Palm disappoints

My Palm handheld experiment continues. What I like is the ability to turn the thing on instantly and begin writing, then turn off equally quickly. Syncing works great -- everything is always backed up.

E-mail has been a little tricky. So far I've only been able to get DSL Extreme's e-mail to work with a direct POP or IMAP connection. Daily News mail only works via Outlook, meaning I have to sync at the office for it to work. Gmail doesn't work (though Gmail compatibility is touted in the VersaMail application on newer Palms than the Tungsten E i'm using.)

All I really want to do is produce Microsoft Word-compatible files with all the "special" characters used by just about every writer out there. By that I mean the em dash (aka a long dash) and single and double smart quotes. They don't even have to be "smart," i.e. turn in the proper direction when you type them. The standard Palm applications ignore this feature entirely. Documents to Go, the office-suite application that comes with every Palm imports all of these characters from an existing Word document, but when it comes to generating those characters on the Palm itself, only the double smart quotes are available. There's every kind of accented foreign character known to man, but no single smart quotes? The euro symbol but no long dash? What are these people smoking?

If there was a way to make "macros" like in regular Word, the problem would be solved. I already have a file on the Palm with all the special characters (I synched it over from the PC). All I'd have to do is pick them up and turn them into macros. But it doesn't look like that feature is available. If I could remap the keyboard, that would work too. Can't do that either.

It turns out that there is a free Palm application, tejpwriter, that does generate all of these special characters on the Palm. But this program needs an SD memory card to be plugged into the Palm to work at all. And I'm not sure whether or not the resulting files sync with the main PC, or whether they play well with MS Word. They sure will produce HTML, the documentation reveals, and they will do text files.

My dilemma: Do I find an SD card for the Palm, download this program and see if it will do what I require? Since Documents to Go requires its very own application to sync, I'm doubtful that tejpWriter will have that same level of syncing.

I've really gotten to like the portability, instant booting and easy syncing of the Palm. But it's really unfriendly to writers who want to produce publication-ready copy.