Other than that, the calendar appears to work well, but the grouping of items within the event edit and entry form still seems bizarre even after a month of steady use. To me, keeping the basic Palm OS event fields, including Repeat Appointment fields with the basic Event information, at the top of the form would be far more useful.

Contacts
The Contacts section of the MyPalm portal lists the contacts you enter from your Palm handheld or Web browser. This is a simple no-frills listing by name or email address, as you can see in Figure E.

FIGURE E


Here's my MyPalm contact list. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It's easy to view, edit, or add a contact. In fact, it's just like doing it on the Palm handheld. Simply click the contact, and you can see the contact information as shown in Figure F.

FIGURE F


Viewing or changing a contact is easy. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Most of these buttons are pretty self-explanatory, but the Map button is keen. By clicking on it, you can see a map of the address for a specific contact.

You can also download a contact from the MyPalm portal as a vCard, the Internet's standard for contact information exchange. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding upload feature, which would be very useful, given that many email tools let you include vCards as part of your outgoing email signature.

Besides the obvious use for the contacts database (letting you look up a phone number in that unusual case you have access to the Web but not your Palm OS handheld), this contacts database provides an important function: it's the glue that holds the rest of the portal together. When you schedule an appointment that includes others, invite others to join a group, create an RSVP, or do anything that uses an electronic mail address, you can pick email addresses from your contact database. This, in fact, is the true value of having your contacts on-line at all--integration with the remainder of the service.

Events
In an interesting twist of on-line calendaring, MyPalm lets you add true events such as sporting events and holidays to your on-line calendar to synchronize with your Palm handheld. Under the Events tab on the toolbar, you'll find movie schedules, art and entertainment schedules, trade shows, television broadcast schedules, sport schedules, and holidays that you can select and merge with your MyPalm calendar, as you can see in Figure G.

FIGURE G


Here's the MyPalm Events screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Of course, once in your MyPalm calendar, you can synchronize these events with your handheld, bringing the information anywhere.

Palm's done a good job setting up the interface with the portal itself. You simply choose a category and subcategory and add items to your calendar. Once they're on your calendar, they appear as regular events.

This is a cool idea I've wanted to have in a working product of some kind for a long time, and one of the key reasons why I was excited to try out the MyPalm portal in the first place. Oddly, it hasn't sat as well with me as I thought it would have. I'm not sure if it's because my interests have changed over the years, or if it's simply that the idea sounds niftier than it actually is. What I'm slowly learning as I add and remove events from my calendar is that, by and large, these events are either material I know well enough to begin with because it's something I was already following (say, major holidays, key trade shows, or upcoming art exhibits), or it's not something I want in my calendar anyway.