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On the handheld
The HandStory Palm application is 203 KB, small considering how much it does. As with most Palm OS programs, HandStory uses a List View / Document View organization. A single, unified List View shows all documents on the device that HandStory understands, including PalmDoc, HandStory books, images, Clips, and Memos, each of which has its own icon. Documents on a storage card are shown inline with RAM-based documents, as they should be, and are denoted with a small card icon next to the file size. Select buttons at the bottom of the screen let the user Open, Categorize, or Delete any document, and tapping on the icon for a document opens a pop-up menu with the same options as well as Beam and Move between RAM and a storage card. Documents on a card, however, cannot be beamed. There is also a button to create a new Memo.
 | HandStory's Web Clips are smaller and faster than AvantGo channels
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HandStory uses the same category list as the MemoPad application for all documents, but also has a second Category-like drop down list for the document type. All documents are also flagged as Read or Unread, depending on whether or not the user has opened them since they were last updated, and the Type selector can also filter on Read and Unread documents.
As a document reader for PalmDoc, HandStory, and Clip files, HandStory functions well. The display is simple, with no title bar, leaving as much room as possible for the document itself. The limited controls allow the user to search the document, go forward and back in multi-page Clips, and access bookmarks, as well as jump to a given page in the document. The number of pages in the document is, in fact, calculated on the fly and the current page is displayed as a fraction. On the Sony CLIE NR-series, the page count is recalculated for both the normal and Graffiti minimized modes.
Scrolling is very customizeable, including line-wise and page-wise scrolling via screen taps or an auto-scroll feature, which supports two speeds in each line-wise and page-wise scrolling. The program can be set to overlap one line from the previous page and to take over the ToDo button to toggle the auto-scroll. The user can pick from any of the standard Palm OS fonts for document display.
There are a total of four well-organized preferences screens, including the Scroll Preferences, which provide a good degree of customization. Scroll bars can be activated or deactivated on a per-document type basis, and placed on the left or right to handle left-handed users.
If the handheld has an Internet connection, the program can remotely download the newest version of HandStory-hosted Clips free of charge. The program also acts as a MemoPad replacement, offering the same functionality as the built-in MemoPad, albeit with the HandStory toolbar instead of the normal one.
 | Image viewing is simplistic, but image quality is very good. That's our logo there, by the way.
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HandStory books are a strange animal. They are not a truly separate format, and offer no additional formatting over PalmDoc. They are also available only from the HandStory web site, and consist of public domain books that Namo has converted. They are, however, not PalmDoc files, and will not be recognized as PalmDoc by other Doc readers. Namo also claims to hold copyright on the e-books, even though the text is public domain and the e-books themselves are free. How all of that works is a mystery to us.
As an image viewer, HandStory is simple but effective. Images take up the whole screen, save for three small controls to page through images or close the image and return to the List View. Color quality was very good, and the grayscale dithering done by the desktop program preserves all important details well. If the image is larger than the screen, the user can drag-and-pan to see the rest of the image, but there is no zooming support.
HandStory natively supports the Sony HighRes screen API, including the HighRes+ screen on the NR-series. It runs on the HandEra 330, but does not provide any native support for the HandEra QVGA display.
Conclusion
HandStory is a very good Jack of All Trades. While it may not be king of any one field, it is good enough in all of them to be a solid performer. The program as a whole is very fast and responsive, and remarkably small for such a swiss-army-knife type application. Its desktop integration is very clean and complete, as long as the user sticks to Windows and Internet Explorer. We would like to see better control over how far a Clip will follow links, such as no-offsite-links, and better control over when Clips are updated and how frequently, but the system is still quite functional and certainly cleaner than AvantGo. And at a price of $19.95 USD for new users, it is a very good deal to boot.
HandStory 2.2 is available for sale now from the HandStory web site for $19.95 USD. HandStory 1.x users can upgrade for $5 USD.
- What's positive: Easy interface, Web Clips, Good desktop integration
- What's negative: Windows/Internet Explorer only, Clips scheduling not very flexible, no image zooming
Overall: 
Price and availability
The will start selling for TBA () in November 1999.
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