I'm probably one of the luckiest commuters on the planet: My home is two blocks from PC World's headquarters. But I used to drive 15 miles (each way) to work in Los Angeles, so if you spend your mornings and evenings stuck on a busy freeway, I've felt your pain.

Palm's latest app for its Treo 600 and 650 can't do much about congestion in the nation's most traffic-snarled cities. But if forewarned is forearmed, then Traffic for Treo Smartphones can at least give you an idea what's in store--and maybe help you figure out a route that avoids the worst jams.

The service isn't free, so you should check it out only if this sort of information has real value to you. Monthly subscription fees start at $5 to track one city, $8 for two cities, and $15 for all ten metropolitan areas that the service currently covers: Atlanta, Baltimore/DC, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle. Traffic gets its real-time information from a traffic-tracking service called Metrocommute.

I took advantage of a 14-day free trial to test the service in San Francisco. Downloading and installing the app on my Treo 650 was easy. It requires about 500KB of free space, which was less than I expected--a good thing since free space is in short supply.

Once Traffic was installed, I had a bit of difficulty establishing a connection via my Cingular service; a Palm spokesperson said there had been some intermittent problems with Cingular. But within half an hour the network was up and running and a map of the Bay Area appeared on the screen, dotted with blinking red and orange blobs. Clicking on one of the blobs pulled up details, including the road or intersection impacted by the traffic, and the resulting average travel speed. Even if you don't get around to tapping on the blinking blob, you have a visual clue: The brighter red the blob, the worse the problem.

You can easily customize your maps by moving around (either by tapping or using the navigation jog wheel) and zooming using an icon on a small taskbar at the bottom of the application. Other icons let you refresh data and save frequently used customized map views as bookmarks within the app.

Cingular Patch

In case you're a Cingular subscriber with a Treo 650 and haven't yet heard, there's a free and useful patch available. Among other things, it frees up internal memory--and as I mentioned above, that's a scarce commodity on my Treo 650 (and yours, perhaps?). I have yet to hear of anyone who carefully followed the instructions having problems with the installation. Of course, there's a first time for everything, but for now I can heartily recommend devoting the half hour or so you'll need to install this firmware upgrade.

Latest Word Game Addictions

Regular readers know I'm a big fan of handheld word games, and in the last few months I've added two to my Treo 650. Astraware's $20 Super Wild Wild Words for Palms is a miniature version of a game from Gamehouse, the folks who created my perennial favorite, Text Twist.

Super Wild Wild Words is basically a hangman variant with a Western theme; you have to form words from letter blocks to earn the right to guess at letters in the mystery word or phrase, or end the game by going for the full solution. There are two game modes, one rewarding speed and the other rewarding the formation of long words. It's an okay pastime, but the roster of mystery words seems somewhat limited: I've already come across the same ones several times.

I have higher hopes for Smart Box Design's $15 Word Watch, my most recent acquisition. It's a word descrambling game that incorporates a timer and the ability to make up lost ground (when you can't come up with a word using all the letters) by earning bonus rounds and forming longer words including some or all of the leftover letters from previous rounds.

As usual, you can try both of these games for a limited time before you buy. Have fun!

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