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SDK available here:

http://gl.access-company.com/p...

Perhaps next time you will read the acquisition history for the software you are trying to find in the Wikipedia article, and then go to the OpenSource/Downloads section of the company website for the current owner of the technology yourself?

Thanks for the feedback. I'm in no rush to use either of these since I have a device with a physical keyboard and they totally neglect thumb typing in all of the scenarios discussed. As far as the size, it doesn't look like it takes up much more room than the regular software keyboard, so I don't see that as a uniquely serious drawback.

The first link in the original post is to the product home page. It does seem to be the same thing you're referring to. There are also videos on that page that look fairly compelling. Their FAQ makes it seem like they do plan to add customization at some point.

Something that can be operated with one hand using the thumb would be ideal. There were also some interesting motion input strategies back when Palm was de rigueur, but they were all proprietary and expensive and went nowhere at the time.

Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.

Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.

Not to mention that the N900 has a PalmOS Garnet emulator available, so you might still be able to run some of your other legacy palm apps:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/index.html

I myself recently made the move from a Palm TX to an Android phone (purely because I'm a Google Maps Mobile addict), but still find myself carrying the Palm TX around for a lot of legacy apps that I haven't been able to find "modern" equivalents for...

• DB
• Progect (haven't found a better user-sortable outlining / project tracking tool anywhere else, even on PCs)
• Cryptopad / KeyRing (though I guess I should try to migrate to the KeePass compatible thing eventually)
• DiddleBug (haven't found any decent drawing apps for Android period, much less ones targeted for free-form note-taking)
• HandyShopper (very useful for recurring lists, birthday party invitation lists, it even does a great job tallying my monthly budget!)
• HappyDays (anniversary reminder linked to "birthday" field in address book, curiously good for popping up reminders for annual maintenance)
• PIM entry is still much more streamlined than in Android 2.2 (too many submenus)
• HP48GX emulator (some Android scientific / graphic calcs are close, but not really feature complete yet)
• Plucker (still looking for some sort of automated web scraper for Android that allows offline viewing... I know Dolphin browser can sort of save individual pages, but it would be nice to carry complete sites around... Waiting for FBReaderJ to support the plkr format someday.)

Anyway, I too am quite interested in where all the hardcore Palm users have migrated to (evidently it wasn't WebOS, if only for the lack of SD storage :P )

BeOS was sold when Palm spun off PalmSource, which is now owned by Access http://www.access-company.com/

AFAIK ACCESS Co. Ltd. own the BeOS intellectual property.

As referenced in this Haiku news posting.

PalmOS is still alive and well, although it has been sold by Palm to another company and renamed Garnet. See http://www.access-company.com/products/accesspowered/handhelds.html for a list of current devices with this OS.

Uhmm... Palm did buy BeOs and did merge it into their os. See!

I have an (admittedly older) Blackberry for work, and still find myself doing all the interesting things on my aging PalmTX.

The only things I use the Blackberry for, in order:

* Google Maps : Verizon disabled my built-in GPS, but I can highly recommend the i-Blue 820 bluetooth receiver / datalogger.

* E-mail : the only reason Blackberry is popular in the first place

* G-mail / Yahoo : limited and slow, but functional interfaces to your email accounts as well as some light news and flickr

* Opera Mini : For accessing heavy websites that the internal browser chokes on.

* MidpSSH as you mention. It really is a decent client as in it's not too impossible to display decent ansi using screen, and send all the weird keystrokes you might need.
http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/

* Tethering (use the Blackberry as a wireless modem for your laptop) : I think they've really tried to stop people from using this, though. I think I have one of the last models / plans that allow this, and it works awesome.

Aside from those basic and indispensable functions, I really kinda hate my blackberry, and use my Palm TX for all of my personal work and entertainment.

My essential Palm TX apps:

* Plucker : I use Sunrise to pull a compressed copy of all my favorite websites that I frequent or e-books so I can read them on the subway or wherever. It's much, much faster than using a browser and supports pictures and everything.

* TCPMP : plays mp3s, ogg, and fullscreen videos in various with minimal transcoding woes. I use a 4GB SD card for my library. By no means an iPod replacement in terms of quality or UI, but it gets the job done well enough for me with minimal hassle.

* PIM : syncs with JPilot on Linux, haven't really seen anything else that I can use with my Linux box. I use goosync to publish stuff to my google calendar as well.

* Keyring / CryptoPad : for encrypted info

* Office Documents, PalmPDF : actually allows me to do light office file editing and relatively featureful spreadsheets, my blackberry only lets me view email attachments and it does a piss-poor job formatting that makes it next to useless.

* tejpWriter : with a portable keyboard, you can get some serious typing done with this text editor.

* Progect / HandyShopper / HappyDays / etc. : great little productivity tools that are extremely well designed and I haven't even found usable equivalents for on full-blown desktop systems.

* OperaMini : Also for accessing heavy websites the internal browser chokes on.

* pssh / PalmVNC : Quite usable. Haven't had much luck controlling VNC through my Blackberry.

* Games : Popcap has a lot of very interesting games ported. Also lots of great freeware / OSS diversions.

Anyway, too bad Palm seems to have really flubbed the future of their platform. Right now if I had to replace my TX, I'd probably get a Nokia N810 which seems to have a good PalmOS emulation layer:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/

Other than for Google Maps, my Blackberry has strictly been relegated to a device that tethers me to work in a limited fashion.

