You can set up recurring appointments and decide to have the Palm alert you of the impending appointment with an audible alarm. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me (the Palm unit does not have to be on in order for the alarm to go off; it will actually turn itself on and give you an audio tone. You can often have it set up to give you a tone during a meeting and people who don't have Palms will think you're being beeped—a nice way to get out of a snoozefest, not that I've ever done that, mind you.

Now that you know a little bit about the Palm Vx, let's put it to some real world testing.

The first time I really gave my Palm Vx a workout was this past May at the E3 tradeshow. You see, before E3, I had been scheduling all my appointments by using that trusty pen and paper method. As you can imagine, not all of my post-it notes were in the right place at the right time, and that led to some appointment conflicts. I knew I had to use the date book feature of the Palm to solve my problems before I got to E3.

Whenever I spoke with a vendor on the phone or by email, I had my trusty Palm Vx with me and was able to “stylus” in the vendor, the contact person, and the booth and hall number. This made it extremely easy to make my appointments and I never missed an appointment at E3 thanks to the alarm function, although I did have to leave a lunch appointment early (sorry Erica @ LinnPR). I only wish I had entered all my appointments with my Palm because the ones I had on paper didn't have as much detail, and invariably when I arrived at a booth, I couldn't remember who my appointment was with. I know better for 2001!

The date book function works basically the same as Outlook's date book… you can look at a day, week, month or year at a glance and appointments on specific dates are noted with a mark which makes it very easy to see if you have something going on.

Another item that I used quite a bit at E3 was the Expense register—every taxi cab ride, lunch, dinner, tip and personal miles driven were easily entered into the Palm and put into my excel worksheet, which is a gigantic timesaver during tax time. The Palm does indeed keep you organized and saves you from all the hassles of filling out that dreaded Schedule C for the IRS.