TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Using Dmitry Grinberg’s new beta of his SDHC driver, the old Tungsten C supports big SDHC cards! Unfortunately, I only have a 2 GB SD card, but it cannot access this card because its slot driver only supports card up to 1 GB. First, file managers didn’t show any contents, but Palm’s Card Info utility could show me several details about the card.

Then I installed Dmitry’s most recent FAT32 driver which is known to work a Tungsten C, T3 and T5 (and should work on others). Now, FileZ had no problems accessing the card anymore.

As the SDHC driver is an early beta - at least on the Tungsten C - it is still far away from working stable and not availible to the public. For example, it does not recognize the ejecting of a card. Inserting my 2 GB card makes the device freezing. But Dmitry told me that he now has a Tungsten C for testing, so the TC users can soon extend their handheld with 2 GB (and higher) memory cards.

The evil empire led by Tam Hanna the 1st and his slave Johnnis the 5th proudly announce their intentions to celebrate the two biggest mind control cult founders of the 20th century by announcing the immediate availability of two mystery products for Palm OS.

LRon and Sigmund are available from Tamoggemon Customer Care for 9.95$ each. Like with a Rorschach test or an OT level, no information is made available to the public about what the packages actually contain. However, neither of the products has been available for sale before.

Additionally, the evil empire looks for peons willing to betatest its new products. People who use chat protocols like IRC or like typing games are here as requested to contact Tamoggemon Customer Care immediately via (Tamog AT gmx DOT at). As we are not a Russian cult, free licenses are will magically appear in the minds of our testers after the testing process is complete!

As usual, no warranties are given regarding the subconscious effects of the products. Keep an eye on the Claucig-shaped dirt bags, chant “so-ein-schwein” and … aaah, we don’t really care.

In case anyone of you still owns a Palm- or Handspring-made OS3 or OS4 device, this is great news: 2bitsoftware’s QuickBits is now freeware.

QuickBits replaces a bunch of Palm OS functions with ones that work faster. This leads to huge performance gains (especially on color devices like the IIIc and Visor Prism) and significantly faster UI response.

Once again: should anyone of you still use a supported device - this is a must have. Visit the URL below to find out more:
http://www.2bitsoftware.com/QuickBits/default.htm

Google Maps recently got “virtual GPS” capabilities on S60 phones - if no real GPS hardware is available, the program used cell ID information to receive an approximate location.

So far, Palm OS devices were left out because the boys partying under the orange orb chose not to expose the cell tower API for some reason or another(except to Sprint).

However, Palm has now released updates for the AT&T and VeriZon Centros which expose the API to the public - and the Google Mobile team quickly released an updated version:
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-location-in-your-palm.html

P.S. The Sprint Centro currently does not support My Location. A firmware update is said to be upcoming!

Sir Wright from BrightHand took Access’s “Garnet VM” for a trial run: in case anyone of you is new to the term, we are talking about a free Palm OS 5 emulator for Nokia Nxxx web tablets(NOT S60 phones).

The emulator supports WiFi hotsyncing(no bluetooth or USB), and can not access the underlying system’s memory cards. Alarms are not played back unless the emulator is running.

Other than that, the emulator worked pretty well except for a few small quirks - get the full scoop here:
http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=14116

OnBoardC users all over the world will be more than happy to hear that their favorite resource editor has just been updated to version 1.19:

Phillippe Guillot, the maintainer of the product, has informed us about the following changes:

A new version of the on board resource editor BIRD (1.19) is available on http://www.ppcompiler.org/download.php?lng=en
This version fixes some bugs and includes the ability to edit the AppInfo field.

In case anyone of you uses an older version of BIRD(or RsrcEdit), please get this free update immediately!

Resco’s excellent password manager(IDGuard) is scheduled to receive a desktop component in a few weeks of time. It will allow you to access IDGuard databases via your PC.

The screenshots below show the current state of the procedures:

As of now, no information is available about release dates or prices - please stay tuned for further info!

Now that our friend Georgie-Boy has begun mail-bombing our editorial department, it’s time to make him really insane - here goes:

via TreoCentral

P.S. Does anyone know what “What pray tell” means? The person who has the best idea gets a free copy of Resco Explorer - enter your email address when commenting so that we can reach you.

