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I dunno, there were a lot of great apps for PalmOS that still don't have decent replacements in the Android / iOS world. Troll around http://www.freewarepalm.com/ and other ancient "best PalmOS apps" lists for ideas.

It doesn't have to be a Visor, either. Any full-size Palm after the III will have a serial port on the bottom and enough memory and power to run your typing tutor app.

It doesn't have to be a Visor, but the Visor is a good choice: 16 MHz clock rate, quite good for PalmOS; at least a couple of megabytes of RAM; and a few years newer than the oldest Palm PDAs.

Even the earliest Palm PDAs had a serial port on the bottom. Later Palms had a newer connector that included both USB and serial. Still later Palms had USB-only. All Visors had the same connector on the bottom and would work with the keyboard.

(When the very first Palm Pilot PDAs came out, people were using them with an Apple Newton accessory keyboard, using an adapter that mated the Newton connector to the serial port on a Palm sync cable!)

Newer Palm PDAs could work also, perhaps with Bluetooth keyboards; but they have internal batteries only, so you can't keep them going just by swapping AAA cells, and Bluetooth keyboards will cost more. The Handspring Visor solution is really quite inexpensive and should be a good solution to the problem.

P.S. I said in my first comment that I don't know if there is a typing tutor program for PalmOS. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker, though. I personally learned to type on a manual typewriter with no typing tutor computer program. It's very possible to learn typing as long as you have a keyboard to type on. (It's probably possible to learn typing just by pretending to have a keyboard, but having feedback when you are making mistakes is a huge help.)

But anyway I just spent some time with Google and found one typing tutor program for PalmOS. I haven't tested this so I have no idea if it is any good. There could also be others out there.

http://www.freewarepalm.com/educational/texttutor.shtml

steveha

The old PalmOS has by far the most "apps" and they don't have to be approved by anyone:

http://www.freewarepalm.com/
http://www.handango.com/
http://www.pocketgear.com/
http://www.mobihand.com/
http://www.pdastreet.com/
and also: http://sf.net/

I never understand why everyone is so amazed by the iPhone's "Apps". Handheld apps have been around for over 10 years.

It does encrypt the passwords with a master password and having them on a PDA/phone is much more convenient than a file/application on a laptop.

You should check again, specifically for the "thriving" part.

commercial software: Handago Smartphone.net
free software: FreewarePPC Freeware Palm

There are thousands of third-party downloadable applications for PPCs, Smartphones, Palm OS devices, Series 60 devices, etc., etc. Anyone can download an SDK and make their own apps with access to a suite of communication, sound, storage, and animation APIs.
Number of third-party downloadable applications for the iPhone that aren't web applications: zero.

Phone apps look like 1992's ass.

Most phone application developers do not consider "look pretty" a huge priority.

Usually the phones are crippled in some way, so that is not true.

What the fuck are you talking about? My Samsung Blackjack runs any application I throw at it. The default WM Smartphone configuration only runs signed programs: to fix this problem you can either add your own certificate (a matter of going to a URL with the certificate and answering Yes to a few promprts) or plugging in the device and running a program that disables all application locks.
Pocket PC and Palm OS devices do not have signature requirements that I'm aware of.

The iPhone does not have the ability to run arbitrary programs natively at all. Just web apps.

Can I run a real Web browser? No.

Series 60 phones often ship with Opera. Opera & a port of Mozilla called Minimo is available for Windows Mobile.

The phones you're talking about are pocket calculators with phones in them

Every smartphone I have ever used has used some sort of ARM CPU, recent ones often around 400MHz. Compare this to the 620MHz iPhone ARM CPU (WebKit needs all that power to render HTML...)

The iPhone is an iPod with a phone AND a Web 2.0 browser in it. People really like it.

I'm sure people really like it if they want to use Web 2.0 applications and listen to music. But what if they want to do something that isn't possible with the included software and isn't implementable in the iPhone's JavaScript environment?
Last I checked, there were no APIs acessible from JavaScript on the iPhone that allowed access to just about anything. No Bluetooth (so no GPS), no sound, no fancy graphics, no file access -- nothing interesting.

