Palm OS Emulator (POSE)

POSE is an emulator for the Palm OS. It is freely available from www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/emulator/. If you are thinking about getting a Palm Pilot, it is a good way of evaluating whether it would be useful to you or not. It is intended to be a platform for developing and testing applications, and provides debugging information. As well as the emulator, you also need the actual operating system (Palm OS 3.5). You can extract the operating system from a real Palm Pilot that you already own (software is provided with POSE), you can register with Palm to be able to download the operating system from their site, or you can find one on the Internet. I believe you can find a ROM image at www.ecpda.net/tips/tips_pose.shtml. POSE allows you to use the mouse cursor as the stylus. You can therefore use the Graffiti writing system as you would with a normal Palm Pilot! Fortunately, you can also use your computer's keyboard to input information. I have only had one problem with POSE - When it is switched off, it usually stops responding so you cannot turn it on and anything you were doing before it switched off is lost. A solution to this is to use the 'AlwaysOn' utility. There are hundreds of Palm Pilot applications available from pda.tucows.com/palmsoft.html (including the AlwaysOn utility mentioned above).

Internet On The Palm Pilot

My main reason for trying POSE was to see what sort of Web access facilities the Palm Pilot provides. I have tried three web browsers so far:
ProxiWeb
EudoraWeb
PalmScape

ProxiWeb obtains pages via a proxy server which converts the webpage to a format suitable for viewing on the Palm. It displays images at a reduced size and colour depth (2 bits or 4 shades of grey). I found Proxiweb to be a little buggy and has crashed the emulator, so I would be less inclined to use it on a real Palm Pilot. Also I have found the service to be rather unreliable recently, and haven't been able to use it at all.

EudoraWeb comes with a good e-mail program too. The browser cannot view images but downloads the pages directly from the Internet.

PalmScape is a more conventional web browser. It can display images (at a reduced size) and loads pages directly from the Internet. This program is Shareware and requires registration after two weeks use.