If you’re a regular train traveller across the UK, or you’re planning a holiday involving lots of different journeys, keeping track of all the various train times can be a bit of a pain.
Normally, you’d have to lug around a bag full of separate timetables or fork out for those spoddy jumbo timetable books often seen in the clammy paws of trainspotters, but thanks to the cunning skills of the German railway Website bahn.de, you can download customised timetables direct to your PC, phone or Palm handheld.
Setting up individual timetables is simplicity itself – just type in your start and destination stations and then select the date period you want journey information on.
Then tick off what days of the week you want included in your timetable along with the outward/return journey times (or select ‘whole day’ for the all trains) and select what modes of travel you want included or excluded from your file.
Next, you have to you choose what format you want your timetable in: PDF, PDB (for Palm handhelds) and J2ME for Java mobiles, downloadable as a zip file or via a WAP URL.
Then it’s a case of bashing the ‘create’ buttom and waiting for a few minutes as the Teutonic technlogoy does it thing, before being presented with links to your timetable (you can elect to download the timetable directly from the site or have the files emailed to you).
Free Palm viewer
Palm users can also download a highly functional free custom viewer called, appropriately enough, Personal Viewer, created by the German company that powers the timetable engine, HaCon.
This small download provides a simple interface serving up enough timetable-related data to give train buffs a moist spot or two.
Users can store as many timetables as they like on their Palm (the files can also be run from the card to save space), with the tabbed interface letting travellers select their journey and time of travel and then see available trains, journey details and stops on the way – there’s even an indication whether snacks will be available on the selected train!
We’ve been using this program on our Palm handheld for years, and can thoroughly recommend it – especially as it’s totally FREE!
Overall score: 85%
For globe trotters, city slickers, urban commuters and spoddy transport types, the freeware Metro looks to be a very useful application.
Using Metro
Using the program’s simple interface, you can also get Metro to display station details, stops between the stations on your journey and even associate contacts with stations.
Conclusion
Another in the “hacks” range of O’Reilly books, where hacking is doing interesting things with something, rather than the unfortunate media convention of breaking into computers (which has some relevence as you’re getting into the guts of the BlackBerry in ways RIM, the manufacturer, may not have expected and/or indeed intended).
The book also gives a good insight into programming the Blackberry and describes the tools that RIM provide and how to go about using them (and what other things you need to do). RIM originally made the BlackBerry for corporates and the last thing they wanted was nasty virii and programs infecting them, so when a program tries to access some of the BlackBerry’s inner workings the BlackBerry actually checks that the program is valid and should be doing that. RIM force programmers to “sign” programs and there’s info on how to go through that process.
Butler is a hugely popular selection of nifty utilities for the Palm Treo smartphone that manages to fix many of the minor shortcomings of the phone in one fell swoop.
Launching apps
Lights out
Butler also offers a straight alarm feature that lets you set up to 6 repeating alarms, complete with customised messages and the option to assign a program to open after you’ve cleared the alarm.
Wrapping up the feature set is a “Hide SMS popup” option which stops you being bothered by SMS screens, an option to beam your business card by holding the phone button down and a useful “Keep Exchange Manager Clean” utility which addresses the annoying ‘preference loss’ bug seen on the Palm OS.
It’s worth persevering though because it won’t take long before you begin to wonder how you ever coped without Butler on your Treo – and at just $14.95 (£8.20,€11.90) it’s something of a bargain!
Nordic browser kings Opera Software have released Opera Mini 2.0, a spanking new version of their tiny Web browser that runs on almost all mobile phones.
Also new for version two is a speed dial widget, which lets surfers call up bookmarks by assigning shortcut key combinations.
With Opera Mini supporting mobile commerce via SMS, users can directly buy ringtones, games and other content for delivery as an SMS.
Now rocking up to version 10, Agendus is a stable, featured-packed integrated PIM application for the Palm OS.
In fact, just about every element of the program seems intuitively thought out, with lots of nice touches reflecting the developer’s attention to detail.
When adding a new appointment, for example, you can add invitees, assign categories, sketch a note, add a custom icon, add a voice message and photo – with all these options being accessible through a clear and concise interface.
Multiple relationships can be assigned to the same contact and the list is customisable, so you could add new categories like, “Fellow Borg” or “Desperate Drinker.”
If you’re the type who quickly forgets who you met, contacts can be linked to events to build a contact history, exportable as a CSV file.
There’s also a basic project management interface onboard letting you organise complex tasks with hierarchical To Do items and set task ‘roll over’ status.
Conclusion
So you’ve shelled out for your new smartphone/PDA and you’re ready to watch your productivity soar as you strut around with an office in your pocket.
Like most annoyingly compelling games, Bejeweled is dead simple to play and takes seconds to learn.
In the original Bejeweled (available on Palm, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile) there’s an additional timed mode to add a frantic air to the gameplay, while its sequel, Bejeweled2 (available on Palm and Pocket PC), ramps up the bells and whistles offering four play modes, bonus play modes, explosive Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs and arcade-style noisy effects (which can be turned off).
You can download trial versions of both games from 
Although a well equipped smartphone or PDA can let you leave the laptop at home, bashing away at those itty-bitty keypads or attempting to write lengthy emails with a fiddly stylus can soon become a chore.
Before use, a small driver has to be installed on your handheld device – as well as getting the two devices chatting to each other, it also lets you set up user programmable shortcut and command keys for fast access to applications.
Although we had no problem maintaining the IR link, one of our test units (a Treo 650) felt a little wobbly on the cradle – using an imate JAM Pocket PC in landscape mode felt a lot more secure, as did our Sony TH55 PDA (one of the best PDAs even invented, but that’s a different story).
Specifications
Filez
CSpotRun
AvantGo
Combining an application launcher with the Today screen, Spb Pocket Plus is designed to add a heap of functionality to your Windows Mobile 2003/5 device.
It has to be said that some of the ‘extended themes’ are something of an acquired taste, but SPB have thoughtfully created a Webpage instructing enthusiastic users on how to create their own.
Conveniently, the program can be run off a storage card to save device memory and there’s a ‘Safe Mode’ to help sort out any rogue software causing problems – just like its big brother, this only loads a basic set of drivers on start-up.