Linkstew

Last night I played with my housemate's shiny new Palm Tungsten T3, and I was damn impressed. Now remember, the last Palm I've really played with was my dusty Palm Vx running Palm OS 3.5, so color and widescreen and bluetooth and Palm OS 5.2 and more was kind of a lot of enhancements thrown at me all at once, so it might not be as impressive to someone who's been actively following PDAs as it was to me.

I had some trouble getting used to the new graffiti input, and the ability to write on the screen took a little bit of getting used to, but once I get the general hang of things I was tapping around just like it was the same old Palm OS I knew and loved. The screen was beautiful and bright and the increased resolution made everything look a lot sharper. But the core features of the device aren't what I'm so much interested in talking about: What made me grin like a schoolboy were the connectivity features.

The T3 has bluetooth built in, and I was able to make the T3 use my my Nokia 3650 as a bluetooth modem and check my mail via IMAPS relatively trivially. Admittedly, my laptop should be able to use my phone as a bluetooth modem -- I just haven't tried it yet. I was able to effortlessly send a picture from my phone to the T3, and from the T3 to my laptop. I was able to make the T3 dial my phone. And I didn't play with it, but I'm sure iSync would do a bang-up job of integrating the T3 into my .mac systems (it'd be extra cool if it synced my safari bookmarks, but I doubt it does that... yet). Regardless, the connectivity was damn cool.

But there's still one thing that the T3 is missing that makes me want to hold out for another revision: Wifi. Sure, bluetooth + my phone can get me a net connection, but more often than not I'm somewhere with Wifi, and I'd like to be able to just get my Palm directly online with Wifi rather than resorting to bridging with a bluetooth modem. Sure, there's this Wifi SD card that's supposed to have Palm OS support later this year, and there's also this upcoming Wifi/memory SD combo card which would kill two birds with one stone, but I really don't want to have to carry around a separate card for Wifi that I'd probably just lose. I'd really like to see the Wifi integrated, and with the T3's introduction of the Palm OS toolbar, it'd be pretty trivial to put a Wifi on/off switch in there right next to the Bluetooth switch.

And then there are things missing from the connectivity puzzle: What I really want is an iPod with bluetooth, so I could use other devices as a remote control for my iPod, and so my other devices could be notified of the song currently playing on my iPod. It'd also be cool to have a Digital Camera with bluetooth, so I could transfer pictures to my other devices wirelessly (though with the ginormous resolutions that dcams can capture these days, that might not be practical), or use another device as a remote for my camera.

So if you're currently looking for a PDA, I'd definitly start by looking at a T3. Besides the lack of Wifi, the only other flaw I noticed was that an hour or so of playing with the bluetooth features drained the battery by about half.

Good idea: Downloading the Palm Desktop 4.0 beta for OS X to start synchronizing my Palm to help organize my life.

Bad idea: Attempting to synchronize my 8 MB Palm Vx via iRDA to my PowerBook, an operation which took more than an hour to complete.

Uh, anyway, hopefully now that that initial synch is out of the way, it will be quicker in practice... If not, my Palm will continue to be not overly useful in my quest to get organized. =\

Do you miss that fantastically shiny finish your iPod had when you first removed it from it's little cube shaped box? Sure, you could mess with trying to keep ahold of that little guy while trying to use some sort of cleaner to clean it. But a simpler tactic is to simply take a piece of scotch tape and put it down and then peel it back up. Repeat for the rest of the iPod. Keep ahold of one end, of course, so that you don't have to mess with picking at corners.

The same tactic works pretty well for cleaning a Palm (Visor, whatever) screen, as well.

Yesterday Dale Earnhardt Sr died. I found out while sitting on my couch watching TV -- not because the TV said something, but because I was browsing on my laptop. Wirelessly. Which made me realize that this is the second famous person in the last year I\'ve found out has died while I was using wireless internet.

I found out about the death Charles Schulz a year and a week before I found out about Dale Earnhardt.

I had just got my OmniSky modem, and was playing with it while riding a campus shuttle. I was having a good old time, when I decided to read the news, only to discover that Charles Schulz had died, before his final strip ran. I quietly put my wireless palm pilot away and sat in silence for the rest of the trip.

I've been using OmniSky since February are so, and here are a random smattering of thoughts on it.

Wireless net is cool. It's especially cool when I'm on a train for six hours and don't have anything to do but wireless net.

