When you visit a different country, be it for business or pleasure, there are so many things to keep track of. You have to find out the time difference between your home country and the place to which you'll be traveling, and the differences in the measuring systems used. Not to mention the currency conversion rates between the two countries! That's a lot of info to have to take note of, but thankfully there's a Palm program out there to help you do the dirty work.

The Palm program I'm talking about is WorldMate, by the MobiMate company. It's a comprehensive travel companion, and it serves multiple purposes. It's a great program to keep in mind if you travel frequently, or if you just like to have such information at your fingertips.

WorldMate consists of five useful functions, namely Clocks, Clothes, Currencies, Converts and International. These functions can be easily accessed through a row of icons along the bottom of the screen.

Under the Clocks function, WorldMate displays up to four different world clocks, as well as a clock for your home country, bringing the total up to five clocks. You can choose to use only two world clocks, but the home country clock always remains. Setting the clocks is easy: all you have to do is pick the city from a drop-down list. If you can't find the city you're looking for, you can always add cities using the "Edit Cities" function. Cities on the drop-down list have been listed with the DST where relevant, and should you need to make any changes, you can also do so in the "Edit Cities" function.

You can customize the look of the clocks by picking a round or square, thick or thin frame. If you like, you can also have your home clock show the second hand. The clocks come in both analog and digital format, and you can choose a 24-hr or 12-hr format for the digital clocks. As an added bonus, Internet Time can be found on the top right corner of the Clocks screen.

The Clocks function also features an alarm with a snooze function, and this alarm can be programmed to display your favorite phrase (say, "Time to wake up, sleepy-head!") when the alarm goes off. Pretty nifty, and makes for a great laugh when you wake up to a humorous alarm message. You can theoretically set the snooze function to repeat up to 999 times, with a minimum of one minute intervals between 'snoozes'. You can also program the backlight to turn on with the alarm. If you would prefer just a silent alarm, you can have one that just displays your programmed alarm message. WorldMate makes for a great alarm clock when you travel, and even when you're at home.

Next up is the Clothes function. This is simply a non-editable list of conversion between USA, EUR and UK clothing sizes. This list includes conversions for trousers, women's and men's suits, men's shirts, shoes, and even kids' sizes.

Currencies is a simple currency converter. You specify the exchange rate and the currencies under the "Edit currencies" option, and you're ready to use the currency converter. Should you need to add several figures up, you can increase the number of rows in the converter using the arrows on the left side of the converter. The converter automatically sums up the figures in each column. When you tap on a box in a different currency, the equivalent figure will appear. One thing I didn't like about WorldMate's currency converter was the fact that the exchange rates have to be manually updated. This assumes that users will have easy access to the exchange rates. I suppose this feature is good when an approximation is needed, but I personally am a stickler for accurate details, especially with the ever-fluctuating currency rates.

Converts is yet another conversion function in WorldMate. This time however, it's a conversion with regards to measuring units, namely area, distance, length, temperature, volume, weight and speed. This is a great feature when you need on-the-fly conversions between measurements. Converts supports up to three 'sizes', say, from feet to meter to yard. It's a straightforward and useful feature, but you can't add your own measuring units.

Last but not least is the International function.This is a comprehensive database of 210 countries, listing the country, IDD code, and time difference between GMT. Again, this list is not editable, and does not include cities, but is generally useful when you need to find out the country code and time difference.