Reader's delight
If you like to read or you need a lot of technical information in your pocket, you'll love the HandEra 330. Just think how much you could carry by using a large CF plus Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Palm OS (at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforpalm.html)! I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which is a single 1.1MB file. Instead of holding the computer in one hand and using the other to hit the down arrow, the HandEra 330's jog dial enables you to page down quickly, while holding the computer in one hand. This is much less tiring, and it works well for even the most rapid page-turner. Obviously, if you rotate the screen and make the Graffiti area disappear, most people will end up using both hands.

In Figure C, you can see the conventional view of Gogol's Taras Bulba. You'll notice these screen shots are larger than normal to show off the great double-resolution. Also note how much room is created by minimizing the soft Graffiti area.

FIGURE C


The HandEra 330 has twice the resolution of other Palm OS handhelds. Roll over picture for a larger image.

And now for something completely different… I rotated the screen to the landscape view, so Figure D shows Taras Bulba rotated and enlarged.

FIGURE D


Landscape view is great for reading documents. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Double the resolution
The HandEra 330 comes with a suite of high-resolution applications, most notably a license for QuickOffice (at http://www.quickoffice.com) and a slew of Seahorse Software's excellent shareware games (at http://www.seahorsesoft.com). As seen above, the high resolution enables a much wider choice of font sizes within supported applications. The downside of the high resolution is that some applications look a little ugly and some just don't work. Some older applications suffer from pixelation-they're just a bit "jaggedy." Most of the applications I've tried that fail are games like PalmJongg (at http://home1.pacific.net.sg/~kokmun/palmjongg/palmjongg.htm) and Shisensho (at http://www.phoenix-c.or.jp/~tomo/palm/pshisen/indexe.html), so it's not critical. In Figure E, you can see how the game TenPin Solitaire (at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/download.htm) fares on the larger screen.

FIGURE E


Although it's not pretty, TenPin Solitaire plays fine on the HandEra 330. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Seahorse Software's Crazy Eights is an example of a game that looks good and is fun to play. It's pictured in Figure F.

FIGURE F


Crazy Eights was designed to fit the high-resolution screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Voice recording and playback
The voice-recording feature is convenient, although it isn't something I'll use much. For some reason, I feel pretty strange talking to my Palm OS handheld...rather like the protagonist in the old spy spoof "Get Smart" who had a mobile phone in his shoe. Note that the audio memos are stored as .WAV files, so you can play them on your PC if you want to. Or you can download your favorite .WAV files to the HandEra 330 and use them as alarms with the help of a program like MTI WavePlayer (at http://store.yahoo.com/pilotgearsw/mtiwaveplayer.html).