" feature, users can automatically import data from a file located on a remote server each time the Palm III is synchronized with the desktop.
What this means, we think, is that you can update your Palm III device from a corporate data source simply by doing a HotSync. Presumably, your corporate information source would need to export a data file, drop it in a pre-determined location, and then, when it’s HotSync time, the Palm Desktop would intermix data from this external file into the normal HotSync data stream.
At first glance, this seems intriguing. For example, it might be possible to download a statistics report, a list of addresses or whatever from a data source and have updated information readily available. It might be a way that all salespeople have an updated price list, for example.
There may be gotchas. Apparently the feature only works with the Address Book and Memo Pad (which has a 4K limit per entry). It would be interesting to see if third party applications Palm-based applications can take advantage of this.
.H1 Macintosh
What can I say? Macintosh users aren’t going to be all that happy. There is no new version of the Pilot Desktop for Macintosh at this time. The good news is we’re told that the current Pilot Desktop is compatible with Palm III devices. Of course, that’s still discouraging to loyal full-fare Macintosh users who aren’t getting the entire Palm Computing Platform experience.
Here’s the official 3Com party line about the MacPac:
.QUOTE The Palm III organizer is compatible with Windows 95, Windows NT and Macintosh operating systems. A MacPac connection kit including desktop software is sold separately for Macintosh connectivity. An upgrade to the currently available version 1.0 MacPac, is expected in summer, 1998. 3Com will provide a Web download of the upgrade for registered users from http://www.palm.com upon release.
.QUOTE This MacPac upgrade is being written specifically for the Macintosh OS and will provide an extensible conduit architecture. The architecture will enable third party companies to develop Macintosh OS specific conduits and desktop applications that seamlessly integrate and synchronize with any Palm Computing platform based-device. A prerelease version of the conduit software developer kit (SDK) is already available.
It’s not the answer Mac users (including your editors) want to hear, but at least it’s something.
.H1 Palm III Bonus Pack
The Palm III is bundled with a Bonus Pack from MacMillan Digital Publishing, a CD-ROM containing a collection of third party applications.The CD-ROM includes a financial calculator, a world clock, a document viewer, a Web channel manager, a drawing application, conduits to leading PIMs including ACT! and Outlook 97, and an assortment of games.
Our understanding is that many of these are demo or "lite" applications. It’s also not clear whether those upgrading to the Palm III will get this CD-ROM.
.BEGIN_KEEP
.H1 Conclusions
Overall, this is a respectable upgrade. The Palm III device is highly usable and the addition of certain features (in particular beaming) will make it more useful in environments where co-workers all have the devices.
The new Applications Launcher adds a much-needed capability to the product, but we’re rooting for the independent developers of LaunchPad and other launchers to bring out even better tools.
There are further improvements we’d like to see. In fairness to 3Com, there’s always room for improvement in any product. That said, we’d like to see much better desktop integration with third party products. It’s a shame we can’t edit outlines on the desktop, for example, and have them drop into BrainForest or ThoughtMill. We’d like to see a new version of the Palm Desktop with support for plug-ins that would allow this kind of capability. We’d like to see better integration between the Date Book and To Do list, a better way to schedule follow-ups, and a much improved Macintosh desktop.
There’s no question in our mind that it’s worth spending the $130 or so to upgrade to the Palm III or, for new users, to go out and buy a device.
One final note: we haven’t spent any time comparing the Palm III with the various Windows CE based Palm PCs. While whiz-bang features are always a turn-on, it’s our intent to look at all the devices from a pure usability standpoint. Over the next few months, we’ll look at the other players and help you keep score.
.BIO
.END_KEEP
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