You're looking for a PDA. Too bad no one really makes them anymore. The creators behind the Palm Pilot expressly designed the thing to compete with a pen-and-paper rather than the other digital organizers that were available at the time.

I have a work-provided blackberry, but I still find myself doing everything (except for checking email or using google maps) on my Palm TX.

I use tejpwriter to edit documents on SD cards, it's one of the few things that can grapple with large documents. With an portable IR or bluetooth keyboard you can actually do some serious editing with it, then sync up with your real computer later.

Also useful utilities such as PalmPDF allow me to proofread and refer to finished documents and presentations for research / rehearsals. All my other information comes in through SunRise + Plucker. It also comes with a stripped-down rudimentary MS-Office compatible Documents thingy, but I haven't found it very useful beyond the spreadsheet application.

For very quick notes I just use the "notes" scribblepad thing, and then transcribe it into the correct application later.

I wish they succeeded in porting Palm OS to Linux. Supposedly the Nokia N810 tablet has a working Palm Garnet VM that reportedly works pretty well.
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Seems like the best option so far for a "modern" PDA, though it wasn't expressly designed as one.

I hate to pop the Anglocentric bubble, but Access Netfront and Picsel Browser have the Far East and Asian markets (carrier and OEMs) stitched up between them. North America and Europe are already fairly small markets in comparison, and the segment of users who can and will install a 3rd party browser is pretty much you, me, and Bob over there.

If they're reference books, the text may be proprietary but the knowledge in them is not, and can be retrieved from numerous free sources.

This is not the case for medical references. I would have to be insane to rely on Wikipedia at work. Fortunately, the beta of the Garnet VM for the Nokia internet tablets looks promising. If the release version can run all the Palm software I need, I can ditch my old PDA entirely. (Or Palm could release some decent hardware for the first time in years, you never know...)

The diagram looks like the one of the Access Linux Platform

http://www.access-company.com/PDF/ALP2007_08.pdf

It looks nice. I think the operators will like it. An open platform, cheap, with standardized tools. And Google has potential for big bandwith consumption: search, maps, video, desktop...

iPhone owners share the dubious distinction of owning a computer they aren't legally allowed to program.

Where in any contract agreed to by iPhone users does it state that you're not legally allowed to write software for it? ("Write software for it" is different from "unlock it" - and I don't even know whether that is forbidden; the DMCA explicitly exempts phone unlocking (see PDF pages 1, 5, and 6).

With the advent of cellphones, especially locked ones, we are seeing a new trend in computers. Rather than expanding the functionality of computers, they seek to limit it, in order to serve the greed of Corporate America. A device which formerly could be repurposed for any task the owner thought fit is now restricted to performing only the functions which make the manufacturer money. Consumer benefit beyond the original purpose of the device is explicitly and legally forbidden.

"Locked" in what sense? I suspect most cellphones sold in the US are locked to the carrier they were sold to work with, but there are SDKs for Symbian, Windows Mobile, and what I assume is the successor to the Palm OS. "Locked to a carrier" is not the same as "locked shut so that you can't run third-party apps"; even the iPhone has third-party apps, Apple's lack of assistance to developers of them nonwithstanding.

*i am laughing at you*

http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis.jsp
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=83A52AF2-F524-4EC5-9155-717CBE5D25ED&displa ylang=en
http://www.access-company.com/developers/downloads /palmostools.html

You say a couple small apps you wrote, so you must be familiar with an SDK. Where have you seen that code you write on one SDK won't work in ANOTHER COUNTRY! Where did you the the PalmOS and Windows Mobile and J2ME came from?

Embedded Visual C++ 4.0 is free. It works with the Windows Mobile 5 SDK. Knock yourself out.

But don't stop there.

Series 60
Palm OS (Treo SDK)
BlackBerry

One key concept that made it work was that the Pilot wasn't really supposed to be a computer in its own right, it was supposed to be an extension, a "tentacle" of your desktop that let you carry data from it elsewhere. Nowadays things are small and powerful enough that you could almost make a handheld your primary computer, but that sure didn't make sense then, and still doesn't quite make sense now. See here.

The Palm OS is develped and Mainatinted by PalmSource, now known as ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc., is a subsidiary of ACCESS .

They are developing a new version of Palm based on Linux-
http://www.access-company.com/about/opensource/ind ex.html

My guess is that Palm Inc isnt changing OS vendors, they are just moving in the direction that ACCESS is moving- To Linux, and that Palm Inc will continue to use ACCESS as the OS development company- I dont think Palm Inc is going out on there own.

http://www.access-company.com/about/opensource/dow nload.html

http://www.access-company.com/about/opensource/ind ex.html

"We believe that everyone, partners and competitors alike, would benefit from the specification or development of a standard basic Linux platform for mobile phones. With an open and available platform, companies would be able to focus on their main areas of differentiation, develop phones cheaper, and get phones into the markets much faster."

"Q. Does this mean ALP will be open sourced?
A. We expect that we'll be contributing some of our technologies to the open source community as a part of this change. The user-visible parts of ALP (user interface, PIM applications, etc) and the Palm OS middleware will be a separate software layer on top of Linux, and will not be open sourced."

Where do you see that Sony owns ACCESS, which makes Netfront? I see that Access is listed on the Tokyo Exchange and Sony is listed as a customer on their investors site, but I don't see anything that lists their ownership of Netfront.