Consider two categories when looking at applications: those that come with the operating system and those that are provided by third parties. A number of applications come bundled with your iPAQ, including contact management, e-mail, notes, to-do lists, and calendaring software. Whether you prefer these built-in applications or third-party products will usually depend on what you used before you turned to your hand-held device. Users of Microsoft Outlook will likely appreciate the similarity between the Pocket Outlook features and those on their desktop. Pocket PC also comes standard with many other applications, including Pocket Excel, Pocket Word, and Pocket Internet Explorer. Each of the applications that come with Pocket PC will be addressed in detail in subsequent chapters. At a minimum, these applications allow easy access to your existing files, or to file attachments that arrive in your e-mail Inbox. The current version of Pocket PC does not include Pocket Money preinstalled like it was on the first versions of the Pocket PC operating system. Pocket Money can be downloaded for free at the Microsoft web site:
www.microsoft.com/MOBILE/pocketpc/downloads/money.asp. The Palm comes with basic contact management, calendaring, e-mail, and to-do list software as well. In addition, you can purchase third-party applications separately for the Palm that will allow you to do some rudimentary work with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, but these come at an additional cost and with limited functionality. Where the Palm really shines is in the variety of software designed for it; more than 10,000 third-party applications are currently available for the Palm. In contrast, fewer than half that many applications are currently available for the Pocket PC platform. The large number of Palm applications is a direct result of Palm’s early ability to grab market share and Windows CE’s previous inability to achieve significant market share. This ratio is coming down dramatically as consumers and businesses are buying more and more Pocket PCs. The quantity of third-party applications available for the Pocket PC platform is growing so quickly that it is getting very difficult to keep track of them all, and by some estimates, it now actually exceeds the number of Palm apps that are available. In other chapters of this book and on the www.PocketPCTools.com web site we will examine some of the best third-party applications that you can take advantage of to extend your iPAQ’s functionality.
Another element to consider is that some companies are currently working on Palm emulators for the Pocket PC that will allow you to run any Palm application on your Pocket PC device.
Although there will likely be little need to run Palm applications on a Pocket PC, and the legality of doing so is certainly questionable, should you locate a particular Palm app that you must have, with an emulator, you will be able to run it directly on your Pocket PC. A few companies have been working on emulators, but to date, no commercial emulator has ever been produced. With the increasing amount of Pocket PC-based software, we believe that a Palm emulator is becoming less and less valuable.

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