Dmitry Grinberg has launched a BlogSpot-based blog detailing the progress of the development of his SDHC driver for Palm OS.

So far, the program supports T5, TX and LifeDrive devices. Zire 72’s have read-only access, as for Zodiac and T3: no info. Unfortunately, no beta versions are available as of now…

Interested readers can give him a click here:
http://palmsdhc.blogspot.com/

Alan Grassia from FoleoFanatics has received the following image from an insider source(Georgie-Boy will be all over him):

He claims that the updates will be “minor” and will drop later this year…

People who own an extensive library of Palm OS titles but want to switch platforms will find the following bits of news useful:

Access updates Garnet VM for Nokia Nxxx
Access has just overhauled its Garrnet VM for Nokia’s internet tablets - Beta two brings the following improvements and can be downloaded for free from Access’s web site:

New Features:
* Full screen support with 3 display modes: portrait full screen, portrait windowed and portrait landscape
* Display mode hot-switching
* SDL support: Garnet VM display subsystem now uses SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) for better performances

Fixed issues:
Floating point bug fixed (MathLib now is fully supported)

The following applications are now working:
* Google Maps(TM) (crash when accessing network)
* Agendus (application failed to launch)
* MegaBowling (crash when using 5 way navigation)
* MMPlayer (application failed to start)
* Pocket Tunes (various crashes)
* WorldMate (application failed to start)
* CorePlayer (application crashes)
* CredibleMed Easy E&M(TM) (application failed to start)
* ICUmath (application failed to start)
* Parens (and all applications that use the MathLib)

StyleTap coming to iPod touch/iPhone
StyleTap has now confirmed its plans to bring its StyleTap platform to the iPhone - more details are currently not available unfortunately…

Opera Mini 4.1(quick overview of the new features here) has just seen a small update bringing the version of the program up to 4-1-11355:

According to the folks at Opera Mini Blog, the following improvements have been made:

*Palm devices now get better memory handling, which means that they should get more images. This is a hugh improvement over the last build, and hopefully it will be similar to the beta, in the eyes of Palm users.
* A user told us about a bug while adding bookmarks. Most of you have probably not seen it due to the strange reproduction path, but it’s fixed. Thanks to some guy using Yahoo mail in Argentina - you probably know who you are!

Anyways, head over to the download page and get the prc if you feel like it…

LightSpeed has been reviewed on TamsPalm some time ago - it did an excellent job overclocking my Treo 680 back then.

Jonatan Fernstad has now informed me of an update improving the following:

• Performance optimizations in the code that changes the CPU speed. Changing the CPU speed now takes considerably less time!
• User preference added which decides action taken at device wakeup.
• GUI updated for Zire31, Z21 and Z22 devices.
• Minor device specific changes related to icon drawing in the list of applications.

As always, the program is available for approximately 20$ from www.clievideo.com. However, the app currently is on special offer for an undetermined time span - it costs just 15$ atm.

Cutting a long story short: if your Treo is too slow for you, get this program immediately. Speed-ups of up to 100% are possible!

The folks at Opera’s have updated their Opera Mini browser once again. The latest update is said to bring the improvements shown below:

The Opera Mini 4 servers have been upgraded with quite a few improvements. To begin with the servers should now be nicer to phones that are low on available memory. but what we are are especially pleased with the new feed system and hope you will like it too:
* Improved feed (RSS/Atom) viewer to support for bidirectional text and layout. Oh, and it’s faster.
* Fixed bug with select items being wrongly positioned.
* Fixed problem with images in object tags not being rendered correctly.
* Made sure image maps gets rescaled to fit the screen width.
* Fixed problem with page being zoomed in when going to page which is in history.
* Fixed problem with some phones with little memory getting too many images.
* The server now prioritizes sending images at the top of the document if the phone’s too low on memory to display them all.

And for those of you using the 4.1 beta client:
* Downloading of files which require authentication now works (gmail etc).
* Redesigned the file download page.

Please let us know if you feel any changes on your Treo!