There are other phones that play music and do a better job of surfing the internet for cheaper: often cheap enough that you could still buy an iPod nano if you wanted.

The apps that regular people run are MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, and they want to run the whole app, not just see some snippets of text out of each page with no formatting. So for most users the iPhone is a better application platform than other phones.

Those applications run just as well on other mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile, for those who like to use the full version. Have you not used mobile applications recently? WEP is dead and pages are now written with XHTML. In fact, with stylesheets, the same HTML can be designed for mobile and normal-sized devices.... and even after the iPhone's widely touted support for full-sized webpages, there are lots of people talking about how they can adapt their app to use the iPhone. Hmm....

For those who don't have the luxury of being in an iPhone-friendly wifi environment, not loading advertisements and (relatively) high-res GUI elements and logos can shave a noticeable amount of time off the loading time: on my 3G device, PayPal's mobile site takes 2 seconds to load. The full site takes almost 10 and uses 122k.

Without downloadable app support, you can't download games for your phone -- you're stuck with web apps. A

Given that PDAs are falling behind in the face of smart phones, going to Linux might just entice the linux haXX0r community to produce some fun applications that help Palm in the marketplace.

Actually, there's been plenty of developer attention paid to Palms already. Thanks to the head start, I think it still has more apps available for it than Windows handhelds. This despite the fact that developing for PalmOS is at best quirky and at worst painful.

But Palm is pretty much in the smartphone business already. All their development these days has been going into the Treo line. This move will be to bring Linux to their smartphone line. And that's going to make developing for Palms much easier, and make a large number of Linux apps available for Palms. Sweet...

Have you tried using Resco Locker to secure SilkScreen? Otherwise, check out Grafiti Anywhere for that feature. I've never had a crash with it. ShortCut5 adds a prefs panel that will let you add or modify shortcuts, and trigger them with a period instead of the original odd character.

To make a custom rom, you'll need Grack's Rom Tool. At one point you could simply download a custom rom, but PalmOne asked Shadowmite to take them down and he did. You'll have to use the tool to extract your rom, modify it, and reload it on the phone. Use this list (danger: pdf) to determine what you can and want to delete. I got rid of everything I don't use, from the tutorial to VersaMail. I added a small handful of programs I can't live without, like pFuel, CMDBar, CMDWay, DA Launcher, and SharkNav. Some apps won't work from the ROM, and cause a soft-reset loop; check against this list and above all, don't panic. I'm told it's next to impossible to brick a Treo 650 with this tool, although the old method was very dangerous, and I haven't had it happen with either. If you install an app that doesn't like running from ROM, you can warm-reset with up+reset pin and flash an updated rom. If you try apps that aren't on the list, this may take some considerable trial and error. Make careful lists of everything you change in case you need them.

You can add as much as you delete and a little more, but the smaller you keep the ROM, the more dbCache space you have. The dbCache is the memory where NVFS-based PalmOS copies the programs and runs them from; a lot of instability comes from dbCache issues. You should also check out dbCacheTool (page isn't english, but the app is) and Resco Locker; the former will automatically clear the dbCache when it runs low, and the latter will lock apps into the cache. Some instability is caused by background programs that do not properly lock themselves.

As far as app selection goes, whether ROM or RAM, that's trial and error. If you hit ##377# in the phone app on a Sprint phone it will show you what crashed the phone. Using RLock on the app may stabilize it, or just delete it. You can read this Shadowmite.com forum thread for more ## codes, but 377 is the only one I ever use. Also, this is for the 650 only! The 600 is not supported and probably never will be, at this point; the 700p is coming but it's not ready yet.

Tip #1: Use a Palm OS device.

I'm sure you realize that PalmOS devices store *ALL* of their data in cleartext, right? Marking those records private and protecting them with a password?

Futile, just fetch the records directly (and pilot-link is the de-facto tool for this) and open it in an editor, or run strings(1) across it to see everything in cleartext.

