3. No Keyboard - How Is That Supposed To Work?

When the classic PC user looks at a Palm the first thing that's noticed is: there's no keyboard. How is that supposed to work? In fact, data can be entered into the Palm in one of two ways. Palm supplies a plastic pen with each PDA which is used to write characters, numbers and symbols into the lower half of the display. Both Palms incorporate a character recognition function, the so-called Graffiti alphabet system. Entering text with the pen worked surprisingly well.

This is the sticker guide supplied with the Palm, which you should keep handy as long as you are still a Graffiti-beginner. It explains the writing rules, which you should use for text entry. The special characters such as $, £, (c), @ for emails etc. make this sticker very important until you're used to the input characters.

This image shows the area for text recognition. The left area is for letters, the right part is for numbers. Users who can't get used to the character recognition system can use the keyboard emulator instead. By tapping on the 'abc' area (lower left) or on the '123' area (lower right) the keyboard is displayed for every Palm application.