TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Should you own an AT&T-sourced Nokia phone, please head over to RCR Wireless immediately.

RCR reports that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Nokia, AT&T and a retailer called CommClub. The reason:

The class has suffered injuries in fact and lost money or property as a result of the … acts in that members of the class paid the purchase price for a brand new Nokia cellphone and instead received a used or reconditioned Nokia cellphone that was worth substantially less

Once again: if you have an AT&T Nokia phone (and purchased it at CommClub’s) - please get in touch. You could be using a refurbished device without knowing it. Should you plan to purchase a device now: stay clear of CommClub until the situation clears up!

When one of you has a problem with a technical device, he tells the manufacturer the system specifications right away. Hell, some of my customers have even included a full list of all files in RAM into their bug/CS requests. However, asking customers for system specs can go very wrong…feast your eyes on the true story below (anonymized to protect the guilty):

I work as an IT guy for an upscale Austrian ***** company. So far, all has went well - until yesterday. Our CEO called the customer support hotline of a major software manufacturer, described her problem and suddenly started screaming at the support rep as if he/she had been gravely insulted.

After interrogating her to see what the problem was, I found out the following mind.boggling truth:

The CS guy asked her: “what computer do you have”?

Our CEO didn’t understand that this information was needed to actually find and fix the bug. Instead, she thought that the manufacturer was trying to blame her holy (Apple) device - and became pissed as sh*t.

For me, this story once again proves my basic assumption: what is clear to us, isn’t clear to others. Tell customers WHY you ask them for data - it might cost you a bit of extra voice, but will pay out in the long run…

Feel like telling us your worst-ever CS experience?

Claws Mail

The mail client of Ubuntu MID supports multiple accounts, searching, templates, different protocols (POP, IMAP), attachment and also plugins, for example HTML readers or spam filters. Some of them are availible in the Ubuntu software repository.

I could access my two mailboxes (T-Online, simple POP/STMP and Google Mail, IMAP/SMTP with special port and encryption settings).

Pidgin

Pidgin supports many chat protocols, for example ICQ, IRC, Jabber, MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, and there are plugins for others (e. g. Skype). You can have multiple accounts. Your contacts are ordered in a “Buddy List”. Beside chatting, there is also an option for sending files to other buddies.

I tried to log into my Google Chat account, but I got no connection. IRC was no problem.

Others

First image: Terminal Server Client, second image: Ekiga Softphone, third one: Liferea (feed reader for RSS, CDF, Atom and OPML).

In the next part, we will have a closer look at the multimedia features.

After listing all the launcher’s applications, we will now see how the browser works. Beside the browser (MidBrowser), Ubuntu MID contains a mail client (Claws Mail), a chatting client (Pidgin), a VoIP application (Ekiga) and an RSS reader (Liferea) - these will be presented in the next article.

Although I made networking active in QEmu, Ubuntu MID did not connect to the network. I had to choose the network button and tap on “Wired Network”. So you can control whether it connects to your (Wireless) LAN or mobile phone network or not, but perhaps there will be an option to start the connection automatically, too.

Web Browser

The browser is called “MidBrowser”, but it works exactly as Firefox 3.0: It has not only the same engine (Gecko), but the same settings dialogues, the same bookmark management, download manager and plugin system. If you are a Firefox user like me, you will find again the same features you use on your desktop machine.

Every site I opened was rendered correctly. It couldn’t display YouTube videos, either. But when you install a Flash plugin, this should be no problem.

When I tried to install a plugin (SwitchProxy), it was downloaded, but the installation failed because of the wrong browser (MidBrowser, but it expected Firefox). But after a small modification, this should work too - SwitchProxy didn’t even work on my desktop’s Firefox 3.0, as it expected version 2.x, so the version number had to be added.

The first two pictures show the homepage of MidBrowser in two different zoom levels. As the new Firefox / MidBrowser also supports image zooming, this may be a useful feature when viewing big sites on the small screen (resolution).

Google Maps also works! When I tried to use Google Street View however, there was a message that no Flash player is installed. The fourth image shows the browser’s RSS reader and on the last image you can see different tabs.

