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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

*Cough*

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo70 0w/

Palm?

Even palm are using Windows Mobile in preference to their own OS.

The Palm OS is history.

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.

http://www.palm.com/us/software/blackberryconnect/

Blackberry Connect...

Did you know that Palm makes a couple of smartphones? They're pretty popular.

Ummmmm....
They DID!

On the subject of Palm, its unfortunate that the standalone PDA is fading away.

• HP
• Palm
• Garmin

Excuse me?

I think your PS3 example is an interesting one. Supply was badly constrained around the vital Christmas season. Now we have the news that the first million have been sold. That means they have probably received about as much revenue for it as Nintendo has for the Wii, despite the latter's far better publicity. This seems particularly impressive since the launch was severely bungled, and most reviewers have agreed that the games that presently exist for the PS3 are mediocre at best.

So actually I think this might be a powerful argument in the other direction. Clearly people are willing to reach deep in their wallets for a truly compelling and desirable consumer device.

Now, I'm uneasy about the 1% target myself. It seems extremely ambitious because it means that they will have to take about a 10% share of the smartphone market. That's a huge bite out of everyone else.

But still, let's review the competition. Much to my surprise it seems pretty anemic. Consider:

* I reviewed the Palm Treo at the Palm.com site. The most powerful competition for the iPhone seems to be the PalmOS version, which has many of the most desirable features, such as easy conference calling. At the same time, the screens look impossibly crude, almost stone-age, compared to the sleek, anti-aliased iPhone. Here are some Palm screenshots, of their email system:

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo68 0/email.html

Now, check out the iPhone's email demo:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/internet/

Yikes. The iPhone almost doesn't look real, does it? Palm looks in big trouble here.

The Treo has the advantage of having a keyboard, although I remember feeling the keys were way too closely spaced for easy typing.

The Treo costs $199 with a plan, $399 without. So the iPhone is about $300 more expensive, provides a far superior screen, bang up to date software, a far superior web browser and email reader, and an ultra-modern operating system instead of one stuck in the 90s.

* The Windows Treo doesn't have a plan option right now, so it costs $399. The iPhone could wipe that out completely for anyone who doesn't care whether they sign a plan extension or not. I don't see anyone paying $400 for a Treo when they could pay $500 for a far superior iPhone.

* The T-Mobile Sidekick is my current smartphone. This was a five-star killer device when it was first introduced, but Sidekick III is barely improved from the Sidekick II. And their online Flash demo is awful. It spends more time showing the phone rotate and move around than demonstrating the features. And again, the screen resolution is horrible, type is ugly and I can't say it stacks up well. Current deal on it is $199. I really like the Sidekick design but like the Treo, it just doesn't look like it's keeping up with the times.

* The Blackberry Pearl is probably what I'd get if I were looking for a non-iPhone smartphone. It does have a beautiful display, and web browsing was probably the best I've seen on anything but the iPhone. $ 199 with contract. Incidentally, the Pearl has the worst online demo. You see the phone moving all over the place, and I'm sure it helped keep 3D modelers in work, but what it didn't do was show the user interface. At all. But when I tinkered with the phone, I noticed that the screen was super-clear, the font crisp and the web browsing smooth. Really, the demo short-changes the phone. The odd pseudo QWERTY numeric keypad was also strange. I found the buttons too close together and it looked like it would be easy to push the wrong one by accident.

The Blackberry may be the healthiest by far of this surprisingly motley crew of competitors, but the iPhone still wins in my book. I wish Blackberry well because I think they are the highest quality competitor, but that's not going to stop me from buying an iPhone

Slashdot has slashdot.org/palm for small displays.

And it still looks terrible on a Treo 700p using the Blazer browser that comes with the phone!

Opera Mini helps make Slashdot on a Treo much more bearable.

Here's where to download the JVM for Palm if you don't already have it.

I don't think you can get an unlocked phone in Canada. I'm under the impression that such a thing doesn't exist, unless you bring it in from a foreign country.

