Click to see the the full 640 by 480 image.
Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Martin, possibly in a scheme to achieve total control over my life and, eventually, the world, made use of his massive contcact networ and told me of a Palm offer I couldn't refuse.
So of course I didn't. And here I am, happy Palm owner again, curious to see what had changed. Basically not too many things had changed, but I've found a couple of things I don't like, the odd thing I liked better in the days of old, and that I still love to have a PDA with me wherever I go. I've lived without one ever since my old Palm IIIe's screen (or something connecting it to the mainboard, or whatever) gave up on me a few years ago, but it hasn't been hard at all to get back into the swing of things.
One thing that has changed a bit since last time is the text entry. It's still called Graffiti, but where there used to be no number at all there's now a suspicious 2 hanging around. If my memory serves me Palm lost a lawsuit and couldn't keep on using their old Graffiti. So, they licensed another writing system called Jot, tucked on that 2 and went on with their lives. I can imagine Jot/Graffiti 2 being designed to come as close to what they wanted without violating that patent agian, because it feels like it's in just the same direction as the old Graffiti, only not going all the way. More charactes require several strokes, t and i most notably, and while it's a bit easier to write some semi-rare characters it doesn't feel like they would have made the trade-off if they'd had a choice. I also feel like I make more mistakes than I used to, but of course I'm not anywhere near the amount of writing I did on the old Palm yet.
It turns out you can actually revert to the old kind of Graffiti if you can get the data files from an older Palm and overwrite the ones on the Zire. Very cool, and quite tempting to me, but it still feels like a little too much and too low-level trouble. What if the magic smoke somehow leaks out? Still, such a simple operation ... I might just try it some day.
The Zire, being a gadget of the modern age, takes photos.
Click to see the the full 640 by 480 image.
Nowhere near proper-camera levels of course, but the step up from my mobile is pretty significant and what counts for me. A slightly better camera for extremely random snaps built into something I enjoy carrying everywhere is always welcome.
The Zire also has a nice and bright (I have it at minimum brightness and wish I could turn it down more when I'm in a dark room) colour screen, a rechargable non-user-replacable battery and connects to computers by USB.
The Good
I always synchronised my old Palm with my PC (big surprise, it was my main and only computer), so when I got the Zire I already had Palm Desktop and some other things installed. I thought it'd be good to get a fresh start though, I didn't really expect any of the old stuff to be usable anyway (outdated contacts and calendars don't feel all that important). So I uninstalled the old Palm Desktop, installed the new one in a different directory on a different hard drive, connected and synchronised.
Done. And somehow, the clever imps inside found all my old data and applications and installed them. Most shocking of all, most of the applications actually still work too.
The ... Less Good
In all, syncing with Pomum and the Palm doesn't feel as smooth as I imagine it could be. iSync, which I like because it's worked great at keeping my phone and iPod synchronized with iCal and the Address Book, doesn't support Palm PDAs in themselves. You needed to download a conduit that launches iSync from Hotsync. Then you press the sync button on your Palm's cradle, which launches Hotsync, which in turn launches iSync as part of its own synchronisation process. Also, categories from the Palm don't carry over into iCal and Palm Desktop, which is where Hotsync puts most of the data (except photos, which are just dropped in a folder, no viewer app included), isn't anything I want to use more than absolutely necessary. And the syncing takes quite a while too. I would like to just run iSync and have everything go to all places I want it in one smooth and quick operation, it has the potential and I don't want to drop it. Maybe I can tweak things a bit to get closer, but right now it feels a lot rougher than it should have to be, and just Hotsyncing is a lot faster. My phone could very well be part of the problem, but it shouldn't be illegal to want to keep it in sync with the Palm and the computer and expect it all to work. Right now it looks like iSync feels it's required to pass all events from all units around on each syncronisation. Perhaps the phone can't keep up with the amount of events. I don't know, but I'll look into it. It also might work better in Tiger, because Apple's download page states the conduit isn't necessary if you use the iSync version included in Tiger.
There's definitely something really fishy going on here. Last time there were around 3000 events, now it's passing 5200 of them around ... Bad, bad feeling ...
Nothing seems terribly out of whack, but I have no idea where all those events came from or where they went, and I don't think iSync, the Palm and the phone are going to get to talk to eachother all at once until I've read up more about all this.
11/10 2005
This isn't much of an update I guess, but I still keep to synching my Palm with Palm Desktop and nothing else.
To begin with I wasn't at all certain I was going to need a memory card. But then it turned out HotSync flat out refuses to copy most types of files to internal memory. Suddenly there was no choice, if I ever wanted to try listening to an mp3 or open a pdf I would need a new memory card (I've got compact flash for my camera, so of course the Palm wants MMC/SD). No sooner said than done, I ordered myself one MMC, waited about a month for it to be delivered and now face the pleasant problem of filling up 512 "one-megabyte-equals-one-million-bytes,-actual-formatted-capacity-less"-megabytes of space.
First stop: ScummVM!
After all, all devices are made better by running Monkey Island 1 and/or 2.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck yet. I've only tried Monkey Island 2 so far, but it's been crash- and lock-prone enough that I have yet to get to any actual gameplay. And it's hard lockups too, requiring a hard reset to get things going again. On all other crashes I have encountered on the Zire the device has reset itself after a few seconds, but not these ones. But I keep my hopes up for future versions of Scumm VM for PalmOS!
Second stop: music!
Pretty obvious this one. I installed the bundled Real Player (can't be impossible to find a free mp3 player for PalmOS, but I haven't succeeded yet) and dropped a few mp3 files to HotSync. No problems at all, and Real Player supports playing in the background, so you can do other things when listening. Nice. So the day my iPod's battery slips into sub-30-minute charge territories I can still squeak by a while before breaking down and buying a nano.
At least if I get an mmc reader device, preferably with FireWire. I definitely want more access and editing freedom than HotSync gives me.
And faster file transfer never hurt ...