Veo's Photo Traveler series aims to answer the old Axim "a picture is worth a thousand words" for the thousands PDA owners who don't have camera-enabled handhelds.

The Photo Traveler, a digital camera peripheral, comes in two versions, one for Palm OS devices that works with Secure Digital slots, and the other for Pocket PCs with CompactFlash slots. In this review, we take a look at the Palm OS version of the camera. The camera is compatible with Palm OS 4 and 5.

To use the camera, you first need to load the software from the bundled CDROM. The camera comes with a desktop application that syncs with the Photo Traveler software on the handheld, which takes up about 150KB of space. The camera, which comes with a nice little protective case, measures a mere 3 inches long and 1 inch wide. A nice feature of the camera is the ability to rotate it 180 degrees, so you can either have it face away from you when using the PDA screen as a viewfinder or face it towards you so you can take a self-portrait.


Photo Traveler & Case

Plugging the camera into the Secure Digital slot automatically launches the camera application. Since the camera doesn't snap into the slot the same way as a memory card, it is sometimes hard to tell if is attached correctly, which can be annoying. When the camera isn't attached correctly, you get the following error message.

The camera allows you to take pictures at either 320x240 or 640x480 resolutions, storing the images as 24 bit color JPEGs, and at either low medium or high quality. You can also turn off the sound the camera makes when taking a pictures. As you see from the screen shots, it tells you what the size of the images will be and how many you have left to take depending on available memory. You can take either close-up pictures or landscape images with the camera's adjustable focus lens.

Manage Camera Preferences

Set Image Size

Set Image Quality

Turn Off Sound

The software also allows you to set the exposure time to either Auto or Manual, which is important for pictures that aren't going to be taken on a nice sunny day and indoors where the camera didn't perform as well.

Choose Manual or Auto Exposure

Set Manual Exposure