Reading books on a Palm-based PDA or smartphone can be tedious, but if there's one book that belongs on your Palm it's a good video guide. Keep it with you so that you can save time and pointless searching every time you visit your local movie rental store.

The newly released Leonard Maltin's 2004 Movie and Video Guide makes a fine Palm companion, and has enough interactive helpers so that it's more than just a list of movies. The book sells for $19.95 as a download from LandWare or on a MultiMedia Card, or for $24.95 on CD-ROM.

During installation, you can choose to install just the bare bones of the guide, or to install mini-reviews for each movie, as well. The guide take about 2100k of storage and the optional Maltin reviews roughly another 1400k.

The guide's main screen lists all of the 19,600 plus films in the database and lets you search through them or look up a certain title. Click on a movie and you'll get its details page, which gives the movie's specs (director, cast, year, rating, and so on), plus the brief review, if you installed reviews.


In the guide's main screen, you can find movies popular
in a certain decade or look up a specific title.

When you have a title open, it's easy to add it to customized lists that the guide helps you create. You can make lists of movies you want to rent or your top 20 all time favorites, or anything else you might want. You can call up these lists in the My Movies section of the guide. If you make a list of movies you've rented, you can have the guide automatically create reminders of when they're due in your Palm calendar.

The detailed search options are a real help, and let you search on actors, awards, titles, and much more. You can combine search terms to find exactly the picture you're looking for.


The guide's search tool lets you set specific
criteria to find exactly the movie you want.

Besides the movie guide and the customized lists, the application has a third section called Events which tells you when new DVD titles are being released or when new movies are opening. With a few taps, you can add these dates to your Palm calendar. You can update the content in the Events section, but only if your Palm can create a direct connection to the Internet. We wish there was updated downloadable content for users without direct Internet access from their Palms, content that could be installed with a HotSync.

The movie guide section only includes movies up to 2003, but the user guide that comes with the CD-ROM promises that updated content will be available in the future for a small charge. It's too early to say what that charge will be, but we hope it will be reasonable.

Leonard Maltin's movie guide is certainly one of the more useful reference books you could put on your Palm. While we weren't crazy about the reviews themselves, which suggest that Maltin has a preference for mainstream films and no great love for experimental works, the guide is handy and a well put together package.