While your Palm OS device is putting a dent in your pocket, it could at least help lighten the load in your wallet, right? And we don't mean by removing your cash. That's the idea between "wallet" applications, which attempt to move some of the chores typically performed by real wallets over to your handheld. If they can help find a place for the scraps of papers and receipts that cram most people's wallets, they'll have more than paid for themselves.

The two programs we focused on, SplashData's SplashWallet and Ilium Software's eWallet, each store essential data, although SplashWallet is a more fully-featured suite. eWallet is a basic, although extremely usable, program purely for storing info. It gives you one central place to store all your essential information, including credit card numbers, driver's license numbers, combinations, passwords, clothing sizes, and much more. SplashWallet, on the other hand, is a suite of four applications: one for info storage and three others for expense tracking, photo storage, and shopping lists.

You can find eWallet at Ilium's website, where it's available not only for the Palm OS but for Pocket PCs, handheld PCs, and Microsoft-based smartphones, as well. The price is $19.95 for the handheld app. If you're running a Windows PC, you can also choose the Professional edition for $29.95, which includes a desktop component. Download the 30-day trial version first to see if it's for you.


eWallet gives you a central place to store all your essential data. Its start page lists all the items you've stored.

Like a real wallet, eWallet gives you one central place to hold a lot of disparate information. You create entries within it like you might create notes in Palm's Note Pad, expect that each entry here has an attractively formatted look that matches its purpose.


A sample password entry in eWallet.

Start by tapping the New button and then selecting the type of entry you'd like to create from a long list of templates. You can select Car Info, Emergency Numbers, Password, or many more. If there's no template to match the info you want to store, you can choose Free Form.

The templates have all been well thought out, and contain needed fields you might not have thought of. Create a new entry for a credit card number and you'll get fields not only for your number, expiration date, and that irritating three-digit security number on the back, but also for the phone number of your credit card company. This would be incredibly useful to have if you lost your wallet and needed to halt transactions on your credit cards before any unauthorized charges were made.

eWallet is a repository for that and all other kinds of useful information. With it, husbands can have, for example, their wives' sizes quickly at hand when shopping for a gift. You can also store your gym locker's combination, for those times when it's been six months since your last workout and you're blanking on the combo.

When you first launch eWallet, you'll see instructions on how to begin, as well as several sample entries, to give you ideas. Be sure to secure it with a password. If you're going to commit all your crucial data to an application, you'd better password-protect it from the start.


A sample credit card entry in eWallet.

SplashData's SplashWallet takes the wallet idea a bit more literally, and tries to cover everything you might carry in your wallet. With it, you can store photos, data, expense information, and shopping lists. That's everything a real world wallet holds except cash.

If you've seen a boxed product in stores called PDAWallet by Handmark, it's actually the same suite as SplashWallet, just branded under a different name. SplashWallet is a newer version, so registered PDAWallet users are prompted to upgrade for free. The suite is available from SplashData's website for $49.95, and the four apps are also available separately for between $19.95 and $29.95. Download the 30-day trial first, to test them out.

SplashWallet's apps appear as four separate icons on your Palm. We were most impressed with SplashPhoto, which gives you an easy way to store and view photos. In our testing, it was a breeze to drag photos to the desktop application, and then have them load onto our Palm with the next sync. (Note that unlike eWallet, SplashWallet has desktop applications for both Windows and Macintosh computers). Photos appeared a bit darker on our Palm Tungsten T than on our computer, but were still crisp and luminous.


SplashPhoto's thumbnail view shows all the photos in your collection. To see a larger version of one, just tap it.

You can view thumbnails of your photos in SplashPhoto, or view larger versions individually. There's also a slideshow option, which lets you customize how long each photo will display. The only thing it's missing is music.

SplashID is the information-holder, and is similar to eWallet. You can create entries for any kind of information that you want to store, whether that means emergency contact information or the codes for your voice mail system. It doesn't have the range of templates that eWallet does, and those that it has don't have the same attractively-designed looks. It's a useful storage system, it just lacks the graphical charm of eWallet. SplashID can be password protected to keep prying eyes away from your crucial info.


SplashID, like eWallet, lets you store important numbers, passwords, and much more.

SplashMoney is a financial register, and lets you record your daily transactions and keep track of current balances. The idea of recording every transaction seems a little maddening to us, and we couldn't bear to do it for long even while testing, but for those who have that kind of fiscal discipline, it's a handy tool (although, really, those are probably the people who least need to worry about going over budget). SplashMoney wouldn't be all that useful if the data had to stay on your Palm, so it syncs with Quicken and Microsoft Money.


SplashMoney goes far beyond the Palm OS's Expense app in letting you track your spending.

The final entry in SplashWallet is SplashShopper, which strikes us at the weak link. It lets you quickly create shopping lists of any type, and comes with templates for grocery, music, wine, and even Chinese takeout lists. (You also have the option of creating your own categories.) When you select a category, you'll get a list of possible things to buy in that category (the grocery lists starts out with apples, avocados, and bacon, while the movies list actually contains ten well known movies). You tap the items you need to buy, automatically creating a checklist for your shopping trip. It's a nice idea, but the lists are so incomplete, that you'd end up spending a long time creating new entries every time you used it. Using the Palm's Note Pad, or even using a real pad of paper, would certainly be simpler.


The grocery list in SplashShopper displays foods you might want to buy on a trip to the store. Click an item to add it to your customized check list, which you can then call up by clicking the "Need" tab.

All in all, though, the suite is a useful addition to your Palm PDA or smartphone, as is eWallet. Both are certain to keep your important data close at hand and safely protected. If only real wallets were this well organized.