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).

FIGURE 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.

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.

FIGURE H

Beam an event from one Palm III to another.

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.

FIGURE 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.