The NTP lawsuit claims that certain Palm products infringe seven NTP patents. All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm. Palm has been in occasional contact with NTP concerning a license to these patents. When Palm last communicated with NTP many months ago, however, each of the patents already was the subject of re-examination proceedings by the PTO. Palm is disappointed that, after many months of silence and repeated rejections of NTP's claims by the PTO, NTP has chosen to sue on patents of doubtful validity. Palm respects legitimate intellectual property rights, but will defend itself vigorously against the attempted misuse of the patent and judicial systems to extract monetary value for rights to patents that may ultimately have no value at all.

And judging by my recent reading of the various newsgroups and forums, it's not just T-Mobile that does this -- pretty much they all do.

Sprint doesn't. I moved my apps and data from my Tungsten T to my Treo 650 with no problems (and I've had some of those apps since I started with a PalmPilot Pro some 8 or 9 years ago). If a website offers up an uncompressed .prc, I can tap it in Blazer to download & install it; otherwise, I can unpack the zipfile on my computer and either HotSync it over or copy it to an SD card and run and/or install it from there.

The same applies to Java apps (once you have the JVM installed), but native apps for Palm OS usually run better (Google Maps is pretty smooth).

Seriously - I am 26, and I use a pen to write something on paper perhaps once every 3-4 days. I also use the printer at my office or home maybe once every 3 weeks at the most.

I'm 26 also, and I use pen and paper every day. I'm never without it.

Any time I have to do something over the phone or by mail, that I know as a programmer I could be easily be doing online, it pisses me off to no end.

Well, that's true. If it's just paying bills, doing it electronically is more efficient.

I know I am not in an uncommon age group either. As I see my nieces and nephews go through school, they use less and less books. They hand in their assignments in USB keys.

That's kind of sad. In all fields I've studied (in or out of school), they stress learning the basics first. In literacy, even if you've got computers, the basics are reading and writing without computers. (I can imagine somebody today going into the Peace Corps to teach third-world kids how to read and write English and not being able to write with a pen.)

The only people I know of who use paper in any amount are people who are 40+, the type of people who like to print off any website longer than a page because "it is easier to read". How is reading paper easier on the eyes than reading a TFT LCD? Answer? it isn't - it's all psycological.

Answer: yes, it is. For one thing, your LCD is 100 DPI, but the paper is 600 DPI. Go find some printouts from an ancient ImageWriter -- that's 144 DPI. Do you think that's just as easy to read as the output from a modern 600 DPI laser printer? I don't. Also, remember that at 26, your eyes are much better than a 40-year-old's eyes (in both sensitivity and resolution); even if you can read lousy screens OK today, that doesn't make them good.

You must be a geek, and have a geek job (programming?). The old geeks I know dislike paper, and the young normal people I know are fine with it. It's not an age divide as you suggest.

Sadly, by the time you're 40+, we'll have much better displays, so you may not get to see just how wrong you were.

The whole "myth" of the paperless world is not a myth, it was just misconstrued - you can't create a paperless world until all the people who are used to using the paper everyday are gone.

And you can't get rid of them (or rather, we'll keep being born) until computers can do everything that paper can do, as well as paper can.

- Can I get a 30" computer screen for a few cents? Or a few dozen of them, to put on the walls? Systems guys at the company where I work put up huge printouts on the walls all the time. HP and others are doing good business selling 600 DPI large-format printers. For the price of a single 2.5-foot display, they can make 3-by-6-foot printouts all day long.

- On a more practical note, I can leave a piece of paper in my car in the summer, because they're cheap and rugged. Replacing paper means either "making it cheap, rugged, and ubiquitous" or "putting it on a device you carry with you everywhere".

Some people say that "e-paper" is the answer to all of this, and it may be someday, but for now it's even more expensive than LCDs.

If you think Palm-style handhelds are the answer, try again. They've moved to 320x320 resolution, thankfully, but it's still nowhere near pen and paper. You go to the Palm Z22 webpage and the grocery list says "Vegeta..." and "Refried Bea..." and "Salad Dressi...". How that's an improvement over a piece of paper is beyond me.