There are applications, such as GNU/Keyring and others that can help you secure your passwords, memos, data and whatever else you want on PalmOS devices.

In short, never trust the vendor's default application suite to do what you want, or be as secure as you need.

a ftp server in my Palm.

Does 'Palm Fiction' do screen rotation?

It does. That's actually one of the main features I wanted in an ereader, and PF was the only one I could find that could do it.

And what're the minimum reqs?

Hmm... according to the Palm Freeware page on PF, it requires OS 3.5 or greater, but that's about it.

Personally, I use it on my TX, but that's not exactly an entry-level Palm. :)

I'm not sitting there every year punching in two dozen holidays. Granted, some can be made to repeat, but many fall on odd times. There is no option in Palm for "Repeat first weekday after date X in month X" or "Repeat every Third Thursday in November." This is a basic feature of every paper calendar on the market. The people at Palm are total tools.

    or just download them?
http://www.freewarepalm.com/clock/clock_calendar.s html
    and there is a third in option.

James

You can use many different kinds of graffiti on a treo 650. One of the great things about Palm is the amount of free (as in beer) software available for it.

The grafitti program that I use on my Treo is Graffiti Anywhere.

It's a touch screen just like any other palm. There are some times that I will use the keyboard and other times I use graffiti. If I just need a few key strokes, it's easier to use the keyboard because I don't have to get out the pen.

Combine graffiti anywhere (http://www.freewarepalm.com/utilities/graffitiany where.shtml) with the Graffiti-1 alphabet (yahm.palmoid.com/G14OS54.zip) and you go back to a nice, comfortable Palm. I use the keyboard at times and I'm fairly quick with it but I'm partial to putting data into the Treo while on my deskphone at work; using the thumboard while holding a regular phone up to your ear sucks!

Get something like Butler or Central to manage the side buttons (stupid, stupid Palm for not having reconfigurable buttons by default!) and Phone Technician for decent mp3 ringtones.

I agree though, there's no point in NOT including pen input when the device ships with the graffiti2 libraries by default! I will try the new ALP os when it comes out to give me a longer migration away from palm b/c I just plain don't like the WindowsCE/Mobile programs. I'm a simple (but heavy) user and they just seem clunky and overly complex with zero gain.

I'm a big graffiti user (and palm user) starting with the Palm III. I switched over to the Treo almost a year ago and love it. I know use the keyboard but used Graffiti Anywhere - http://www.freewarepalm.com/utilities/graffitianyw here.shtml

The current Treo sites I frequent are Treocentral.com for news and the forums, Treonauts.com for reviews and palminfocenter.com seems to tow the palm party line.

Good luck.

I got an Ogg-player for Palm Tungsten, however it doesn't allow you to delete files, so I have to re-format the MMC every time I want to change my selection.

*Why* do you want your audio player to delete your files for you? Haven't you installed Filez or something comparable?

And barring that, you didn't consider buying a $20 USB2 card reader?

I use this timesheet program on my Palm Pilot. The main screen has clock in and out buttons, and a drop down to select the current task that you are working on. It can report your time in a number of useful ways, and it can export to CSV.

For the 10 of you who still use the PalmOS, I would suggest metro. As an ugly american I used it to get around all over Western Europe & I never missed a train or bus.

For instance, there is no Java JVM for a Palm.

There isn't? What will I do?

Dude. Java is everywhere. It's in tiny little cards and in the latest ARM processors. You can't run. You can't hide. Java will find your OS, and you will be assimilated. Submit to the collective!

After reading your post and staring blankly at the screen for a few moments in disbelief, I can only come to the conclusion that:

A) You're a troll
B) You're drunk
or
C) You work with a bunch of saboteurs that intentionally crash their Treos to get paid downtime.

I've had my Treo 600 for about 2 years, now, and have experienced none of the problems you've described. The GP's description of no more than 1 crash per month is very accurate. Anytime it has crashed, it quickly boots right back up. I've never had to send it in to be serviced.

