My previous cell also had IrDA, but the only thing it could be used for was data calls. It would show up as a modem (both to Windows and to a Palm). I was hoping to be able to use the Ir port to sync the phone book, but that wasn't an option

As far as letting apps beam stuff out, that shouldn't be too hard either. The first thing that comes to mind would be a fifo that any app could write to and Empire would read input from there until the writing process closed the file. Then use the first line of input as the file name and beam the rest out as an IrOBEX object.

My pager allows routing of incoming IrOBEX objects. Based on the filename extension, it will pass it to the registered program for that type of file. I'd guess the Palm has something similar... can a Palm developer confirm? Cushman?

I suppose you could even write a "shell" module for Empire that would run any input as shell commands and beam back the results as a text file that would show up in your PDA's memopad.