The first thing that I noticed about WordSmith after downloading it from Blue Nomad (at http://www.bluenomad.com) was the size...all 467K of it! It's a true Palm OS heavyweight, in the class of other full featured programs that make your Palm handheld more like a desktop PC. It's big, but you get a lot for the kilobyte. WordSmith has three main modes of operation: word processor, memo pad replacement, and ebook Doc reader. Plus, it can edit your existing Palm OS Doc files. So, if you have an ebook that has a glaring typographical error, with WordSmith you can edit it, save it, and re-compress it!

Blue Nomad, LLC, sells WordSmith as "trialware." the program will allow you to have 200 editing sessions before it expires. After expiration, it can still be used as a memo pad and ebook reader. However, WordSmith is the type of program you'd probably either buy or delete. Every Palm handheld has a built-in Memo Pad program, and ebook readers are usually smaller than 75K, so the space taken by an expired version of WordSmith could be put to a lot better use. However, if you're like most business users, you regularly need to create and edit documents on your Palm handheld and synchronize them with Microsoft Word. If that's the case, you'll be gladly laying down your $29.95 and wondering how you ever lived without an application like WordSmith.

First use
When WordSmith is run the first time, it asks if you want to remap the Memo Pad hard button to launch WordSmith. This is highly recommended, since WordSmith makes an excellent Memo Pad replacement, allowing you to add character and paragraph formatting to your memos, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

WordSmith easily adds formatting to memos.

As you can see from Figure B, WordSmith adds RTF (Rich Text Format) coding to the plain text of the memo. This formatting is preserved during HotSync operations, but it could get ugly if you print from the Palm Desktop software.

FIGURE B

Here's the memo from Figure A when viewed by the built-in Memo Pad program.

When I first started using WordSmith, I thought formatting memos was a nice but useless feature. However, after giving the feature a try, I've decided that the ability to format memos is a really good thing. I've found it a lot easier to find important items in lists when the text is bold or underlined.