Later, as we leave the beach, my wife calls.

"How's your article?" she asks.

Uh-oh. What article? Oh, yes. That article. "Fine, fine. Just a few finishing touches to do when I get home," I reply, deciding it's time to take a detour. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I see my son is fast asleep.

Thank goodness for naps, the Palm Portable Keyboard and Blue Nomad's WordSmith (at http://www.bluenomad.com), pictured in Figure L.

FIGURE L

I can work on my article using Blue Nomad's WordSmith.

After a quick pass through a drive-through espresso café, I find a safe place to park. While Jarod naps, out comes the handheld and keyboard. With Blue Nomad's WordSmith, I can write just as if I had my laptop. As I synchronize, the WordSmith conduit keeps my documents synchronized on both my Palm computer and my desktop, so I don't need to remember where I worked last. Its performance with a keyboard and synchronization alone are enough to keep my attention, but it supports rich document formatting too, letting me do most of my first-pass composition and editing right on my handheld.

When I first left industry to work from home as a writer and raise my son, I naïvely thought that my Palm handheld (at the time, a well-upgraded and well-battered Palm III) would quickly fall into disuse. While I'd doubtless use it for software development and tracking addresses, many of the business needs no longer existed.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Two years later, my Palm handheld is now as indispensable as my glasses or cell phone. As my life has changed, so has how I use my handheld. No longer as rigidly scheduled as before, my Date Book still holds appointments, but has expanded to contain other snippets from my days. My Memo Pad and Note Pad now contain article and story ideas, reference information, and grocery lists as well as business-related information. I carry digital snapshots of my children with PhotoSuite (at http://www.mgisoft.com/products/mobile/index.asp), electronic books for the Palm Reader (at http://www.peanutpress.com), and Web pages for AvantGo. I even have a game or two, although I'm not a big game player.

My handheld lets me squeeze out bits of time that I'd have otherwise lost-both for my business and for me personally. I can plan an article like this while my son naps, catch up on the news, or read a book. I spend less time hunting for phone numbers, appointments, and the bits of trivia that surround me. Moreover, my handheld has become a crucial part of my "life-support system," supplanting my memory and combating the memory loss all parents seem to struggle with!

As a parent, my choice of Palm OS applications closely fits my lifestyle. That's a key element of Palm's success as a handheld computer vendor: providing a robust platform that encourages developers to create new and interesting applications. The variety of applications makes a Palm handheld as attractive to me as a parent as it is to me as a consultant and author.

Claire Pieterek is a long-time Palm handheld user. On a mission to ditch her Franklin Planner, she bought her first--a Pilot 5000--in May, 1996. She currently owns a Japanese-language Sony Clie 650C, a Sony Clie 710C, and a Palm Zire 71, among others. She is most at home in Chicago and Kyoto, and is a student of life, the universe, and Japanese.