The first image shows what happens when you tap on a link to a file (in this case, a MS Word document) - you may know this dialogue already from Firefox. It recommends opening this file in OpenOffice - but there is no OpenOffice in the launcher?! - more about that later. You also see the download manager in the second image, the settings dialogue in the third one and a plugin installation in the fourth one.

The user agent of this browser is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061813 Firefox/3.0

This browser seems to be the right choice for Ubuntu MID. It has one of the best rendering engines and can be customized very well (many plugins, which are availible for Firefox, can be modified to run also on MidBrowser). In the next article, we will show the other communication programs.

THE CAMERA HAS BEEN DEFECTIVE! IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY AN OLYMPUS REPRESENTATIVE!

The replacement camera has been on a press conference with me and provided me with lovely images in all kinds of suroundings. I will post samples of these later on(as soon as the DDOS attack by
some a$$ ends)!

Sample images from the new Olympus E520 can be found here…

A friendly photography shop close to my house sold me an Olympus E520 today - yes, not an E510, but the newly-announced E520. I currently work on a complete review of the camera - meanwhile, here are a few indoor sample shots.

Our Olympus EVOLT E520 is running the 1.0 version of the firmware; the included German manual seems to be the production one(the whole camera seems to be a production-grade model).

EZ 1442
The EZ1442 kit lens is a F3.5 lens that has a focal range of 14-42mm. Here are five small sample shots ranging from ISO 100 to ISO 1600(on the right). click on the shots to see the full JPEG as it was produced by the E520(sharpening and noise reduction disabled):

Here are a few crops(1:1) resolution - once again, the images are from all ISO settings available. I see slight noise starting to pop up at ISO 400; however, even the ISO1600 shot seems to be somewhat usable. However, the completely fuxated focusing voids further discussion - the images are unacceptable with out-of-the-box settings:

Zooming in didn’t do much in regards to sharpness(detail shots below, click thumbnails for native picture)):

EZ 4015-2
The second kit lens is a mediocre zoom - its focal length is from 40mm to 150mm. I tortured it with a few night shots of a closeby railway station(on a stand) - none of the shots was focused properly:

These detail shots show the true extent of the focus catastrophy:

Zooming in made the situation even worse - the images turned out completely unusable.

The detail shots can be considered Pixel Soup at the very best - a 100€ camera can produce significantly better results than the E520.

THIS CAMERA HAS BEEN DEFECTIVE! THE CONCLUSION BELOW IS VOID! A FULL REVIEW IS UPCOMING!!

Olympus aimed for the moon while designing the E520 - unfortunately, the actual projectile went into outer space. The autofocus system of the E520 is the worst I have ever seen on a digital camera: if you value sharp and well-focused shots, look at the sample images above and stay FAR away from the Olympus EVOLT E520.

My camera heads back to the shop tomorrow(for further analysis) - stay tuned.

P.S. This is one of the cases where purchasing a device at a specialist store helps. I am pretty sure that the folks will either find a solution for me(which I hope) or take the camera back tomorrow…

Jan Slodicka from Resco’s sent me the following in response to Motricity’s latest announcement(the PalmGear/PocketGear sell-off):

IMHO, the sooner it happens, the better. I never understood why they destroyed their PalmGear brand.

Concerning the selling results PocketGear is getting worse and worse every day. I just hope they will find a buyer before it is too
> >late.”

The story of Lori Drew is so insane that one can almost consider it a joke - cutting a long story shoert, a 40yr old female set up a MySpace account pretending that she was a 16yr old boy. She then started to play around with a female teen…the final result was the tragic loss of life…what a whacky tale.

Unfortunately, the teen really killed herself - and the case is now in court. Mark Rasch from SecurityFOCUS takes a look at the legal situation and at the possible consequences of this trial. Read on for the full (and somewhat disturbing) scoop - it’s possible that anonymous protests like the ones held at Enturbulation.org may soon be forbidden…

Expansys UK has bundled up Palm’s Centro with a reasonably-priced T-Mobile FLEXt20 contract that offers 1GB of data and 170 free calling minutes for 27.50 pounds a month:

The unusual thing about this is that the contract term is 18 months rather than the usual 12 or 24…

The Austrian branch of Expansys currently does a blowout on b-stock of a special edition of the original
Palm Zire(the DragonBall-powered one):

In case anyone of you still needs such a box for his PDA collection, it can be had for 23€ via this web site…

P.S. In case you do get your hands on one: PLEASE send me a few pics!