Unless your prepared to make sure little Johnny can't get his hands on $300, you can forget about your router. Of course you could always make sure your kid never holds down a job, and stays away from any kind of business that might offer free or easily hacked wifi. Oh, you are probably going to want to move far enough out that you don't have any nieghbors that might have a wifi connection that reaches your house. You will have to keep them out of school too, because the school might be close enough to a business or home that might have or get wifi.

Just *yesterday* I was looking for *exactly* the same thing: a way to hook up a Gumstix to a display. I would like to use it for a home automation project.

If you use one of the appropriate expansion boards, you can interface a Gumstix to a variety of raw LCD panels: there's even X Windows drivers for it. However, there's nothing for TV out (composite, for example), and there is nothing for VGA out.

The cheapest LCD touch screen I could find is $56 bucks. Then you still have to buy a controller board and LCD interface (about $150 from Gumstix), and a case, cables, etc. It adds up quick.

The more research I do, the more likely I am to do it with Palms: where else can you get a color LCD with touch screen, 200MHz processor, 32MB RAM, etc. for under $100? Palm Z22

I'd love to hear from someone with a better idea... :)

A calculator with a comparable set of capabilities to MATLAB, etc., even with the same monochrome screen, probably wouldn't last too long on a set of AAAs. Even back when I was using my TI-83 for long problem sets in college, I could still get months of daily use, probably a few hundred hours, out of a single set of batteries. No portable device of such power and flexibility can come close.

I'll concede the point about the price-point, though. For $100 you can get an entry-level PDA with color screen. It won't be nearly as rock-solid reliable, though, nor have as much of a user base and support.

I agree that they don't seem to have changed much over the last decade. But, I would contend that a a TI graphing calculator can do an aweful lot. I'm not talking about graphing a Calabi-Yau manifold, or something handled by one of Matlab's extensive toolboxes, but the actual manipulation and display of numbers and algebra. What do you wish they could do that they don't do now? If you'll look at user-pages for TI and other graphing calculators, you'll see that people have been able to program them to do amazingly complex things.

I don't use my graphing calculator for much these days, but that's mostly because it would take me less time to use MATLAB, mainly due to having a full-sized screen, keyboard and mouse.

I'd strongly recommend what I use, which is a Palm T|X with a 4GB SD card. The T|X itself has great features: 320x480 screen, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, stereo with standard headphone jack, solid battery life, 128 MB of NVRAM, in-box compatibility with not only popular PIMs but MS Office files in native format. Add to that a 4 GB SD card (available for about $65 or less after rebate at Newegg.com--I use the Transcend one), and you've got enough add-on storage (which supports hierarchical folders) to store a whole bunch of multimedia as well as documents. The PalmOS isn't the most sophisticated, but it makes up for that with speed, simplicity, stability, and thousands of apps. Mac compatibility comes through apps like MarkSpace's Missing Sync, and the Palm user community is tremendously supportive, including sites like PalmAddict (for which I'm a volunteer Associate Writer). Add a Bluetooth keyboard like the compact ThinkOutside model, and you've got a serious laptop replacement that will play well with campus wireless networks.

If you need any other info., feel free to e-mail me. {Prof. Jonathan}

Of course there are only so many names you can construct using a given language, but given that Palm has been marketing a LiveDrive for some time now that name sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The Symbian OS is primarly for smartphones, and unfortunately they usually make for lousy PDAs. But if you're still interested check out the Nokia E61 or Sony Ericsson M600i. Same could be said about RIM's Blackberry OS.

There's also an plethora of quirky, mostly-discontinued embedded linux PDAs, including the geek-famous Zaurus.

If you thought having only two major players for PDA OS's was unfortunate, Palm has started replacing the Palm OS with Windows Mobile on some of their own hardware.

