NOTE: The Coola service has unfortunately been closed down due to "major changes in the marketplace."

Reviewed by: Hal Mueller

(If you don't know anything about Coola, please refer to Greg Gaub's review of the Coola service, and check out the Coola web site for more info.)

Coola for Mac was a snap to install. It took me less than 5 minutes to download, run the installer, and Hotsync. Coola happily grabbed and converted all of the web documents that I threw at it, including some complicated and graphics-heavy sites. I'm very happy with Coola, and will be adding Coola capability to my own web pages.

There are two rough spots regarding Coola password. First, the Coola conduit prompts for a username and password, on the desktop machine. The dialog box doesn't identify itself as coming from Coola, though. If, like me, you have more than a few passwords, it might not be obvious what the dialog box is asking for. When it popped up, my first reaction was to reach for my Palm, which is where I keep my passwords--but I couldn't look up my password because I was in the middle of a Hotsync!

If you "Reset Login" from within Coola on your handheld, you'll trigger this dialog box the next time you Hotsync. If you happen to be doing a remote Hotsync (say over a modem), you'll hang your desktop machine. This violates PalmOS design rules, which say that a conduit should not have any desktop user interface.

The Coola password would be better managed from the handheld, as AvantGo does it, rather than requiring desktop intervention.

The other slight criticism I have is of the Palm-side Coola app. It requests that you enter another user's email address before beaming the Coola app to him. There's no clear purpose to this request, and asking someone to enter (with Graffiti) some information that's already available on the receiving Palm is an unnecessary frustation.

Once you're aware of them, these two minor points do nothing to slow down your use of Coola.