For those that think that a Palm is just an "organizer" and a PokcetPC is a "pocket computer", don't buy into stereotypes. I use my Treo as a computer. I have an ssh client installed that I use frequently to work on some servers I admin for. The thing came with a capable web browser, but I have many options to install something else, if I want. I also have a Samba client that works great, an FTP client, a VNC Client, and an Instant Messenger. Somebody already mentioned the superb movie player TCPMP, but that's not all, I also have a Video recorder that makes use of the Treo's built-in digital camera. I use a perl script I found to convert the video to mpeg1. I use a Photoshop-like image editor that has support for complex things like layers and blending modes. My Treo is also my mp3/ogg player and I use it to listen to podcasts in the car. I read ebooks and even /. using Plucker. I take audio notes using SoundRec. I even have a Python interpreter, and can code native apps in C right on my Palm. I won't even bother to mention all the games that are available. You can google for them yourself. I've seen apps out there for viewing/editing Word Docs and Excel files, but having never had a need for that, haven't installed them.

No matter where I went in Tokyo, I knew that if I could find a subway station I could find my way back to Nishi-Magome station, which was walking distance from where I was staying.

Check out Metro. There's also a Pocket PC Version.

- Find/Remove bad uninstall info
- Find/Remove not valid shortcuts
- Find/Remove temporary and junk files
- Find/Remove PocketIE cache files
- Registry clean

(Shudders) Yeah, registry - now that's innovation!

• flexible hierarchical organization. In fact, I end up using it as a general purpose outlining tool as well (are there even any good ones under Linux, outside of a word processor?)
• manual sorting (I really hate trying to sort by meaningless arbitrary "priority" numbers like in just about every other PIM sw)
• several simple forms of progress & completion reporting

HandyShopper is another good one for tracking non-hierarchical things that have costs and quantities associated with them. It does nice things like let you tally up totals, as well as maybe schedule recurring need-to-do/buy items. It's bizarre that it doesn't really have a desktop equivalent yet :/

For the Linux desktop, you might want to take a look at MrProject, a nice Project clone that's part of GnomeOffice. I've only played with it a little bit under Mandrake, but it looks fairly competent when you want to add hierarchical schedule and resource loading data to your task list. Sadly, there's little else that I've seen that comes anywhere close, and I've been searching for one fairly recently for a project management class I took last semester. Oddly enough, I don't even like MS Project for doing this kind of thing, it just doesn't give me enough flexibility in rearranging things, scheduling parallel activities, automatically sequencing constrained resources, etc.

One thing that makes the Palm a lot more linkable is Megawiki. Gives you something very close to hypertext, can link all kinds of records of various apps together. Highly useful.

A PDA is a satalite computing device. You use it for quick updates and little else, typically. Its major use is that you can pull it out quickly from a pocket and check your contacts, todo list, and more! On my Palm, for example, I can pull out the application Due Yesterday and check my GPA in all my classes, what assignments are due, etc.

People may say, "hey, why use a Palm when you can use a cell phone or laptop?"

I also have a cell phone that claims to have PDA support. Unless you own a P800 or a P900, the interface on a cellphone is too clunky. Graffiti or the recognizer on a PocketPC will beat the shit out of the tap entry methods that cellphones use. The major cons of the cellphone are that the interface is crap, there isn't a large library of extension software, and it's not easy to sync with my PC.

The cons of a laptop are just as serious. First, they cost about 3-4x the price of even the most fancy 500$ Palm units with built in cameras. They don't really fit in my pocket, either. Even if they could, chances are I wouldn't be able to whip it out and hit a button and have the unit power up in less than 1 second like a Palm does. I'm always having to use a large physical keyboard, even if I'm not seated at a desk or table with a laptop. And chances are I'll have to deal with Windows, unless Apple starts making the units, as Linux doesn't tend to work on a laptop without much messing around. For all the effort, I'd rather have the smaller unit which costs less and Just Works (TM).

