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The Wine Enthusiast's PDA Guide 2004 Edition is an incredibly useful program and very appropriate for a PDA. If you are new to wines, it will guide you through the learning process and help you avoid disappointing purchases. If you like to explore new vintners and new vintages, it's a great tool to take with you when shopping at the local wine merchant. And if you're out at dinner and you're overwhelmed by the wine list, this is exactly what you need to cut through the clutter and pick the perfect beverage.

The reviews are numerous (over 10,000), but brief and to the point. It will easily group wines by variety, price, rating, style and region. You can even use it to maintain your personal tasting notes and cellar inventory.

TECHNICAL - 2 STARS

The Guide has some nice technical features. You can beam information to other PDA users and even store the program on a removable memory card. But because of the small memory footprint it occupies, you may not have to take advantage of that feature. The installation is straightforward.

HOWEVER, the poorly designed copy protection scheme can be a real problem. And unfortunately, the documentation is silent on this. When you install the program from the CD or purchase an activation code after downloading the Guide from LandWare, the program links the Guide, the activation code and the owner's name as listed on your PDA. This is not a problem unless you modify the PDA owner's name. In my case I simply added my middle initial. Any change, even in case, will invalidate the install and cause the program to deny entrance and ask you to purchase a new license. So rather than linking the copy protection to a serial number on the CPU or some other element of the PDA hardware, LandWare chose to link it to a user-changeable field and didn't bother to warn you not to change that field. This is very poor design, not something a technologist would have created. Maybe marketing designed it?

SUPPORT - 0 STARS

I contacted LandWare for assistance and was told the following:

1) The software is licensed to a specific user for one PDA. Aside from the fact this is contrary to their license agreement (installation on one PDA at a time and create one backup copy), my Axim 3i, like most PDAs, is not multi-user capable unless you count handing it from person to person.

2) Initially, they were unwilling to help me because I had not sent in my warranty card. The fact that one had not been included in the sealed CD case I received from Amazon and that there is no way to register online did not seem to matter.

3) Because I had purchased the Guide from a third party (Amazon), and not downloaded it from their site, I would have to fax them a Xerox of my CD and the authorization number before they would try to help me gain access to the Guide and the data I had already entered, even though I had the authorization number and CD I had originally used to install.

4) I suggested in a very nice way that I understood why they had copy protection and that for future releases perhaps they should consider linking the copy protection to something inside the PDA like a serial number or configuration that doesn't change. And if that was not workable, that they at least warn people not to modify the username field on their PDA. I received a curt response that I can best characterize as "Shut up and sit down. We own it and this is the way we do it."

In the end I did a hard reset and reloaded my applications to get the Guide to properly reinstall. And of course I lost all of my tasting comments and cellar data from the Guide.

BOTTOM LINE AVERAGE - 2 STARS

It's great content, but LandWare stumbles on poorly designed copy protection and weak support. The Wine Enthusiast is a great magazine and I am very excited to see them produce this product. I just wish that had chosen someone else to produce and support it.

Caveat Emptor. Know what you are buying and the risks involved.