We’re always being told that Palm is now pretty much a dead platform but if you’re still using one of these devices you needn’t worry too much that you’re falling behind the times because there are plenty of ways to customize your handset to freshen it up a bit.

TouchLauncher provides you with the power to transform your Palm to resemble something far more modern and cutting-edge, namely, the iPhone. In order to start skinning your OS you’ll need to install the application file and the iFone icon set, both of which come bundled together in the same Zip.

Before you launch the app you get the chance to scan the memory of your PDA in order to automatically add icons of applications into TouchLauncher and remove deleted applications from the program. Once you finally get the program running you’ll be staggered by the quality of icons in this pack, which are remarkable faithful to the Apple device. In fact, it left me wondering how Steve Jobs would react if he clapped eyes on TouchLauncher (no doubt a phone call to his lawyer would be foremost in his mind.)

The software is highly customizable and you can not only select icons for individual for each each of your installed applications from your icon sets, but also to categorize and change the name that appears underneath each utility of icon. Make sure you have plenty of RAM allocated on your device though, because TouchLauncher is a bit of a memory-hogger.

If you’re fed up with your mates mocking your Palm then TouchLauncher provides a great way to turn their sneers into gasps.

Download TouchLauncher 1.2.1 in Softonic

PDACookbook™ is your total recipe and cookbook software for Palm OS® handhelds, Pocket PC or Windows Mobile handhelds, and Windows PCs! If you have a handheld, carry your recipes, cook book, menu planner, and shopping list with you for fast and convenient reference.

Feature Highlights:

• Includes 1200+ FREE recipes to get your collection started
• Shopping List integrated for creating your list and carrying it to the store
• Menu Planner feature to plan future meals. View recipes on menu with a tap!
• Smart Ingredient Paste for quickly entering recipes copied as text from a web page
• Import recipes easily from MealMaster and MasterCook, free from the internet
• Scale ingredients quickly and automatically by changing the number of servings
• Define your own categories and ingredient list to fit YOUR needs

The ultimate recipe book and cookery assistant for PDAs.

Download PDACookbook Plus 5.0.3 in Softonic

They may not like fighting, but the Swiss are sure into their cuckoo clocks and if you’re a fan of this particular kind of timepiece then this mobile app will ring your bell. The program is capable of emulating a cuckoo clock to measure the passing of time.

Cuckoo Clock can function in two ways. It can identify the start of each hour by playing a single tone, or tell you what hour it is by playing the corresponding number of ‘cuckoos’.

Although this is a fairly basic program there are a few options you can mess around with, including choosing one of three sounds (a bell, a cuckoo, or a bell and cuckoo combo), and defining the volume level based on the time of day. This means you can make the cuckoo sound quieter at night, which is very handy for sleeping.

If you want to impress your buddies with an accurate cuckoo sound every hour, this app is perfect, although the constant clucking soon becomes annoying.

Download Cuckoo Clock 5.0 in Softonic

SplashPhoto is an application that allows you to easily store, organize and view your best pictures on your handheld device.

One of the most noteworthy program features is the fact that it’s just so easy to use when it comes to introducing new pictures. Thanks to its application which resides in Windows, you simply need to load the image and then select “Install”, then you will automatically be able to view this picture on your Palm!!

The interface supports 12 pictures on the screen at the same time, as well as the creation of categories in order to organize your pictures in whatever way suits you best.

SplashPhoto is one of those applications that your PDA just can’t afford to be without.

Download SplashPhoto 5.02 in Softonic

BackUp can protect your data by keeping an up-to-date copy of everything on a memory card (SD, MMC). It does this in a very efficient manner and is extremely fast. To give you complete peace-of-mind it also allows for unattended automatic backups at a pre-determined time of the day. Try it for yourself. We are giving the Lite version away for free. Get your copy of BackUp Lite today.

Features in the Pro version include:

• Great interface
• Unattended backups
• Automatic backup after HotSync
• Removal of orphaned files
• Selective restore
• Exclusion of files for backup
• Elaborate file view of backup directory and files in RAM
• Quick toolbar access

Download BackUp Lite 1.8.4 in Softonic

HandyShopper is a great shopping list tool with a plethora of powerful features. But it’s much more than just a shopping list app!

HandyShopper users have been putting it to work for almost every kind of list imaginable. What’s more, HandyShopper works on Palm OS 2.0 through 5.0, and on all PalmOS-based devices (including HandSpring, Sony, HandEra, etc).

So whatever type of list you’re working on, give HandyShopper a try!

Download HandyShopper 3.0.6 in Softonic

Simple Spider Solitaire is a Palm version of one of the more popular two-deck card games around, which you may have played in Windows XP or Vista.