Plus, with Bluetooth, my Palm can sync its contacts with the cellphone, control it for outgoing dialing, use it for sending SMS, etc, while it's in my pocket. The PDA interface is much more flexible and has a much larger screen real estate, so it's like I've upgraded my phone without making it into something the size of a brick!

So why choose something that doesn't have these size, speed, and cost benefits? I don't get it.

For *possible* prior art, see keylaunch
Released on June 12, 2002, you can launch an app by pressing an application button twice within a limited time.

Also see slowlaunch
Released on May 20, 2002, you can launch an app by holding an application button for a specified length of time.

Neither half of the patent (hey, I read only the abstract, but that's more than you did!) seems to have been novel at the file date, and it's easy to imagine that keylaunch and slowlaunch could have coexisted on the same palm, giving the full functionality described in the patent abstract.

For *possible* prior art, see keylaunch
Released on June 12, 2002, you can launch an app by pressing an application button twice within a limited time.

Also see slowlaunch
Released on May 20, 2002, you can launch an app by holding an application button for a specified length of time.

Neither half of the patent (hey, I read only the abstract, but that's more than you did!) seems to have been novel at the file date, and it's easy to imagine that keylaunch and slowlaunch could have coexisted on the same palm, giving the full functionality described in the patent abstract.

• You can get an used one on eBay for $30-$50.
• I get over 8 hours of constant use before I have to recharge its internal batteries. It has 8 MB which is enough for 10 typical novels.
• It has a backlight.
• I find that there's more programs available for the Palm OS than the PocketPC OS. (I have a battery-sucking HP Jornada as well.)

• The resolution is only 160x160 but I find that this is fine for reading.
• It is only 2-bit black-and-white.

• For software, I use Plucker for HTML pages, TiBR for simple text, and Acrobat for PDF.

I have a Palm Vx which does all of this. It has 8 MB of RAM and I haven't even filled up 2 Megs yet even with all the games and texts I've downloaded. It is certainly cheap. It recharges every night when you set it in the cradle. And charge life is about 14 hours of continuous use. I used to think the screen was too low res at 160x160 since I had tried reading on it and didn't like the results. But I've found that reading on it is fine if you use the right software. Since I downloaded Palmreader I have been reading Cory Doctorow's stories from Craphound.com and loving it. Ive only evaluated three readers but out of those three, Palmreader is by far the best.

And you wonder why you're having trouble finding GPL programmers for it? :)

You might have better luck trying to sell the same idea to the Palm community. Not only do you already have a bunch of "anything-but-Microsoft" folks, but even the new development tools are based on the Eclipse open-source IDE. There are FAR more apps and developers out for Palm, many of them free.

I love my Sony NX70 with its gorgeous big screen, but the writing is on de wall...

Best Buy stopped selling PDAs. Cell phones sell VASTLY more than Palms/PPCs so Best Buy said sayonara to geeky handhelds. Also geeks like me kept taking back their old handheld and exchanging it.

If a handheld isn't "connected" via Bluetooth or 802.11 then its lifespan is about zero. Pocket PCs have Palm beat in this department. Stupid PalmOne and Sony are just NOW getting 802.11 and Bluetooth on their entire line.

Palms stink in the game department. We now have Warfare, which is great, but thats' about it. My favorite game is a freeware game called Bee, but what do I know. PPCs have tons of great games.

The bottom line: the days of unconnected PDAs are gone. PalmOne/Palmsource/Sony had better get with it. The T3 is a beautiful device (as was the Palm V and 515) but unconnected ain't gonna cut it any longer.

The Treo 180, 270, and 300 can use Graffiti. You need free third party utilities like Newpen to write in Graffiti without a Graffiti area. With the Treo 600, you don't event need that since PalmOS 5.2 allows you to write anywhere on the screen. Unfortunately, Palm changed their version of Graffiti with OS 5.2 so you have to relearn your Graffiti strokes.

According to the author's site, there's also a newer app that's been more thoroughly reviewed, though I've never used it. Check out CryptoPad.

