An unfortunate omission, from my point of view, is the native Expense application that has come with nearly every Palm OS organizer. Kyocera decided not to buy a license. Many companies, including mine, have custom spreadsheets linked to the native Expense database, and I am very sorry to lose that convenience. I know of no third-party application that uses the same data format.

The included phone software does not allow a user to clear the database of Recent Calls. This is a security concern for me, since I use confidential sources and don't want their names to be found in a log if I leave the phone in some government office. I work around the problem by using Filez to delete the KWC_RecentCallsDB and KWC-CallHistoryDB when I need to.

Integrating the phone and PDA
In general, the integration of phone and organizer is remarkably good. This was no small task for Kyocera engineers, since there are separate chipsets for the phone, the organizer, the voice recorder, and the MP3 decoder.

You can use most applications during a voice phone call, either by switching on the speakerphone or plugging in the headset. It's easy, for instance, to put a new appointment in your Date Book as you talk. Any time the Dialer is active, though, MP3 music play will stop.

During a data call you can use an external keyboard hooked to the HotSync port to reply to email or fill in a Web form.

The complex handoffs between organizer and phone sometimes lead to annoying delays. It may take 10 or 15 seconds before you can answer the phone, depending what the organizer is doing when the call arrives. That leaves you unsure whether you actually pressed the "Answer Call" button. If you press it twice, you mute the call when it finally answers. Until I figured that out I kept finding myself in a burlesque of the Verizon commercial: "Can you hear me now?" "Can you hear me now?" "Hello?"

A mind of its own
There is one problem shared by both the Kyocera and Treo smartphones. It's a design choice that occasionally makes it hard to use either phone or organizer for minutes at a time. Both companies chose to invoke the Palm OS Attention Manager (a routine available to programmers) each time a wireless network tells the phone that a text message or voice mail is waiting. The results are far from ideal.

During the few seconds it takes to receive each incoming message, the phone stops what it is doing without showing why. Then the screen pops up a notification that holds other functions hostage until you dismiss it. For instance, the notification stops email retrieval, causes HotSync operations to fail, and covers whatever was previously on the display. Some people need instant notification, if they're using the phone as a pager. But for others, it is annoying or worse.

There is no way to turn the function off. There ought to be--either as a default setting or on the notification screen. Right now it offers choices of "OK" or "Go To" for each message. It should add, "Disable Alerts." There are reports that Kyocera may offer such a choice in a firmware upgrade.