The main aim of Simple Spider Solitaire is to remove all of the cards from the tableau. The cards are dealt into 10 piles, face down apart from the top card. You must then assemble piles running down by rank or in-suit sequence in order to clear the tableau. You can use spaces but they can only be filled with groups of 13 cards in sequence headed by a King.

Never having played this one before, I found Simple Spider Solitaire quite confusing to start with. Luckily, there is a comprehensive help system, and Simple Spider Solitaire will even show you the cards that can be moved.

What I loved about Simple Spider Solitaire is the sheer range of options in it. Not only can you customize the theme of the deck, but you can also pick from a huge array of game settings, from game style options to which tools are available from the toolbar. There’s also a statistics menu, where you can view basic stats about your performance over time.

It might take you a while to get used to the rules, but overall Simple Spider Solitaire makes for an enjoyable and well presented Solitaire game.

Download Simple Spider Solitaire 2.0 in Softonic

MMPlayer is a media player for Palm OS5 handhelds capable of playing many standard audio and video files. If you’ve been looking for an all-in-one solution for playing multimedia files on your Palm PDA, MMPlayer may very well be the perfect choice for you.

Features include:

• Makes it possible to compress an entire 2 hours movie with a quite acceptable quality into a 128 Mb memory card and watch it on the road.
• Supports fullscreen on both landscape and portrait devices. (the screenshots on this page are in window mode, not fullscreen)
• Rotates and zooms the video to make full use of available screen area.
• Supports MJPEG, making it possible to shoot a clip with many digital cameras with SD Card, insert the card into the Palm and watch it.
• Skin support. Download any of the additional skins available or make your own using the skin SDK.

All in all, a media player with a comprehensive range of features.

Download MMPlayer 2.3.0 in Softonic

If you’re the kind of person who’s always missing meetings, events or even birthdays then perhaps it’s time you did something about it.

Don’t worry though, because all you need to ensure that you’re always on time for everything is your Palm handset. Belltime is one of a number of clock apps for the platform, though this one offers a lot more than most of them, allowing you to controlthe passing of time in a highly visual and intuitive way.

At its core, Belltime is a clock with the time and date, but the difference with this one is that the program’s interface can be customised with 20 different elements, including alarms, stopwatches, timers and even an MP3 player window.

Once you’ve set up all the different alarms and timepieces your Palm will be looking like something from an Eighties James Bond film (Live and Let Die, perhaps) and you’ll have a multitude of functions accessible from one place. The trouble is, with all these different windows and dials on display at once things can get a little confusing and the interface is somewhat cluttered.

Nevertheless, if you want to make sure that you’re always on time for everything, Belltime provides you with oodles of functionality.

Download Belltime 1.1 in Softonic

Life Balance is award winning coaching software that provides a dynamically ordered To Do List driven by the importance of your goals, your desired allocation of time and effort, and feedback from what you get done each day.

Life Balance is a time and task management program that helps you focus on what’s really important to you and actively balance the often conflicting demands of career and personal life. Life Balance emphasizes the intrinsic importance that you’ve assigned to your projects and life goals, rather than arbitrarily filling every slot in your calendar. This helps you to spend your time and energy on what matters to you the most. You can be self-directed, and know that you are working toward long term goals while still managing your day to day routine.

Some of the features that set Life Balance apart from most to-do list software are:

• A built-in outliner so that you can organize your tasks into projects
• The ability to reprioritize all the tasks in a project by dragging a single slider
• An unlimited number of places (categories) that you can use to filter your to-do list
• Dependencies, so that Step B won’t appear on your list until Step A is finished
• Routine tasks, like laundry, can be scheduled to happen with a flexible interval rather than scheduling for a particular day and time
• Lead times to gently bring your attention to approaching deadlines
• Integration with the schedule in your Palm’s built-in Date Book
• Pie charts that provide feedback on how you are spending your time
• Unique “balance” feature nudges your to do list to help to bring your actual time and effort allocation more in line with your desires
• An active and knowledgeable User Community available in the User Forum to help answer questions and discuss how to get the most out of Life Balance software

Life Balance helps you to set priorities and increase personal productivity in a very new way. Items on a to-do list can have a high priority for different reasons: because they are part of an important project, because the deadline is near-at-hand, because you are in the right place to take action, or because you have been neglecting the task.

Internally, Life Balance uses fuzzy logic math techniques to balance all these competing factors. As a result, it can provide you with an easy to use, sorted list that makes it simple to figure out what is the most important thing that you can do right here, right now.

Ultimately, Life Balance is software designed to help you achieve that feeling that you are living authentically and following your own unique path.

Download Life Balance 3.5 in Softonic