TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

In case anyone of you is not yet aware of all the filth and squalor surrounding the Asus press department(and why we didn’t have access to an eeePC sample) - apparently, the eeePC’s success has awakened allmightyness fantasies in the heads of some employees of their German PR agency.

As I am not a big friend of the xyz allmighty films, I report with some satisfaction that Acer is setting out to topple over the eeePC’s dominance.

DigiTimes(usually a reliable source) claims that Acer is planning an UMPC of its own; and plans to outprice the next-generation eeePC by approximately 50$(while offering the same components).

Even though Acer’s customer care has proven problematic in the past, I nevertheless welcome every bit of competition in the laptop market - may the prices fall fast…

When comparing current operating systems for mobile devices, the lack of an useful web browser for Palm OS immediately stands out - all other operating systems have an abundance of browsers available.

Java ports of WebKit recently began to pop up - unfortunately, one of the most promising ones of them(TeaShark) currently crashes on Palm devices according to user reports.

However, the company apparently is aware of the problem and plans to fix it according to this Google Groups discussion:

Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, TeaShark is not supporting Palm
devices yet. (neither natively nor through WEME (java))
We will let you know, when TeaShark is available on Palm devices.

Stay tuned!

P.S. In case anyone of you manages to get it running - please send me an email asap!

The Wordpress installation on TamsPalm has been updated to version 2.5. This update contains several security fixes and new features.

If you experience any problems browsing the site feel free to contact us at tamog [at] gmx [dot] at or js1988 [at] gmail [dot] com.

The following ad banner has recently popped up on CNet:

So much about the Treo 650 being dead…

P.S. Anyone managed to get the SlingPlayer running on a Treo 650? Is the GPRS data link fast enough?
P.S.2 The Sling web site doesn’t list the 650 as a compatible device…

Yours truly has never been a fan of slimdown attempts concerning business smartphones - for me, a device should be big enough to use comfortably. Seeing that the Centro has been slimmed down quite a bit, how does it fare in everyday use?

When looking at the front of the Centro, one immediately notices the striking similarity to the 500/500v:

The back of the device features the usual camera/speaker combo - Palm omitted the latch for the back cover. Instead, you are now meant to slide it off the device - a process that works badly compared to the mechanism used on the 680:

Removing the back cover exposes the battery(1150MAH), SIM tray and a completely insanely-constructed MicroSD slot. Don’t ask me what the folks at Palm’s thought when f**king this up - swapping out a memory card is a total PITA:

The top of the device features Palm’s now-legendary silence switch. At the bottom, Palm’s Athena Connector and the 2.5″ headphone jack can be found:

The left side of the device features the volume button; IR was moved to the right side:

Palm didn’t change the keyboard layout(it is the same across all models, here next to a Treo 500) - however, the keys are now much smaller and are made of some kind of soft rubber…just plain lovely(sarcasm!!!).

Last but not least, the stylus also was slimmed down - plastic stylus freaks, rejoice(Centro, ipaq rx4240, ipaq 614 and Treo 680 stylus; from left to right):

In the end, the Centro is too small for my taste(and has too many, small nuisances). The screen is barely ok for me(pixel density can compete with Fossil’s WristPDA) - but the tiny rubber keyboard is the straw that lays the Centro flat for me. I’ll stick to my Treo 680, thank you. However, people who don’t type as much on their devices as I do will definitely get along well with the box.

The new version of Ubuntu, which is currently in a beta state, uses the kernel 2.6.24-12.13, GNOME 2.22, X.org 7.3. Firefox 3 Beta 4 is included, as well as Inkscape 0.46 (vector graphics), Brasero (CD, DVD writer) and OpenOffice.org 2.40. This version may have some bugs; the final version will be released in April.

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Release (Ubuntu.com)

Dmitry Grinberg of PalmPowerups fame has just released his latest application: PowerDrive, a utility that will allow you to use ANY Compact Flash card as a replacement for your MicroDrive.

Ever wanted to use huge CF cards in your LifeDrive? How would you like 4GB of RAM and a 28GB internal drive…? Well now you can…

PowerDrive promises to become an essential tool for any LifeDrive users out there, and Dmitry has stressed that, besides hardware risks (shorts as you remove the microdrive, etc) the software is completely safe.

As I’ve not got a lifedrive, or a card for testing, this isn’t a review so much as a public service announcement.

Feel free to browse the readme.

PowerDrive is available from the PalmPowerups store.

iambic has attained universal brand recognition with its Agendus PIM. Now, the folks around Adriano Chiaretta decided to release yet another contact tool - ToolboxToGo is said to unify your contact’s formatting….what does it do?

Starting the app up presents the following screen - each button launches one of the subtools contained in the program:

For the purposes of this review, I decided to use the Contact Doctor. Click it, and a wizard-type UI leads you through the setup process:

The product then displays a list of contact fields and how they will be modified. You can pick which contacts to modify and which to leave alone:

Confirm that, and the changes get committed - nothing more to see here….

