The miniature qwerty keyboard designer? Now the little keyboard is really nice, and makes a good way to surprise your friends with the speed and clarity of your text messages, but Graffiti is just so handy for all sorts of things. So it is off to find yet another third party app which will enable it.

Perhaps the most brain-dead thing of all is that Graffiti-style shortcuts are included on every menu item, fooling you into thinking that making quick strokes with your stylus will actually do something useful.

I seriously want to see some of the minutes of the meetings where these decisions were made. The 650 is an outstanding piece of hardware, and it irks me that I have to spend hundreds - yes hundreds - of dollars on third party applications if I want to use it properly.

In some ways this is worse than graphics and network card manufacturers providing poor drivers (yes ATi and 3Com, I am looking at you). The 650 is not a single-purpose peripheral but an entire computer platform, complete with RAM, OS, CPU, storage, clock, graphics chip and everything else that you would find in any desktop PC. To cripple it so much is entirely incomprehensible to me.

Perhaps we are just living in a world where the mediocre is the enemy of the good. Still I cannot deny the size of the market for third-party applications. Now if I could just find some easy way to develop my own apps for PalmOS, I would have it made.