I looked at easyPDB. It may not be the prettiest app, but it's a small binary and does the same thing. I don't like how line returns end up in PDB files though, so now I use Acrobat and PDF files when I want the formatting to stay formatted. It does a good job, but won't bookmark. Does anyone know why Adobe hasn't built bookmarking into Acrobat for Palm OS?

Yeah, I'm not sure why the specs are so limited - even if it needs high-res for the keys, it should at least run in monochrome. The best palm-based calculator I've found is EasyCalc, which runs on pretty much everything (it isn't RPN, though). I just wish there were portable keypads you could plug in like the portable keyboard - so the combined machine would still be around the size of a scientific calc and the numbers would be in a pattern that's actually usable. (All the keyboards I've seen for the palm just have the numbers along the top, which takes me longer to type than enter by tapping or graffiti.

I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.

I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.

I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.

You can download NewPen here.

Don't forget palmopensource.com and freewarepalm.com which enable a significant time savings (i.e. anyone who looks for games there can automatically skip the "find cracked warez version" step that seems to be dear to the piratical hearts of much of the more vocal /. readership. To whom I say, good grief, get a haircut and a job and cough up the dough already.)

mine does all of that. The only provider-specific piece is the insta-isp from verizon (my provider). I setup a ppp session to dial #777 with a verizon default password/user id, and I get an ip address in about 4-5 seconds. Sprint has a similar deal with a different magic number. Qwest may have it too, but you may have to dig for it.

You can still setup a regular isp to dial into if you have a modem-providing isp account. the phone comes with apps that do take advantage of all of that: check out the call log app and the messages app. it comes with eudora too.

voice recognition is a separate app, I just train it as usual for each phone number. I train it for "FriendHome" and "FriendCell," no problems so far. it doesnt save the train data in the addressbook, which is great since it lets me use AddressPlus, a far superior app. the best way to get to the voice trainer is by closing the flip and navigating the menu, IIRC.

the minute counter rocks, get it free here. You can even tell it what kind of plan you have (weekend minutes, daytime minutes, what day of the month the minutes reset, etc) and it will keep track of how many minutes you have left.

the call logging app is also comes with it. it tells you incoming/outgoing calls and the number if available. it can also tell you if a call was a data call or regular voice.

do some web searches and find the wave-ringtones converter. You can set ringtone/category mappings in Preferences. Check it out man, your 6035 rocks!

Get digifix at freewarepalm.com. It is a great lil util, can be setup to fix calibration every startup.

• Visor Deluxe or Platinum ($250 / $300, 8MB of memory, runs for about 2-6 weeks off a pair of AA batteries) The Prism would let you look at your pictures in color, but has rechargeable batteries, so probably wouldn't work for you. The greyscale Visors seem to be able to store color pictures, though.
• Eyemodule2 ($200 , you can download the picture emailer program from Palmgear.com or freewarepalm.com there's also the greyscale eyemodule1 for cheaper some places)
• cell phone with a modem (~$170 for my little Nokia phone with IRDA. There are Visorphones ($300) and wireless modules for the Visor, but then you'd have to swap modules all the time. For service, I have Voicestream GSM, but that's limited to 9600baud digital service right now... I think TDMA (AT&T, Verizon) networks might let you connect up to 14400baud and have more complete analog roaming).
• if you want to get fancy, you could spend maybe $100 or so on phone-Visor serial cables so you don't have to hold them together to use the lame IRDA link, so you can keep pedalling while you're connected. Then again, it might be cheaper and more convenient to just duct tape both of them to your handlebars so the IRDA links always work... that way you could use the phone's serial port for a handsfree kit so you can talk to people when you aren't dialed in. A pet peeve of mine with the Nokia phone is that the IRDA port is on the wrong side of the phone, so I have to hold it upside down to use my Visor. But you could probably get creative with a mirror.)
• you might want to program a script (or get someone else to program a script :) ) to automate the picture grabbing/uploading tasks with one button. I don't think I've seen anything like that yet...