This review looked at version 1.0 of the program on a Treo 680. ToolboxToGo needs 250KB of memory and didn’t cause any issues in my tests.

In the end, ToolboxToGo is a special-interest application. If you feel that your contact database needs some formatting aid, get the application for 10$ and save yourself countless hours of work. However, people with a disciplined data entry behavior(like yours truly) will not gain much here…

I just decided to pay gspda.com a visit - only to find that the web site is said to be “under construction”. Also, all deeplinks pointing to product pages no longer work.

I am not sure what this means for M28, M68 and M70 owners - if the company goes belly-up, getting support for these devices will become almost impossible. However, let’s hope for the best for now - stay tuned for further info!

P.S. http://www.xplore.com.hk/ is still up - but does not mention any of the PalmOS-based products anymore.

This is a PSA for all readers wanting to download SrcEdit from the IRC channel(irc.freenode.net, #srecdit). The command is:

!get email


For example, enter !get Tamog@gmx.at to get the file sent out to Tamog@gmx.at.

Once again: do NOT enter just !get !

Gather together a bunch of master programmers, and ask each one of them to write a chapter about a bit of code that they are really fascinated about. Pack it all up, sell it, and donate the proceeds to a charity of choice - in short, this is the thought process that went into O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code. The tome is almost 600 pages thick - but can it stack up?

The book is subdivided into 33 parts which each were written by a different author. Thus, each chapter is (mostly) independent from all others, code samples are written in different languages,… . Topics covered range from “simple” things like sorting to Google’s Map-and-Reduce-approach for massively parallel computing - in short, you are treated to a “smorgasboard” of things that could be interesting to the one or the other.

Much of the book looks at Open Source code that is freely available on the net - for example, chapter 2 takes a detailed look at a part of the subversion version control system. Another highly interesting chapter by Charles Petzold looks at dynamically generating code for the .NET framework - as I also write PocketPC applications, I naturally considered it a very interesting read.

As usual for such collection tomes, project management and code style also got covered, and a few chapters on various web-service related things round the book off.

In the end, Beautiful Code definitely contains a load of nice, innovative code samples. However, like the No Fluff Just Stuff anthologies, the book does not present itself in a coherent fashion - the multitude of authors definitely demands its toll here. People who are used to rigidly structured books will not be too happy with it. People wanting a quick overview of the topics covered(look at the table of contents here), get ready to pay 40$ at Amazon’s.

As many of you may know, except for newer Treos and the Centro Smartphone, Palm OS devices are not able to use High Capacity SD expansion cards (referred to as SDHC cards). It is not that the hardware doesn’t support this newer standard, but that these older devices would need a new Driver to be able to use them. Over the years, there has been many complaints about this, but there has been little action to do anything about it. Recently though, Dmitry Grinberg (of PalmPowerUps) has agreed to try to write an SDHC driver for the TX, T5, and Lifedrive devices. There is one catch, he’ll only start the project if 100 people or more, in good faith, say they will purchase the driver for $20 once it is completed. In this thread at the 1src.com forums, you can vote for whether you would pay $20 to buy the Driver to use SDHC Cards.

What are you waiting for, head over to 1src!

Palm’s Centro has been advertised as being especially small(for a smartphone). So far, going teeny-tiny was not Palm’s special strength(look, e.g., at some Asus devices over at TamsPPC) - did they manage to shrink competitively?

Next to a Treo 680, the Centro indeed is a bit less wide. However, one immediately sees that Palm made the rim around the screen significantly wider - not a good sign:

The screen of a Palm TX alone is almost as big as the entire Centro…but the TX is a nice bit slimmer:

GSPDA’s M70 still is a tiny bit smaller from the front, but is a bit thicker and ‘blockier’:

Both of my fliphones(Nokia N71 and QTek 8500) are a bit smaller - but the thickness score is different. N71 is fatter, Qtek’s 8500 aka the’Anti-RAZR’ is (much) slimmer.

Last but not least, the Centro was also put head-to-head with a rx4240 and an iPod touch:

In the end, Palm’s designers indeed managed to make the unit yet another bit smaller(not too much though) - but for what price? Tune in soon to find out what compromises the boys had to make, as the next part of our Centro review is coming soon!

Apparently, the idea of sending shady/invalid cease-and-desist letters didn’t grow on the minds of a few people who don’t quite understand English - it looks like the principle of trying to shut up journalists and bloggers seems to be pretty wide-spread.

A company called MobiTV sent a cease-and-desist letter to Howard Chui of HowardForums - and got fillips from literally hundreds of analysts.

If there’s one advice that you I beg you to take from me: never attack an analyst unless you are 100% sure you can take him down quickly and without anyone noticing. If you cannot get the guy offline immediately and for good(which is highly unlikely), rest assured that you’ll receive massive flak from the community.

Instead, get in touch with the guy and see what can be worked out. Most(all) of us are reasonable fellows who usually don’t want to fu** anyone over - miscommunications can happen and can usually be cleared out cheaply and easily…