Writing with the Palm OS
Any Palm OS handheld comes with what you already need for the classroom experience, however there are a number of software applications that'll make your task easier. There are many options for people in search of quality alternatives to the "Big Four" applications, and I have a few suggestions from my personal experience. However, this isn't a definitive guide to software by any stretch of the imagination.

The most important thing you'll probably use your Palm OS computer for is word processing. While the included Memo Pad will suffice, there are several sizeable disadvantages to this solution. First of all, Memo Pad has a file limit of 4K per memo, and second of all, there' are no special formatting options. This is a simple ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text editor.

There are many methods to getting around these problems. Some are simple, and some are not. In order to get around the Memo Pad's shortcomings, the Doc format was created This allows for much longer documents; however, there still aren't any formatting options. There are Many Doc editors, and while they all offer different feature sets, in my experience it doesn't make much difference. Don't tell that to Larry Stedman, however. Check out his exhaustive look at various document readers in the May 2001 issue of PalmPower at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200105/ebook0501001.html.

I have used QED/QEX (at http://visionary2000.com/qed/) and TakeNote! (at http://www.landware.com/takenote/index.html), and both of them are quite capable programs. However, it's hard to ignore the lack of formatting options, especially when doing a large amount of writing. In order to circumvent the lack of formatting options in the document editors, people have tried many different things, from writing documents in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and converting to a Word document later, to creating a special markup language while using special macros to convert the files back and forth. But some people just lived with it, until Blue Nomad's WordSmith was released.

WordSmith (at http://www.bluenomad.com/ws/prod_wordsmith_details.html) is a full-featured word processor for the Palm OS. With WordSmith, students can compose documents, limited in size only by the amount of free memory on their handhelds, with full formatting features that were previously unavailable to Palm OS users. This program isn't freeware, but it's worth every penny.

Time and task management
The Palm OS has grown a long way from being only a digital organizer, mostly as a result of third party developers and licensing. But out of the box, the Palm computer is still a great organizer. As a result of this heritage, the Palm OS is often at its best when performing time and task management. Students, as well as other Palm handheld users, should learn to properly take advantage of this ability, whether you decide to use the built-in PIM (Personal Information Management) applications or use enhanced third party applications.