PalmPilot - The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition)

Thanks to Janice Wright for returning with a review of O'Reilly's PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition). It's the 2nd edition, written by David Pogue and Jeff Hawkins - click below to learn how to make the most of your PalmPilot. PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition) author David Pogue, Jeff Hawkins pages 597, publisher O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN 1565926005 summary An excellent book to teach you how to make the most of your Pilot Wow - I'm impressed. With my Pilot that is. I bought a Pilot 6 months ago so that I could carry my agenda (which I keep in MSOutlook on my desktop computer) to meetings with me. For six months I used it essentially as an electronic version of my filofax that I could also play backgammon or Sokoban on; and that was all. Then I read David Pogue's "well-written, nicely designed exploration of the Palm" (to quote Jeff Hawkins in the 'Forward').

Now I think of my pilot as a computer, one that will provide almost as much hackish enjoyment as my Linux box... as a matter of fact I'm now following the microLinux project with great interest and wondering how long it will be before I can upgrade to a Palm/Handspring device that will run Linux, a POP3 client and support a wireless modem. In the preface, Pogue says "Taking your Palm further: that's what this book is about." He delivers on that one-hundred percent.

David Pogue's "Palm Pilot - The Ultimate Guide" is absolutely excellent. It did take forever to read, though, because I kept stopping every few pages to optimize my Pilot with the tricks I had just learned, or to turn an easter egg on (yes, the book tells you where all(?) of the easter eggs are). The book has everything from office productivity tips for suits (when transferring lots of data from the expense program to Excel, you can end up with multiple spreadsheets which you have to total seperately, p. 228) to great hackish tidbits for hardcore geeks (like how to turn on verbose hot-sync logging, p.142).

Like many people I completely ignored the manual that came in the box with my Pilot, so some of the stuff Pogue covers, like ferinstance the Ronomatic stroke, is probably actually in the manual (l've only ever looked at it once - to try to solve an installation failure problem. The manual was unhelpful, and I found the information I needed to solve the problem in the FAQs at PalmCentral.com. The problem and solution are on page 181.

What's good and/or my favorite bits:

• the musical notation for the palm chimes on p.137
• the official solution vs. the better solution to upgrading
• the way it explained why a backgammon game I had installed and then deleted kept 'coming back' every time I HotSynched
• even though I will probably never surf the web on my pilot the explanation of how ProxiWeb works is mega cool.

What's bad:

• didn't really need four pages on the various classic games that you can download from 3Com
• doesn't mention quickwrite in the 'graffiti alternatives' section

Table of Contents
I. This Is Your PalmPilot Speaking

The 3x5 inch powerhouse

Setup and guided tour

Typing without a keypad

The four primary programs

Other built-in programs
II. Palm Meets PC

HotSync, step-by-step

Installing new palm programs

Palm desktop (win&mac)
III. The Undiscovered PalmPilot

The electronic book

The secret multimedia world

Database and number crunching
IV. The PalmPilot Online

Email anywhere

The web in your Palm

Paging, faxing, printing, and beaming

Palm VII: wireless email, wireless web
V. Troubleshooting and Upgrading

Troubleshooting

The Palm family, model by model
VI. Appendixes

CD-ROM
A few notes about the CD-ROM that comes with the book: Though it was obviously outdated by the time the book went to press, it will save you hours of hunting for the best software and, depending on the speed of your modem of course, a significant amount of download time (for those of us unfortunate enough to live in corners of the world with metered phone calls, you will probably save yourself the price of the book within weeks). I've been working my way through a variety of 'world' clocks (ones that show multiple timezones), trying to find one that I like; because there are half-a-dozen on the CD, this is pretty painless. The Catalog software resident on the CD makes it easy to find what you are looking for, and in many instances, shows you what the program is going to look like. I've 'trialed' a lot more software on my PalmPilot than I would have ever been bothered to download.

And yes - I did write this review on my Pilot, mostly on trains & on the London Underground. Speaking of which: as soon as I get the time, I'm gonna figure out how to make ImageViewer docs, so that I can update the London Underground map for the Pilot - the one that's currently available still has Mornington Crescent crossed out!

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Janet, please send your name, address, t-shirt size, and this article's URL to roblimo so we can send you your t-shirt. (Everyone who writes a Slashdot review or feature now gets a free t-shirt!)

Comments

Title humour

[turg]

Is it just me or is there irony in a title that contains both "the ultimate guide" and "second edition"?

:-)
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<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht