I'm just looking for some suggestions here. My phone was stolen about a week ago, so I picked up a Smasung i330 with Palm 3.5 (?) and 16MB of memory and built-in Sprint PCS phone. I'm using this thing a lot more than I used my old Sony Clie Palm because I don't need to look up a phone number on one device and call with another. But the main reason for going with a Palm based phone was cushmans' Palantir program that allows your Palm device to send playlist commands to the empeg!

Here are a few programs I've found for the Palm so far:
Dopewars (thanks for the thread in Projects that got me looking for this!)
AvantGo! (basically you sync each morning whatever internet sites you want to the phone - I do weather and news)
Palantir (worth mentioning again!)
Bejeweled (came with the phone but love it.)

But that's about it. I know nothing about Palm Pilots so I was wondering if there were some suggestions of cool programs to get?

System utilities:

Filez for managing what files are on the palm

Applications:

Mapopolis for maps
Calcul-8 to replace the bulit-in calculator
Converter to do conversions

Games:

Blocks, a free Tetris clone
Connect 4
DopeWars
Froggy (Frogger clone)
Galax
MineHunt (Minesweeper clone)
PocketChess
Pyramid (card game)
Sokoban (Web Sailor version: http://www.ngai.f2s.com)
Space Trader (if you like Dopewars, you'll like this. It's like TradeWars on the old dial-up BBS's)
Traffic (mind game)
Vexed (same)

These can all be found at http://www.pilotgear.com/

I was looking at this phone in Best Buy. How do you like it? I have been waiting for a phone/PDA combo for a long while, and since the P800 may be way too expensive, this would be great.

So what are your impressions?

Mark, Thank you so much! I'm so clueless when it comes to Palm software - this will get me going!

As for the phone itself - I love it! It is just small enough that it doesn't feel like I'm talking into a TI-82. Because the screen was shrunk a bit (everything is there, but just smaller fonts and icons than a standalone PDA) sometimes you NEED the stylus to do stuff rather than just use your finger. But, the reason I picked it was because of it's small size. I havn't gotten online with iit yet - my "Vision" plan with internet doesn't kick in till April 10, but I use that Avantgo program to sync the latest news and weather each morning. It's been great for that.

Here is what I love about the phone:
- Included accessories: Extra stylus, spare extended life battery (these are expensive!), docking station that charges phone + spare battery, leather case that is very nice (has plastic insert to securely hold phone.)
- Sound quality: Incoming and outgoing calls are crystal clear (this can be hit and miss when it comes to phones but at least the mic is close to your mouth). Even speaker phone is great.
- Options: One feature I didn't like was how the phone would turn on with the press of any button - this was easy to turn off. There are so many options on this thing.
- Form factor: There are so many phones out there that are PDA's too, but this one was the only one that seemed small enough to be a phone yet big enough to be a useful PDA. The phone function can be used by touch screen - no stylus needed to dial or receive calls.

What you may not like:
- Options: Some options are burried deep in menus. Takes a few days to know where stuff is.
- No expansion slot: I don't care because 16MB is enough for me, but I'm a "light" PDA user and heavy phone user.
- Touch screen: With no physical keyboard, you can't "feel" your way to dial a number. You do actually need to look at the thing. I've gotten over this.

My friend has this exact phone, and we took it on a backpacking trip 3 weekends ago to the Red River Gorge. It's a 3+ hour drive, so on the way down I beamed him the Palantir application (I had to use Filez to beam both the app and the data) and then he could control my Empeg with his phone. That phone is the nicest phone/pda combo I've seen, and you are right when you say that the sound quality is very good. I used his phone to call my wife a few times, and it was crystal clear, even in the hills of Kentucky.

I think that you'll do ok with the 16M of memory, most palm applications are very very small, it's the data that might eat up your space. Mapopolis maps are usually about 1M and in Ohio where I live they are split by county, so you could probably only store a few counties on there.

I use a variety of programs, but here are a couple that I can definitely recommend,
- titrax, a simple time tracker.
- progect, hierarchical project planner/todo list
- diddlebug, simple sketchbook/notepad
- cspotrun, reader for compressed palm DOC files ('ebooks')
- plucker, pretty much the same thing as avantgo, but freeware

Interesting. Thanks!

I was a bit concerned when I saw no expansion slot. That was probably the first thing I looked for, so I'm not sure I'll be going that way. It has a speakerphone?? I didn't even see that! Where is the speaker? After owning my current phone (Sanyo SCP4500), I won't get another phone without speakerphone. I love it! I was on a camping trip with some college friends once during the final four games. I called up my roommate from the middle of the woods, and via the speakerphone he told us all the scores to the games while we were sitting around the campfire. Ahhh, nature

Oh, on the desktop side, I use Pilot Install to install .pdb and .prc files to the palm. With this very nice tool, you can sync apps via IR or cradle without having to do a Hotsync, and it gives you good progress, too. For a developer this is needed because I sync apps to test on the Palm often, and an entire Hotsync takes way too long.

Either "WirelessModem" or "MochaTelnet", both are particularly useful on my Treo and probably are to you for the same reason.