Michael Levitt's Palm Pilot

Michael Levitt's Latest PDA (May 2004)

I have been a fan of the Palm Pilot PDA’s since the beginning of 1997. At one time I became quite addicted to it and would do nothing that was not listed first. Now, I am happy to use it as a great efficiency tool.

This is my fifth or sixth PDA and is most advanced with a built-in camera, MP3 player and WiFi. I find the camera more useful than I expected and the WiFi much less useful than I expected. The Sony Clie PEG-TJ37 uses the Palm OS5, whereas my previous PDA’s used OS2, OS3 and OS4. At first the need to use Grafitti 2 drove me crazy but by the time I had downloaded the Grafitti 1 software, I was quite used to Grafitti 2. I do wish that a few of the best Grafitti 1 short-cuts were still recognized (gamma for “x”, 90 degree rotated gamma for “k”, and backward vee for “v”).

With more memory and a 256 Mb memory stick, I use the Clie to store maps, word documents (with WordSmith) and a few MP3 songs. I tried a lot of different map programs and found them generally unsatisfactory (except for the Tube street map of Paris). Instead I scan good quality paper maps and add them in as images that can be easily panned and zoomed with the built-in image viewing software. One big problem of OS5 is that TomTom City maps are not supported.