Palm OS 4.0 introduces a standard way for applications to communicate with mobile phones and access phone functions. Together with phone drivers, a Palm Powered handheld can work with a mobile phone over a serial cable, infrared or even Bluetooth.

First of all, Phone Services is preinstalled on many handhelds but not all. If the Phone panel is not listed under Prefs, it must be installed, and activated with a soft-reset. Here are the core Phone Services elements:

• ATPhoneDriver.prc
• Dial.prc — needed only for dialing with the Address book
• Phone.prc — the prefs
• PhoneLib.prc
• SerialPhoneTask.prc
• SMS.prc — the SMS app
• SMS Library.prc — necessary for sending stuff over SMS

Be sure to install also the companion _xxXX.prc files: for instance, _enUS.prc for English users. There is no official web distribution of the files above. Please check out a friend's Palm m500/m505 CD.

The other parts are the phone drivers. Apart from those supplied on the CD (if the handheld has the Phone panel), here are some on the licensee's support web sites:

• Palm: SMS accessories
  This page contains the StdGSMDriver which would work with all GSM phones. Yet it doesn't support Bluetooth. Meanwhile, only popular 2G phone drivers are available.
• Palm: Phone Link
  This page contains many drivers to many phones introduced before mid-2004. Note: Phone Link is supposed to work with Palm m500 series, LifeDrive, Tungsten series and Zire 71/72.
• Palm: Additional drivers for Chinese users
  These are the drivers for Tungsten and Zire 72 users, Chinese edition.
• Sony: PhoneDriver 1.2.1
  This one seems to be a generic driver for Bluetooth users.
• Tapwave: phone drivers
  This one contains a few drivers for Bluetooth-enabled GSM cell phones for North America.

Mix and match. Sure the available drivers cannot catch up with the market, the StdGSMDriver should meet the baseline. In case Bluetooth is a must, try SonyGenericPhoneDrv.