FIGURE L


Click the Recovery Mode button if you need to. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I've never had to use the Recovery Mode button, but it's nice to know that it's there.

Finally, go into the Launcher and delete the programs you just flashed from RAM. I currently have 910K available RAM, and 43 apps installed. Fourteen of these apps--totalling 742K--now reside in my Palm III's flash.

Why buy it?
FlashBuilder III gives you the use of about 800K of flash for $50. This will cost you 13% less than having TRG upgrade a stock 3Com board with 1MB of RAM. Although it's not a huge savings, it is a great deal, considering that you can reburn your Palm III's flash and change the apps that reside there any time you want.

The Palm III uses a 3 volt Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) AM29LV-series flash. AMD guarantees a minimum of 1 million program/erase cycles, which should be more than enough for even the most ardent FlashBuilder III user. For all the hardware and programming details on the Palm III's flash chip, see http://www.amd.com/products/nvd/techdocs/21358.pdf.

Also, anyone who's experienced a hard reset would appreciate the ability to put their most often used third party programs in flash. There are a couple of caveats to this, though. Programs like certain games or hacks that need to be able to modify themselves or write variables to RAM won't be able to run from flash. The same is true for data files (generally, files with the .pdb extension), unless the programs that use the data open the files in read-only mode.

An example of a .prc/.pdb combination that works fine in flash is WordBox and its dictionary. Kanji Hanabi didn't work at all with any of its components in flash. HackMaster itself works fine in flash, too. HandStamp Pro also failed after I tried to flash it, and errored out with a Fatal Exception even after reinstallation into RAM. I am currently working with SmartCode's tech support to resolve the problem.

TRG provides a compatibility list at http://www.trgnet.com/Palm/Products/compat.htm, which you might want to check before burning your flash. This list doesn't cover every version of every application, so don't be afraid to try the application you'd like to flash. The worst that I have experienced is having to delete the apps that don't work and burn the flash again.

Summary
FlashBuilder III is very easy to use, and works well. I find FlashBuilder III a worthwhile investment, and highly recommend it to those Palm III owners that want to make the most of their available memory for a minimum price. However, I would like to see an upgrade that would allow Palm III users to truly delete unwanted built-ins after saving a backup copy of the factory defaults to disk.

Claire Pieterek is a LAN/WAN designer at Whittman-Hart in Denver. A PalmPilot fanatic since the first days of the 1000 and 5000, she currently uses a "production" Palm III and a "hot spare" PalmPilot Professional.