TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Yours truly has recently switched to a MSI Wind U100 due to its excellent portability. The machine is powered by an oddball CPU from Intel called Atom, and has satisfied me so far. Benchmarks and an unboxing will hit TamsPalm shortly.

Until then, feel free to take a look at the SysOpt.com article linked below. It looks at what’s inside an Atom processor, and provides an overview of the available configurations/models.

Get the full scoop here:
http://www.sysopt.com/features/cpu/article.php/3765986

The folks at Engadget’s have taken a stab at Palm last year, citing various issues inside the company. Back then, Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan responded and promised improvements. One year has since passed, and the parting chief editor of the site now took the time to sum up.

Amusingly, Ryan Block agrees with my verdict on the Palm Centro (Palm Centro review), and considers the keyboard and the screen way too small.

Palm OS II aka NoVa has also been a topic - the lack of progress has made the Engadget team recommend Palm to give up its OS exclusivity and start building Android devices(!!!)…

In the end, Ryan doesn’t feel too well about the future of the company. Even though the Centro currently sells very well, he feels that the gains will be “short-term” => the long-time strategy and Ed Colligan’s way of handling the media hasn’t improved too much.

Get the full scoop here:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/22/engadget-cares-the-state-of-palm-checking-in-a-year-later/

Just in case anyone of you ever asked himself what Exchange is all about and how it feels: you can now experience it first-hand!

Microsoft currently offers “trial” accounts that work for five days a pop and can be used with a mobile device of your choice - click the link below to start using Exchange!

https://signmeup.exchange2007demo.com/exchange2007demo/

ATTENTION: the accounts are automatically deleted after 5 days. Do NOT use them in a production environment…and be sure not to fuxate the data on your device by synchronizing it with the account!

The folks at BrightHand’s have managed to somehow generate stats that show which devices stir up the most “user activity” - their results are posted once a month and usually provide pretty interesting reading.

When looking at the chart, we see Apple, Windows Mobile and PalmOS powered devices and a dumbphone. the Palm TX managed to get back into the list, while the HTC Mogul, Nokia N96 and the ipaq 110 flew out:

Here’s the exact ranking:

1. HTC Touch Diamond
2. iPhone 3G
3. HTC Touch
4. ipaq 210
5. HTC Touch Pro
6. Samsung Instinct
7. Xperia X1
8. Palm Centro
9. iPod touch
10. Palm TX

In case you feel like comparing it to last month’s mind share rankings - please use this link!

Finally, the TamsPalm team managed to relaunch PalmWiki, our Palm OS information database. A Wiki enables every visitor to edit pages, so the whole Palm community can help creating this database.

About two years ago, when TamsPalm moved to another server, the Wiki database and all backups were lost. Luckily, Google’s Cache and Archive.org had some of the old pages still availible. But as this sites only have HTML code which needs to be converted to MediaWiki code, the import of old data needs some time. But some pages (main page, software, hardware, …) are already present and the Wiki is ready to be used again.

The new URL is:

http://palmwiki.tamoggemon.com/en

The Palm OS economy is (/was) a beautiful place. Prospective owners of an electric blue Centro can now feast their eyes on our stock images AND a real-life, hands-on gallery over at the PalmInfoCenter.

Ryan seems to really like the new paint job - he describes it to be:

… very vibrant and really “pops” in person. This color also has a subtle sparkle finish to it when viewed up close. It’s not overwhelmingly sparkly and it makes for a nice effect. The casing is the usual solid plastic. As a nice touch, the included stylus also matches the sapphire motif.

The folks at BrightHand’s have managed to somehow generate stats that show which devices stir up the most “user activity” - their results are posted once a month and usually provide pretty interesting reading.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, here’s an overview of the “Mindshare” distribution. Palm and S60 get one device into the top list, Apple manages to squeeze in two, and PocketPC’s take up the remaining six boxen. Windows Mobile Smartphones are not represented this month:

Here is a list of the devices:

1. HTC Touch Diamond
2. Apple iPhone 3G
3. HTC Touch
4. ipaq 210
5. Nokia N96
6. Palm Centro
7. HTC Mogul
8. Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
9. ipaq 110
10. iPod touch

What do you think?

At a store of the German phone provider “Telekom” I could test the iPhone’s Safari browser today and was surprised about it . So I shoot a photo of it displaying TamsPalm.

I already knew that the iPhone’s browser must be very good. Safari is Apple’s standard desktop web browser (and based on WebKit/KHTML/Konqueror). Palm users still have no similar browsers for their PDAs and phones (although PicselBrowser displays this site in a similar way). But this could change in 2008 as Donald Kirker announces the next version of Universe, his Palm browser. Even his old beta versions, which use his own engine, were popular. The new version will have a new UI and also use the WebKit engine.

Well today when I was checking my Gmail account, I happen to notice Gmail’s storage is now over 5 Gigabytes.

I’m so glad Google gives this much storage, because at the rate I’m using it, I need it

On the gmail login page there is a news bit entitled “New! IMAP Access!”

While this has been in the pipes for a while (a few slashdot articles show a few users getting beta testing of it) the news article states that “We’re rolling it out to everyone over the next few days”.

Will you enable GMail’s IMAP access?

Ron Fernandez has posted a very interesting whitepaper to his personal web site. Cutting a long story short, Ron covers the “design history” of the Palm Zire 71’s camera application and its controls. He looks at what Palm originally wanted to do and what happened in reality, giving good insight into Palm SG’s hardware design process.

Ron made it to a conference in Vienna…and the publisher charges $$$ for the whitepaper. However, Ron has it available for free on his web site - enjoy!

P.s. Thanks to the palm-dev-forum posters who informed me about the existence of this document!

The Palm Linux boys from HackNDev have played Whac-a-mole with our very own Alexander Gratz recently. Their page is up, down, up, down, staying down for maintenance…and now the page has risen from the dead with the following announcement:

Bringing H&D website up
Submitted by Farcaller on 29 September, 2007 - 11:25.

Unfortunately old hnd website is unrestorable in the accepted time period. That’s why I’ve decided to reinstall Drupal from scratch (we had to update it anyway). Sorry for making you register again but user table format has changed to the point where I can’t port it

If you find any bug or mistake on this site, please email me directly (farcaller at gmail).

I wish them well and hope that the new installation proves itself stable. If not, changing CMS to WordPress could maybe be an useful idea…

This is what the admin of Hackndev posted in his forum:

I’ve been rethinking H&D again last time. Our gallery is dead and forums are being attacked by spambots every often. Either we do something or we don’t (and this means we don’t care about H&D future anymore).

We have several ways to go from here.
CMH. Seems that it will be on site when it’s done, but I bet we will be playing Duke Nukem Forever earlier..
New Drupal. Same thing as we have now, but somewhat better. Bad point is that hnd would be reinstalled from scratch due to DB incompatibilities (this one would be moved to old.hackndev.com). We start from a clean&shiny drupal.. then it would be not so clean and not so shiny but anyways..
Forum-based solution. We move H&D to some forum engine and base everything around it (I still think that forums are main part of H&D). Personally I know only one forum that is good enough - IPB. Bad point - it’s commercial piece of software.
other?.. Haven’t got any more ideas now. What do you all think?

To see other comments of his post or join the discussion, go here:
http://hackndev.com/node/912

Some readers have reported that Hackndev.com, the #1 site for Linux on Palm, is currently offline. The Hackndev developers in the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net; #hackndev) told me that they are working at the server and that Hackndev.com will be online again in the next few days.