11/16/98 READING THE PALM

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READING THE PALM

When the folks at Palm Computing designed the Palm in 1995, they saw it as an easy way for people to get contact and schedule information into a handheld device. They didn't reckon with customers like Jeff Boly.
Boly, a systems engineer at Santa Clara (Calif.) networking-equipment maker Auspex Systems Inc., uses his Palm III to do everything from keeping track of split times in a 192-mile relay footrace from Mt. Hood to Portland, Ore., to fetching E-mail while traveling in Europe last summer. Boly uses a range of commercial, shareware, and freeware programs (page 138). But when he wants something that doesn't exist, such as the relay-tracking program, he just writes it himself.
NO GLITZ. Not everyone can do that, of course, but there are plenty of ways a nonprogrammer can get the Palm to handle all manner of tasks. Boly, for example, keeps price and part numbers for Auspex' server products on his desktop PC, then downloads it into his Palm so he has the data when he visits customers. When traveling, he snaps on a modem and uses his Palm for E-mail and browsing the Web.
Boly's first handheld experience was with the Hewlett-Packard 100LX, but he gave up on it because it didn't offer desktop synchronization. ''I went for the Palm because I saw the Macintosh-like features that I really like,'' he says. ''It wasn't just another Windows machine. There are a lot of third-party applications. And it doesn't have a lot of the glitzy features that use up battery life.''
Boly's experience sums up two reasons why the Palm has been so successful while other handhelds have struggled to win acceptance: First, the Palm's design is limited to what works simply and well. Second, the availability of excellent software-development tools and the encouragement of outside programmers means that a broad range of specialized programs is available. Boly shows that it's a winning combination.
By Stephen H. Wildstrom

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