I thought the Excite layout was good. I found it easy to compose an e-mail, invitation, e-card or video card. Yahoo! had good preferences and field layout. Yahoo! gets extra points for implementation of the Yahoo! Messenger and it's use of presence detection (knowing if someone is online). Yahoo! also gets extra points for the ease of quickly adding a contact. The weird thing is that Excite and Yahoo! are consistent with the Palm OS and call this section Address Book. Palm, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to call it Contacts (go figure). I found it odd that Palm wasn't consistent with their own OS. I did find, however, that it was easy in the MyPalm service to add a contact and it had excellent field layout.

 Calendar

I found all three services had a decent Calendar and all three allowed you to view your schedule daily, weekly or monthly. Excite and MyPalm have added a nice feature by displaying the current weather at your location, in case you have no windows or you are in lock-down. In my case it was wrong, but I liked seeing they put the extra thought into it. Excite though, has taken the calendar a step further by adding shopping links to important dates like birthdays and anniversaries. MyPalm has some excellent features, but fails in my book for what they don't offer. Here is an area where they could have excelled, by adding Alarm support for reminders. This way when you create a reminder on the website, an Alarm function can be attached to the calendar item in your handheld when you sync. Excite, Yahoo! and MyPalm each had publishing support so that you could post your calendar for others to view.

To Do List

Excite, Yahoo! and My Palm are all about even on this feature. I found that the MyPalm service reflected the Palm OS well here.

Notepad

Excite and Yahoo! have good Notepad support, but MyPalm doesn't support this at all. There is no Notepad on the MyPalm site. Huh? I mean it was so important to the Palm Pilot that it got it's own button.