I use a Palm LifeDrive and enjoy its built in wifi. The Treo could benefit from this, but overall they need to remember to make a product that works. Sure the Treo could pack every possible gadget possible into its case, but users are not really looking for that. WiFi is very very popular and I believe it should be integrated, but TFA has the wrong attitude. They should focus on making the device as useable as they can. The Treo is a PDA and a cell phone, not an amazing spactacular all-in-one uber device that can change the baby while transferring your call from cellular to Skype. The reason that my friends use the Treo is because it easily works.

You're looking for a Palm Treo. The Developer Suite for it is totally free. It's got a no-nonsense phone, and can do basically anything you want it to. A couple of my more financially well-adjusted friends have them and absolutely adore them.

I recently migrated off an HP iPaq 5450 to a Palm LifeDrive, solely because I couldn't deal with data loss. Because it uses DRAM if the device loses all power, data loss. I had a couple of crashes, data loss.

Sure, I got around that by backing up frequently, but still what a drag. I'd keep using the iPaq if it was a little more robust about data.

Now the LifeDrive you ask? Well, it's got it's own set of problems, data loss (knock on my wooden head) not one of them.

I admit I'm nostalgic; nobody has ever matched my Apple Newton (MP2K) or Apple eMate for reliability...

a ftp server in my Palm.

Hate me for pointing out a MS product

I don't think you know what an "order of magnitude" is.

Processing power is less than an order of magnitude difference, between handhelds and desktops. Slightly larger handhelds can have standard notebook hard drives, making them less than an order of magnitude of difference.

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo70 0p/index.html?creativeID=HmPg_BB|treo700p_announce ment&AID=10380937&PID=1511436

(link found via http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/5/ 15/3967 )

• better camera (1.3 MP)
  
• dial-up networking to let your laptop connect via evdo
  
• voice memos (formerly needed an add-on to do this)
  
• more built-in memory
  
• different built-in mp3 player
  

I guess it's for real, and not just some blogger's fantasy:

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo70 0p/index.html?sssdmh=dm13.112777

If it's from the horse's mouth, I suppose it's not bs. Plus, Palm's website is unlikely to be slashdotted. The site also has, you know, lists of features, brochures, and stuff.

Uh, what about Palm's 700p Page? Or is you looking for a review?

"...rumoring about the Treo 700p for quite some time, Now, HandMark has "officially" confirmed the Treo 700p's existance...." Rumor? How about checking with Palm? http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo70 0p/index.html?creativeID=HmPg_BB|treo700p_announce ment I've been waiting for this for six months.

What about this link on Palm's own website? http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo70 0p/index.html?creativeID=HmPg_BB|treo700p_announce ment I mean, am I being dense, or is it so hard to find info on the 700P?

There is an official site There's even a comparison with other treo's. It seems it will be only US for now, and the only major difference is a better camera and more RAM. While it sounds ok, it's not a killer upgrade over 650.

So in other words, it's actually like Xdrive, the company that started it in the dot-bomb boom.

http://www.xdrive.com/

Also, I can't wait for Palm to take them to court because Live Drive sounds an awful lot like LifeDrive.

http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lif edrive/

You mean like their latest models that run Windows Mobile?

I'd take a PocketPC or PalmOS PDA Phone and a Bluetooth GPS and a 4GB Microdrive, combined with some nice Hiking maps. And maybe some nice bright flashing toys from ThinkGeek. For Self-protection, I'd want a Taser. Oh yeah, and a Sidewinder so that I don't have to find a power supply for any of this stuff.

it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.

That would never ever happen.

Agreed. Three days ago I got fed up with the failing handwriting recognition of my old Palm Vx, Wednesday I bought a brand-new T|X (I was going to buy it with this year's tax refund but I was pushed beyond the point of endurance).

I want something that I can put in my pant's pocket. With long battery life. With a good display. That doesn't crash.

I don't want something with a cell phone, it will violate the size issue and also gives me a single point of failure depriving me of two devices if one fails or the unit is lost. I don't want an MP3 player in it, the fidelity will suck and it will suck more memory that I don't want to give over to it. I don't want Bluetooth, I don't want WiFi (it can't get onto my home network because of my security restrictions). I definitely don't want a digital camera as I'd like to do some DoD consulting at some point.

