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.

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.

FIGURE J

Assign tasks to others by beaming To Do entries.

FIGURE 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.

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.

FIGURE 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.

FIGURE 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.

FIGURE N

Make your Date Book entries large and clear.

FIGURE O

This font is quite readable.

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.

FIGURE P


The day view now has To Do and Address information. Roll over picture for a larger image.

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.

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.