Having it all customised in the palm of your hand

Technofile: Years ago a column like this would have been called "software and hardware review". These days we are so used to information technology invading every area of our lives that we think more in terms of "gadgets" than IT. But since the day when someone first surprised a passing mammoth with a sharpened stick, we have been defined by our technology. So what defines me?

Friends will say that the one thing they know me for is going everywhere with the device my five-year-old nephew disarmingly calls my "Pooter". This is in fact a Handspring Treo 600 - basically a Palm pilot and mobile phone combined in the one device. So it would be disingenuous to kick off a new gadget review column if I didn't come clean on the one gadget that I use most often.

The Treo is now made by Palm, the company that bought its inventors, Handspring. It's a fairly bulky device compared to the average mobile and holding it to your ear is not unlike being transported back to a time when Duran Duran was famous the first time round. However, its functionality more than makes up for its dimensions. And being a full blown "Pooter" one needn't simply make do with the existing software for things like notes, calendar and messaging. After all, what is tech for if not for messing about with?

To do that you'll need some memory. Packing 16 megabytes (MB) of internal memory, the Treo can be expanded to more than 500 MB by the SD Card which slots neatly into its top. One gigabyte (GB) cards are already on the market (costing around €143), which almost makes my Treo an iPod.

In fact it's already my only portable music device. With the simple addition of the cheap PocketTunes software (www.pocket-tunes.com) I can play any MP3 I can cram onto the Treo's SD card which, with a 1 GB SD card, amounts to upward of 200 songs.

However, synchronising your MP3 collection on the Treo would be best managed with some slick software like iTunes, but we'll have to wait for that.

Although the Treo, like many modern smartphones, features a low resolution VGA camera, I've managed to turn it into a video camera with the addition of the MovieRec software (www.infinityball.com) which allows you to record as much video as you can carry on the SD card. That usually adds up to a couple of minutes - but it's great for those 30-second films of my son on the swings.

Customising the Treo has also lead me to load up some free email software, which is handy for those moments when an email just has to be sent or received. Eudora (www.Eudora.com) is the weapon of choice, and it can handle any number of email accounts you care to throw at it.

I could go on about the best software for the Treo, but the last two items are high on the list.

Palm RSS is software for downloading the latest headlines to your phone in one fell swoop. Simply find the little button on a news website that says "XML" and type that into Palm RSS. When next you update the listing, all the latest headlines appear without any tedious use of the infernal WAP.

And lastly, the best game every invented for any Palm device has to be SF Cave (best to Google it).

The Treo 600 model is the latest to hit these shores so far, but the 650 model is due out any time now, so look out for some more weird and wacky tips on customising the latest model in future columns.