As a Notes and traveling companion it's good. The VersaMail quirk means that it's not perfect. The fact that you can't send voice notes directly by mail is also a bit of a let-down. To mail them, you have to HotSync them to your laptop and then do it from there. Pity the Send menu on the Tungsten doesn't include directly mailing them. Remember that VersaMail can do direct mail sending with POP and IMAP servers.

The clock program is neat. It has a decent alarm clock, is easy to set with the same time selection paradigm as used in the Calendar, and the alarm tones are both insistent and loud. When the machine is turned off, stabbing the button in the center of the navigator button displays the current time. It has one main and two secondary clock locations. Altering the main location to another time zone resets the machine clock and time zone, too. This is good. However, calendar entries synchronized from Notes are transferred in the time zone of the PC, and when you update the Palm handheld's current time zone, the calendar entries don't move with the time zone shift. It does all work with a Notes 6 client.

So the Clie is retired and may even appear on Ebay at some point. In the meantime, I stuck it on top of the wardrobe in our bedroom, along with all its gubbins, still alive and still fully loaded with data. I went off early to the airport for a 6:30 flight, and my wife went back to sleep, only to be woken up a bit later by strange noises and an odd glow on the ceiling. By the time she was fully awake, the sound and light show had stopped, only to happen again five minutes later. This time she realized that whatever it was, it was in the wardrobe. In there was the Clie displaying a calendar alarm for my flight. You can imagine what she said to me when I got home that night!

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.