I got a new Palm Centro yesterday, to replace my old trusty cellphone, which I sort of dropped [*] while talking to Sprint Customer Support, and cracked the display. The Centro is the first modern PDA I've owned, and it's a pretty sweet little machine. PalmOS, lots of PIM functionality, expandable up to 4GB with a MicroSD card, USB connectivity, BlueTeeth, etc.

HOW-ever. I depended on my trusty old cell to wake me up at 6:30 every morning so I could begin the process of prying my 11-year-old out of bed for school. So after getting the Centro, I spent probably half an hour trying to do this extremely simple thing: set a repeating alarm for 6:30 every weekday morning. Finally I resorted to Google, where I found this post with a bunch of supporting comments basically saying, "oops sorry you can't do that".

It turns out you can set repeating alarms of this sort, and I describe how over the fold.

[*] Dropped kind of, uh, horizontally across the room, when after ten minutes of trying to validate my account information, the Sprint service person tried to tell me that I didn't know the name of my first elementary school. Stupid security questions...

First, the bad news: the place you naturally go (as a new Palm user) to set an alarm -- the "World Clock" applet -- is not going to help you much. "World Clock" only lets you set a single, non-repeating alarm, so don't even go there. You need to use the Calendar app, schedule a suitable repeating event, and attach an alarm to it.

If you bother to read the manual (but who does that?), you know how get to the Calendar. The easiest-to-describe way of doing that is to click the little house button at the top of the keyboard, then scroll down to the Calendar app and click it. (I love about the Centro that I don't have to goof with the stylus - my fingernails work fine for tapping the screen, except in the extreme corners and edges.)

The Calendar UI itself is a little counter-intuitive. There's a "New" button which calls out to you to click it if you want to create an event; however, it doesn't work as expected. The easiest way to create an event is to click on a line of the current-day view and type an event name -- I used "Wakey wakey!" for my daily alarm. The important thing is that the Centro will not actually save an event unless you enter some text into the schedule, even if you used the "New" key to create an event. So the correct way to set up an alarm event is:

• Type the event name at the approximate time you want the alarm to occur on the Calendar day view. You want the event time to be after the desired alarm time, but not too much after. You can always adjust the start time in the "Details" view.
• With the cursor still on the line you just typed, click "Details". This will give you a screen that lets you adjust the start time, alarm enable (check the box if you want the alarm to ring) and alarm time (in minutes-preceding-the-event).
• Once you've enabled the alarm and set the time, click "Repeat" and choose "Other..." from the pick-list.
• In the "Repeat" screen, choose Weekly (not daily!). You'll then be given a row of day-of-week buttons that act like checkboxes; check the ones corresponding to the days you want the alarm to ring.
• Leave "No end date" selected, unless you want the alarm to stop after a certain date.
• Click "OK" until you get back to the Calendar day view.

However, there's a problem: setting up a repeating event like this can clutter up your other Calendar views. The solution to that is:

• Go back into the event's "Details" view and check the "Private" box.
• Go to the applications page and select "Security".
• Under "Current privacy", click "Hide records". This causes Calendar events marked "Private" not to show in the Calendar. You can, of course, still see them by setting the "Current privacy" setting to "Show records".

Compared to my old cell (which supported only three configurable alarms, and had a scheduler applet that was way too much of a pain to use) the Centro's Calendar capabilities are a lot more flexible, but that flexibility is accompanied by a considerably steeper learning curve. I'm glad to have found a workaround for my alarm jones; I can live with this solution just fine.