Usually, the EFF’s newsletter is a rather boring, legalese thing that one reads to stay current. However, their last issue contained the gem below:

A bit of explanation: in Austria, a weird sect called Watchtower Society/Jehova’s Witnesses has plastered the streets with critters who hand out weird free “newspapers” called Watchtower and Wake Up! The funny thing(and where UMG gets into the picture) is that these peddlers always try to talk you into holding onto such a paper forever and never throwing it away(as if it were a handheld ;)):

In a brief filed in federal court, Universal Music Group
(UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs (”promo CDs”) that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is “an unauthorized distribution” that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right — if you’ve ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don’t still have it, UMG thinks you’re a pirate.

This revelation came in a brief for summary judgment filed by UMG against Troy Augusto. Augusto buys collectible promo CDs at used record stores around Los Angeles and resells them on eBay. UMG sued him last year, claiming that the “promotional use only” labels on the CDs mean that UMG owns them forever and that any resale infringes copyright. EFF took Augusto’s case to fight for the proposition that a copyright owner can’t take away a consumer’s first sale rights just by putting a label on a CD. In other words, EFF believes that if you bought it, or if someone gave it to you, you own it.

For EFF’s legal perspective on the issue of “promo CDs” in UMG v. Augusto:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/umg_v_augusto/AugustoMSJBrief.pdf

For this complete post by EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred Von Lohmann:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/04/umg-says-throwing-away-promo-cds-illegal

Nice to know that the UMG now adopts sect-like marketing techniques. I guess that Gong! now has an entirely new meaning…

I have had my fair share of standoffs with Palm’s customer care myself; but this story trumps it all - here’s the best excerpt from it:

…
So I asked employee C11329 to be transfered to her manager. She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.

For a second, I paused. “You’re the CEO of Palm, Inc.?” I asked again, not really believing what I was hearing. “Yes, I am” she replied, now with a defiant tone. “So you’re telling me you’re Ed Colligan?” I asked. “I am the CEO and that’s all you need to know.”

Well, turns out I was now in a very odd situation. I had been at several industry events where Ed Colligan spoke (including a number of product launches from Palm) and, as far as my memory was concerned, his voice was neither feminine nor did it sound south-Asian in its inflection. My memory might have been playing games on me but I was pretty sure I was not talking to the CEO of Palm.
…

Head on over to tnl.com for the full scoop…hope this helps all those of you frustrated with Palm’s Customer care to a good laugh…

P.S. Wonder how I found this? I was actually looking for horror stories on a courier service…more about that on request!

Thanks to our reader Peter from the UK, we now know that VersaMail 4 indeed can no longer sync. After reading about the problem on TamsPalm, he sent an email to the big orange folks, and found out the following:

“The functionality of being able to Sycronize your Centro, with the Palm Desktop 6.2 and HotSync Manager 7 with VersaMail, is not supported.”
They refer to KB ID 11149 which spells it all out in gory detail. It’s rather disappointing and curious since this facility was available in earlier versions of HotSync Manager.

Another reason to stay far from the Centro…Mark/Space really should port Missing Sync to Windows…

Apparently, things are very rotten in the state of T-Mobile - after the weird stories reported by TamsPalm readers some time ago, the company now decided to attack Engadget…

The reason for the bad blood is simple: the Engadget Mobile logo is magenta, just like T-Mobile’s logo. Someone in T-Mobile’s legal department decided to fight boredom by sending a letter requesting a name chgange(does that remind anyone of OZ Communications???).

As of now, nobody knows if T-Mobile plans to actually sue Engadget - if they do, the backlash could IMHO turn out to be extremely painful for the carrier…

Get the full scoop at Engadget’s - let’s stay tuned how it all turns out…

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…