And I don't want something from HP/Compaq: two B companies that merged to form a bigger B company (except their servers, I like Compaq servers).

Sorry, I've been using Palm Pilots for over a decade and will not give it up until they pry my cold dead fingers from around it.

I was very happy with Sony Clies, and the company stopped making them. (Why do they insist on killing their best tech?) Then I dropped mine. I happened to have a plan that had it replaced, but I decided to upgrade. To get another Clie, I spent an insane week on eBay trying to get an NX80v. It's almost 3 years old, but nothing on the market has all its features. After seeing several go for over $300, I settled on a new Palm T|X for $250. Similar specs to the NX80, but no camera, and I constantly used the camera in my Clie TJ27. Also no keyboard.

A bigger concern is that if they stop making Palm devices altogether, we're stuck with Windows.

You probably want a Palm Treo then. They're a little "boxier" than some of the tiniest phones on the market, but are still smaller than they appear in the pictures. It's easy to enter data with the keyboard and you get a lot of features - camera, memory card slot, web browsing, mobile email - and it's a decent phone (it gives me better reception than my previous one).

I've been a happy owner of a Treo 650 since the fall of last year. I would not recommend the 700. The 700's Windows Mobile is not as good as PalmOS for being a phone, the 700's data connection is faster but data access plans much more expensive, the 700's camera is overkill for emailed photos. The best deal for a 650 is Sprint's unlimited data plan, which can be had for $10 a month.

Although you may also need a real email client (like SnapperMail) - the built in one (VersaMail) can only send attachments in a form that Outlook recipents can see (that is, if you want to take pictures and then email them to your friends).

oh something like... http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lif edrive/ ?

Opera Mini is running fine on my Treo 650...I grabbed the java files from here

Don't believe the claims that it won't work on t650 from Verizon...it works fine.

you sure about that. http://www.newtonmuseum.com/images/image08.jpg http://www.palm.com/us/images/products/palmpilot/p almpilot.jpg both where about the same size, with the Newton being a bit heavier and wider.

So far just one Palm, the Treo700W, runs on Windows CE. But, I would imagine more are on the way.

I take it you haven't actually owned or used a PSP for watching movies as these times are terribly inaccurate. The PSP will last 3 hours, maybe, while regularly reading from the UMD media. On the other hand, if you are referring to watching movies off of a memory stick then, fine, 8 hours is feasible (though, as a PSP owner, I've never had the PSP last 8 hours doing ANYTHING, let alone watching video or playing games).

Given that you are referring to memory stick videos, and you want to watch a full length movie on one, let's look at what that entails:

- Let's ignore the fact that it takes a long time to convert a movie to the proper format for memory stick.

- Let's ignore that you can't fit more than one, maybe 2 movies at a lower quality rating, on a 1gb memory stick (definitely nowhere near the quality of even UMD, let alone DVD).

- Let's ignore that most consumers will pay full MSRP for a 1gb memory stick duo, which is the only hope of having 2 movies (at low framerate and quality) on the same stick. That full price, btw, is $99. On pricewatch I found one for $74. Best price I can find for 2gb is $146.67 (pricewatch)

- Let's also ignore that some *cough*evil*cough* organizations feel it is illegal for us to rip a movie for any purpose.

Ok now that we've ignored most all of the pertinent facts, we conclude that it's great to get to watch movies for 8 hours straight, assuming you like watching at 8-10fps, 320x200 resolution, with lots of encoding artifacts. You also don't mind shelling out $250 for the base device with a 4" screen, another $74 per 2 movies ($150 to maximize your 8 hours on average), or spending a weekend converting the movies you're completely certain you will want to watch the next time you're out and about.

Yeah, that's a good deal!

