At my first DPUG meeting I was lucky enough to win a copy of BugMe V3.35. It is basically an "electronic sticky note" with some practical features.

First I must admit that I am a some what of a purist, so I was skeptical of the hand written notes idea. My philosophy for new people using Graffiti is to throw away that planner and dive in. BugMe is fully featured to make it useful. The main advantage is the fact that you can associate an alarm with the notes. Other features like cut, copy, paste, and beaming of notes are all available. Preferences include handwritten notes or Graffiti entry, font sizes, date & time stamping, a large assortment of alarm sounds, and another good feature, the ability to select many repeat alarms at just about any interval. Again, the alarm feature is the strongest attribute.

BugMe offers an alternative to writing notes in your Palm calendar if you need an alarm. (I haven't figured out why the Palm To Do list doesn't have an alarm). If you like the idea of hand writing notes you can get QuickNotes for free, but it is very basic without all the features, and no alarm.

Many of you who attended the November meeting will recall my lucky day when I won one of the two Kodak PalmPix Cameras that were given away at the November DPUG meeting. I was ecstatic. I never win anything!

I wanted to evaluate the camera for a few weeks before I commented on my experience. Prior to winning the camera this item was on my Christmas list. I travel frequently, rarely carry a camera, and thought this would be an excellent opportunity to begin to capture some of life using my Palm. I always carry the Palm. My Palm device is a IIIC so I was looking forward to a great marriage.

Unfortunately, I must report that the PalmPix has been somewhat disappointing. The camera is very convenient to carry and easy to use. Storage of the camera is a piece of cake.

The picture quality however is poor, even in well lit environments. Resolution is fuzzy and color quality is poor. The other problem was storage. I was only able to shoot about 20 photos before I ran out of memory on my IIIC. Each shot takes about 100k. Since I did not have my desktop with me on a recent trip to Boston, I had to delete favorite programs to make more room for the photos.

I remain optimistic however and am going to continue to search for tips on the net on how to improve the photos. I think Kodak is on track but I am a little surprised that the product is not more useful prior to it hitting the market. I will keep people posted on my success. I am attaching a few photos as examples of indoor, outdoor, day and evening shots. I may not be using the device correctly but the documentation page at Kodak is brief on how to improve picture quality. I am going to keep trying and will hopefully see better results.

Click here to see some of the photos Tom took and his comments about them.

FaceSavers are a new brand of screen protectors for your Palm. The product is a full screen protector that clings to the screen after you peel it from the protective backing.

The screen protector is cut to fit within the screen, so there is no trimming necessary (not yet available for the V). It is slightly smaller than the screen so it there is a slight gap between the screen protector and case. The gap is very small so the stylus should not ‘catch’ on the screen protector in normal use.

The size and shape (rounded corners) of the FaceSaver make it very easy to center. It can be removed and will cling to the screen multiple times if you need to adjust its position or try for less air bubbles. Once it is placed on the screen it does not slide around under the stylus.

Although the FaceSaver did not cause distortion, I never got it installed without any air bubbles. As a result, the screen clarity was affected. Any pressure applied in an attempt to smooth the screen protector during installation created a mottled shadow. The best results occurred when the screen protector was placed lightly on the glass and no attempt to remove air bubbles was made. This installation technique eliminated the mottled shadows, but each stylus stroke produced a ghost effect.

At first, I had trouble with my Graffiti recognition due to the product softening my writing style. Once I increased my stylus pressure to compensate for using the screen protector, character recognition improved dramatically. The FaceSaver has a slightly tacky feel which I preferred to smooth glass.

Since this was my first use of a screen protector, I can’t compare the FaceSaver to other products.

Overall, if the air bubbles that are causing the clarity problems could be eliminated, this would be a good product.

iSilo appears to be a decent Doc and HTML reader. Surprisingly, when I first loaded it, it saw and was able to read one of the documents that had been converted and loaded on my Palm by the DocsToGo program. To use it for HTML, I downloaded the "iSiloWeb" utility from their web site. This utility goes to any specified web site, fetches and converts the pages, and sets them up for downloading on the next HotSync. There are a number of options for handling graphics, depth of links to follow, etc. The package is similar to using AvantGo except that you have to get your pages by manually running iSiloWeb instead of the automatic conduit that AvantGo uses.

On the Palm unit, iSilo has a number of nice navigation features for getting through the web pages. It also can handle graphics that are larger (length and/or width) than the Palm screen. Or, you can get it to shrink all graphics to fit.

iSiloWeb is probably worth the $12.50 that they're asking if you want to get the contents of a particular web site into your Palm for some length of time. On the other hand, if you are just looking for daily updates of web-based material, then AvantGo is still a better bet. A combination of the two would be hard to beat.

Note: I was having trouble with iSilo crashing, so I emailed iSilo and it turned out to be a bug related to the 3.5 version of the OS I was running. They got me a fixed version out within the day, and it works perfectly. I was pretty impressed by their responsiveness.