It REALLY sucks the battery on my Palm (thus the title of this post). I have to regularly recharge my palm, lest it die. After using it on the train as mentioned, I have to recharge. Using it that long really kills the Palm -- in fact, the modem's battery lasts longer than the Palm's battery does. Bleargh.

And finally, the coverage is annoying. To get any signal at all, I have to be outside or close very close to outside. If I'm in the core of Dwinelle Hall or something, it just won't work. It works pretty well on the train, though. Further, if someone using a cell phone gets near me (which happens a lot in Berkeley), I lose my connection. I also find it irritating that last semester, Dwinelle was the only building it didn't work in, and this semester, Dwinelle is the only building it does work in. Sheesh. And of course, the only reason for it working in Dwinelle is because I'm at the corner of the building and I sit by the window. It doesn't work on the other side of the classroom.

This page hits home for me, considering my poor Palm III died in the most horrible of ways... So go check out one way of keeping your Palm from hitting the ground unless your palm does.

In Anthropology 3 today, Professor Brandes was talking about Folk tales, and in particular, he mentioned The Grimm Brothers collecting their tales back in the day. I got home later that day, and checked out Palm Infocenter, and saw this article, which says that the Grimm Brothers Collection is available from PalmaServ.

The Palm IIIc came out the other day, and it's plenty cool enough... I would have been content without color, but now SimCity is out in full color, and I'm envious. However, I really like the V enclosure, and I've commited to it with several V peripherals, and won't go color until I can get a Palm Vc with 8 megs of RAM.

So I finally saw a Visor. My initial impression is simply this: "Damn that thing's huge!"

Compared to my Palm V, even in the Hard-case, the Visor is a very big device. When I pull my Palm V from it's protective sheath, the Visor dwarfs the V. The Visor is at least twice as thick as the Palm V, and a good half an inch taller. While the Visor is also heavier than the Palm V, at least it's light for it's size.

I don't doubt that it's an effective tool, but I think I've been really spoiled by the size of the Palm V. After using the Palm V for a month or so now, I think I'd go nuts if I went back to a Palm III... I suspect that I would still manage with a Visor, but the size was... impressive.

The Palm V is very excellent. It's a pity I couldn't afford the Vx, because it's amazing how little 2megs of RAM is when you start adding a lot of software. Luckily there's this amazing app called FlashPro from TRG that allows me to store things in the Flash Memory of my Palm, giving me access to about 650k beyond the 2 megs. It's a program DEFINITELY worth buying if your Palm supports it. (Yes, I know the page advertises 800k+ that will be reclaimed, but I think PalmOS 3.3 is bigger than 3.1 was, limiting how much Flash is free)

The size of the Palm V is beautiful, I love the metal case, and the re-chargeable battery is the best thing. And while I've heard a lot of people complain about the inverse backlight on the V, I actually like it a lot better than the backlight on the older models. It just seems to work better, and it's not nearly as bright, drawing less attention to it.

The hardcase is also very very nice. It'll keep my Palm snuggly protected, and it's much better than the flimsy cover that comes with the Palm V by default. It's also better than the cover of the III series, etc. There are two flaws, though. The first is that it can only go in one way, even though the Palm V should be able to support going in both ways. I didn't explain that very well, but I'm not sure that I can do better. The point is, if you're left handed, this case is going to be difficult for you to deal with. The second issue is that in order to put the Palm V in the cradle, you either have to remove the case, or open the case flat, put the Palm V perpendicular to the case, and then hang the case over the edge of the table while the Palm V sits in the cradle, which is kind of precarious. However, it's definitely, as advertised, a hard case, which is exactly why I bought it. Get it if you want to protect your Palm, because the standard cover just won't cut it.

So I had to cope for over a week without a Pilot, and I went totally nuts during that time. I had no idea what time it was, I had no where to keep track of my assignments, and I was generally lost. It was unpleseant.

But all of that is over now, as Thursday I got my Palm V.

I got my Palm V on Thursday. It's Shiny, it's new to me, and I like it. My only complaint is that it took Value America a week and a day to get the thing to me. And they sent it in a huge box.

But asside from that, I've got my Palm V, and I like it a lot. I downloaded most of the programs that I used to have on my Palm III, and I bought a couple of super useful programs that I'd been admiring, including a vastly improved DateBook and a program which gives me access to a significant amount of Flash Memory. Very worth the few bucks they cost.