I'm a new BB user and would like to transfer my address book from my palm handheld (which has all the contacts on the pc). Is there any way of me being able to transfer the contacts from the palm desktop to the BB.

You will need to use Outlook as the intermediary.
On the CD that came with the Palm is something called the Palm Conduits. You can load these, and then sync your Palm to Outlook.
Then use Desktop Manager and Intellisync to sync the BlackBerry to Outlook.

Palm --> Outlook (via the conduits) --> BB (via Intellisync)

It'll work!