Yesterday was a day off with lots of free time, so I played with a number of applications.

I have been playing with PDAReach (Junefabrics.com) for about a week now. The basic concept is great when there is a need to enter an exceptional amount of data and at that it meets the goal. I did find though that there were those times when the device screen shut down that a soft reset was required in order to get the device going again and that becomes annoying. When this happened, I did not loose any data. The work around: press a key once in a while on the device.mWhat was annoying even more though was the device occasionally resets after it sits a few moments on the launcher screen. One more thing here, I prefer Bluetooth and if this application were Bluetooth capable, it would better fit my needs, especially if it were a bit more stable. I avoid cables when possible; the first time a sync cable was attached to my 700P was when I started playing with PDAReach - all syncing is done via Bluetooth.

I have been using SoftTick's Blue Files for a while now on a daily basis to primarily copy bunches of HanDBase files to the lap top at the end of the day. It works very well with no problems. Prior to Blue Files, when the need to enmass copy files from the device/card to the laptop, I generally used FileZ. FileZ allows you to mark the files for copying and then prompts the user for input for each file moved - works, but is time consuming. ZLauncher's file utility requires each file to be individually copied - very time consuming.

I then tried Card Export II and was wowed! yepper, wowwwwed. Does much the same as Blue Files, but with a sync cable attached. If I were not a Bluetooth fan, this would be a must have application. Copying/moving, et cetera, what a dude.

Next was Commander, it supports browsing via Bluetooth. It worked, sort of. The house is Bluetooth and wireless enabled with most everything and I was able to hit the lap tops and desk tops; when it came to hitting my Treo 650, I got a rejection notice that the 650 did not support the function. Oh, well. Due to screen size, I would not consider using Commander to browse very often - just too small for practical use. It does work as advertised.

Next free time will see me playing with PPP.

What was not fun was I also decided to install the Palm Desktop upgrade for Vista. The upgrade did not work, so I reverted back to 4.1.4. I was advised to try it with the anti-virus software disabled, maybe next week.

Ben