Few people use their Palm Pilots or Microsoft Pocket PCs for anything more than their address books. Sure, having addresses ready for postcards at the top of Mount Washington (where there is a post office) is handy, but it hardly begins to tap the potential of your digital assistant. Here we have a device smaller than a mass-market paperback and far lighter, but that can store vastly more information.

To start, we can all say “sayonara” to those cumbersome phrasebooks. Digital phrasebooks for Russian, Japanese, and 25 other languages are sold atwww.pocketgear.comfor $19.95. Translators from several companies, such as Ectaco and the Talking Translator series, not only transliterate the phrases into English letters, but also 554 1870 686 1882712 1989 796 2000come with the recorded sounds of an actor pronouncing the words.

And maps for PDAs are all over the Internet, from freeware to old standbys like Rand Mc-Nally’s Streetfinder ($29.99 direct fromwww.RandMcNally.com). McNally’s software can provide driving directions between more than 75,000 American towns and cities, and it comes with hotel and restaurant information, too (though these are essentially paid advertisements). Adventurous travelers won’t find much help there, but in a pinch it’s handy to have data available.

PalmOne, the maker of the Palm operating system, has a Web store at www.palm.comthat sells copies of subway maps from Sidney, Amsterdam, and many other cities around the world. A little bit of digging into the site turned up an array of odd widgets: a luggage organizer to keep track of what is in each bag; a currency converter that also converts between metric and English measures; and a free program called “City Walks” that lets users prepare a walking tour of any city they may be visiting.

When I expanded my search for PDA software to Google using the terms “PDA” and “travel,” the list seemed endless: city-by-city restaurant guides, expense trackers for busi ness travel,and foreign language verb conjugators are just a few examples.

And that’s to say nothing of the endless airport entertainments developed for PDAs – from crossword puzzles to arcade games.

Most of this software is available online and distributed by download. Make sure to check what kind of PDA operating system you use, typically either PalmOS or Windows CE, though a few people may be using a variant of Linux. Some software, like McNally’s Streetfinder, is only available for one operating system or the other, though a few products work on both. Make sure to check the fine print before you download. Also, confirm that your Palm has enough memory to handle the application. My 3-year-old Handspring Edge couldn’t handle some of the mapping software because its eight megabytes of memory were insufficient.

Downloading the software can take a while, too, especially it you’re a modem user. Major companies such as Rand McNally package their software for purchase off the shelf, but many of the smaller companies save costs by offering their material by download only. They try to keep files sizes small, but modem users especially should be prepared to start the download of some of these two- or three-megabyte programs and then go pack or run errands. Once the software is on your computer, loading it onto the Palm doesn’t take much more than five minutes.