Re: one more nail to the coffin ?

In article news:<pan.2007.10.12.00.59.46@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Thomas P Brisco
wrote:
Again; Datebook5/6 is what really hooked me.

The various Datebook N apps are really fancy pieces of software. They look
great but I must say I have never used them. I don't use much 3rd-party
software on my Palm and what I do use is all free stuff. That's not because
I mind paying, but because I have a sort of notion that what's supplied with
the unit *should* be good enough.

Having said that, I do use Whatzup to give me a combined view of the
calendar and todo lists ... that's really all I need, and it has the *great*
advantage that it uses the native calendar and todo-list data so there are
no new formats to sync.

I use HappyDays, too, which extracts birthdays from contact records and puts
them in the calendar. I like that. Again, it works without using any data
formats beyond the standard Palm ones (you have to put DoB in the 4th
"Custom" record in contacts), so everything syncs without a problem.

I can put down events that "float" forwards ... like a to-do item

Yes, Whatzup gives that effect by combining the calendar and todo list in a
single view. It's very simple, but it works.

I've a T5, and support talking to my Samsung X820 is a nightmare. I
strongly prefer different devices for voice and PIM -- holding a brick
of a blackberry or treo against my head just seems ridiculous. If your
phone isn't on Palm's aged list of compatible sets - you're SOL. With
some /bizarre/ machinations (which, I pray to god, I never have to
reproduce) I got the Palm to talk to the phone over bluetooth as a
DUN-looking device for EDGE access. SMS? - forget it. Dial contact? -
forget it.

You have my sympathies there. Most phone manufacturers don't do enough to
document what's needed to get a device to talk to a PDA (or a PC) over
either ir or Bt ... and setting this sort of thing up has never been one of
Palm's strong suits. I'm lucky because my Nokia 6310i (obsolete, but STILL
the best business phone ever designed) is either one of the phones supported
by the ROM or is one that Palm released a so-called driver (really just a
configuration file) for (I forget which). It works well, and I'm happy. The
biggest problem I had getting it to work was actually finding out the
settings that my airtime provider was using, not anything to do with Palm or
Nokia.

I agree about the 2-box solution being better ... but I'd consider a 1-box
solution if it actually worked. I was quite taken by the Treo 680
(especially when, just recently, they were giving away a GPS module for it)
but if Palm can't be bothered to produce a proper fixed car kit for the
thing, with power, aerial, and mic/speakers connections I can't take it
seriously. The hint that someone in Germany may make such a kit for the Treo
that may or may not be compatible with the 680 and may or may not be
available does NOT cut the mustard. Bluetooth solutions are not acceptable
because they don't provide the aerial connection (or charge the phone, but
that's less of an issue). It is against the law to use a handheld mobile
phone while driving in this country -- and probably in many others -- and I
expect to see the car kit up there on the Palm Store page alongside the
phone. I'm used to a Nokia ... Palm have to get a *lot* better to meet my
expectations.

Sending contacts via BT is a bit wonky, but sending
things like photos and music works just fine.

Maybe ... I don't do those things. I occasionally send contacts via ir,
never by Bt, and I don't put pictures or music on my palm -- IMHO the
screen's too small to display pictures well and the battery life isn't good
enough to squander it on MP3s.

When it comes to /tons/ of applications -- I've got to be honest and say
that I've not seen anything that isn't circa-2002 for the Palm OS
(excepting Datebk6).

I don't think I've seen much that's actually new (rather than an update)
since that time frame ... but there is SO much that's available and almost
all of it works on the current machines that I don't see that as a problem.
There are very few "new" applications to code, after all (if you think of
one that'll make a million let me know!).

I do think that Palm have rather put developers off writing for their
platform -- the acquisition of BeOS and all the talk of PalmOS 6 ... the
world held its breath ... and then NO machines that ran PalmOS 6. Nobody
wants to write form PalmOS 5 any more because they see it as an obsolete
platform, but PalmOS 6 is apparently dead and now they're talking about
linux ...? And some Treos now run Windows for Pocket PC -- that may be a
shrewd marketing move on the part of Palm the hardware maker, but it does
make it look to the world as though they have no confidence in their own
software.

You may gripe about the difficulty of doing "hard" things like setting up
Bluetooth sync with Palm, but I find it ironic that although W/PPC can
apparently do these things much more easily, it still has trouble just
running all day without a reset. Palms user interface is also still much
more intuitive and natural to operate that anything on the Windows or
Symbian platforms.

In an open-source community- driven environment, one looks for recent
updates as a sign of active, living software - instead of some binary
that'll disappear forever with the next server crash.

A lot of the Palm stuff -- even the free stuff -- isn't Open Source. If it
were anyone could take over maintenance of the packages that are no longer
supported by their original authors. It's a pity that the authors who lose
interest don't just put their sourcecode up on SourceForge, or somewhere
like that, so others can have a go. At least the better/more-interesting
packages would survive, that way.

I have no end of headache with this kpilot/jpilot/gpilot. Kpilot is
passable, but the crippled USB support in Linux is annoying (time it
right and it works ...

USB support has got a lot better in more recent kernels -- what are you
running?

I must admit that I actually sync with Palm Desktop on Win2k, as that's what
my main everyday working machine runs ... as I type this I have one PC (this
one) running Win2k, one running XP64, one running Gentoo linux, and my
laptop is running Debian (though that usually runs Win2k) ... the other box
around here (that is still ever used) runs Gentoo.

When I tried kpilot I didn't have any USB problems, but I was really only
trying it out and not at that time intending to use it "for real". I wanted
to make sure that I could switch all the things I cared about to linux if it
came to the crunch, and as far as the Palm was concerned I decided that I
could. (Unfortunately I still need Windows for client work, and for some
sources of proprietary data for which no linux viewer is available.)

Ignoring the phone part, what is it outside of being a gussied-up
calendar is that you use?

I use it as a gussied-up calendar, I suppose (whatever one of those is) ...
I also use it as a calculator (with EasyCalc), as a password keeper (with
TopSecret), as an alarm clock and countdown timer (with BigClock), and as a
database (with a couple of apps ... but I think DB (pilot-db) is the
better). I've got a nice little periodic table program I downloaded from
somewhere, which can display some handy atomic data (I wish I'd had that
when I was a Chemistry student), I've got a freebie card game I never play
(but the score table tells me I have played it over 800 times -- now I know
where my life has gone!), I've got a J2ME JVM that lets me run Java midlets
on the Palm ... which was handy when I was developing some proof-of-concept
Java tools for a client, but is never used now.

I also use it for EMail (via the phone part I was supposed to be ignoring)
with the bundled VersaMail (not great, but good enough) and have
occasionally tried to use it to access the web (via Palm's own WebPro --
which is what was bundled with my Tungsten|T(1)) ... despite the voice of
experience telling me that it will crash just before I get to the page I
want.

I keep wondering what I would replace this T|T with if it failed on me ... I
have an old Palm IIIc that will keep me running while I buy something new
... and I really don't know. Maybe a T|X ... maybe a Treo 680 (despite my
comments above, and despite its being a 1-box solution) ... maybe a Nokia
9300i ... or the new Nokia E90 (but look at the price!). None of them is
ideal for my needs. At least the Nokias would let me program in python from
the commandline.

Cheers,
Daniel.










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