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Mobile working Toolkit

Travelling light: replacing your notebook with a Palm

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 Mar 2004

Do you find even an ultraportable notebook too much to carry? We set out to discover how feasible it is to restrict yourself to a Palm OS handheld on your travels.

Palm's handhelds have come a long way since the grainy, monochrome displays of their first few years. Today’s high-resolution colour gadgets are genuinely capable of being almost all you need in an on-the-road computer.

The software discussed here was evaluated on a Palm Tungsten C with its original 64MB of memory and no additional memory card. The larger amount of memory available on the Tungsten C of course makes it much easier to use a Palm as your only computing device on the road. But even on less well-endowed devices you can add enough memory via expansion cards to make them do the job. The one thing the Tungsten C doesn’t support is Bluetooth, but you can still connect to a mobile phone via infrared.

Palm Tungsten C: is this all the computer you need on the road?

The key, of course, is in the ability to successfully synchronise data between handheld and desktop so that you can seamlessly shift from working on one to the other. This is an area where Palms generally shine. Even more important is the ability to ensure that all your data is backed up, so that in case of loss, theft, or dropping the device down the toilet, your data can be fully restored as soon as you can get your hands on replacement hardware. Here, too, Palms work well -- as long as you remember to synchronise or make backups frequently (and we speak from sad personal experience).

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