By all means, the PSP is a cool little device, it's just severely lacking in a few aspects that would help make it THE device to have. My examples would be the poor *REAL* battery life, the inability to do say, listen to music while browsing or looking at text files http://gutenberg.org/, or a useful amount of storage http://store.palm.com/product/index.jsp?productId= 1999092&cp=1157580

Of course, this is all opinion, blending with facts and personal experience. No need to get upset if you disagree.

p.s. Yes, I do feel like I got majorly jilted when I bought my PSP. Almost a year later, my psp has no new games that interest me, no value in the videos (cripes, at least make them half the price of a dvd since they have half the quality and none of the features!), and my DS has brought me many hours of quality unique entertainment... I should sell the PSP.

Starting with Windows Mobile 2003 you can. Better still is Windows Mobile 5 (devices with that have started coming out recently, like the Treo 700 (for a Pocket PC form factor) and the HTC Faraday (for a Smartphone form factor), you can have push mail. You need Exchange Server 2003 SP2 (or higher of course) to support it.

The original version of the push technology used specially crafted SMS messages to trigger the phone in to doing a sync. (i.e. the SMS message never showed up in your inbox, it was eaten by the software, nor was the email message actually included in the SMS itself) This means that with a cellular company that charges you for incoming SMS messages you may end up having to pay for them. Some of the cell companies put filters in place so that you didn't get charged for these system type messages.

The newer version of direct push no longer relies on SMS messages, so you don't have to worry about paying text messaging fees.

Personally, I like to just set my device to a scheduled sync (every 5 to 10 minutes) which is just as effective really.

First Palm decides to use Windows Mobile for the Treo 700, now there is a good possibility that Windows will run on Intel-based Macs.

As an aside, does anyone know if NT4 could run on PPC-based Macs (since NT4 had support for x86, PPC, and Alpha processors)?

Apple doesn't capitalise on the current media and consumer 'love' for iPods, then the plethora of other devices with similar or superior function will destroy Apples market

They already have for me. My setup is:

* Palm Treo 650 - smartphone / PDA.
* PocketTunes - MP3, OGG and WMA Windows Media DRM-enabled software player for Palm OS.
* Cheap 512MB SD memory card (going to upgrade to a 2GB one when the price falls).
* Rhapsody Unlimited "To Go" subscription - $15 a month for access to a 1.5 million song library on a portable device (although you can also pay $0 a month and buy music just like iTunes, or $8 if you only want to use a desktop PC with the installable client or Firefox streaming plugin).

Two things that Apple are not doing to allow this to happen with them:

* Apple refuses to licence their DRM technology. Notice above we have hardware & two pieces of software from different companies playing brilliantly because they use standard Microsoft Windows Media DRM. I can even play Rhapsody DRM tracks in Yahoo Music Engine. And WMA files on a frickin' Palm handheld. Seriously. Microsoft has their shit together with building DRM that is transparently usable.
* Apple refuses to offer "unlimited" subscriptions to their music store.

My theories:

* Apple is deliberately holding back. They won't licence their DRM as iPod users would then flood other music services (such as the unlimited music subscriptions).
* Apple also won't offer "unlimited" subscriptions as there is no customer lockin across "unlimited" services. You have all the music you want - so long as you have a subscription with *one* of the competing services, you can switch at will - the only thing you've lost are your playlists. Apple likes that you've spent money on tracks that you can't play anywhere but in iTunes.

Conclusion:

* Apple's continued success depends on them being able to maintain the "walled garden" around their iPod and iTunes users. It didn't work for AOL and it's not worked for Microsoft.

Because of this, I'm done with iTunes. AND I'm a Mac user - my main computer is a Powerbook (which is so great it's hugable). EVEN though I had to set up the Rhapsody client on my old Windows XP machine to transfer files to my phone. Yeah, clunky.

But the win is that Rhapsody Unlimited is an addiction - I listen to one or two new albums a day, which would cost about $600 a month on iTunes. For $15 a month, Rhapsody is a bargain and I can still afford to buy one or two physical CDs a month (for DRM-free MP3 ripping). But now I can listen to the entire album as much as I want first to make sure that I won't regret purchasing it. It's so much better than "The iTunes Way". Yahoo Unlimited is cheaper, but it has an ugly player.