2000, I decided upon the palm pilot. The polished see through look of the limited edition IIIe allured me.

It was fully integrateable into the PC desktop, and could store 2mb of data - enough at the time. The main features are a TODO list, memo, diary address book. standard.

The main reason to buy it was to have an accessible diary. But now ive realised its so much easier to pull a pen out and flick through some pages to scribble in some notes. The address book is useless as most phones support this nowadays anyway.

I remember an advert about pointing the damn thing to a nice looking victims palm pilot and swapping numbers via IR at a train station.
SO i sent a message once whilst in a library, and nothing happened except a puzzled face.

It did have its novelty points. Works as a good pocket chess computer (thats all I use it for now), and you can store books on it converted from the PC, but its no fun reading on such a tiny screen, and that includes the diary.

It works good as a todo list, you can cross off and change stuff, and this is better than paper. Useful in tescos as well...

I barely use this machine now. Its supposed to keep everything compact and handy, but at the end of the day, its more hassle recharging batteries and syncing it to the PC than its worth. Once I left it out in the sun, and lost all my work.

A little hint. If you have an IBM laptop, you can configure the infrared to back up the palm pilot via infra-red.. bit quicker.

Batteries last about a month. A few hours if you use them and a few minutes if you use the backlight.

SUMMARY: This is a very versatile object to have but you wont be relying on it for essential things.