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palmOne Releases Two New Zire Handhelds
wPageUp writes "palmOne today announced two new additions to their consumer Zire PDA line. According to PalmInfoCenter, the Zire 72 has a 1.2 MP digital camera, 32MB of ram and a 312MHz Intel processor for $299. On the low end side, the new Zire 31 is the first sub-$150 color handheld to include MP3 audio and a memory expansion slot."
MacCentral reports: "The Mac installed base is extremely important to us," said Stéphane Maes, PalmOne's senior product line manager for handhelds. "We will continue to meet Mac users' needs regardless of what OS we're running."
According to the register here
p da _sales_q1/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/global_
(soz when i do ahref's from this machine they dont work)
PDA sales are falling all over the world except EU, this can be attributed to the power of the mobile phones that are coming out at the moment. Seriously, i have a nokia 6600, what can the Zire's do that the 6600 cant. This phone has
Calendar,
Notepad,
Plays music,
Expandable memory,
Todo lists,
convertors,
voice recorder,
Camera (with video function)
Address list,
opera,
games,
email
the list goes on
But it uses Symbian a better OS that i can upgrade, alter and get hundreds of progreammes for.
Its a nice little bit of cheap tech but would rather have the phone (prefer a p900 though)
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
There are Palm programs like Pocket Tunes that support playing Ogg Vorbis.
Most interesting to me is the Bluetooth connectivity, you can be connected to the Net in just a few clicks for most recent phones. Works good enough to read slashdot or check your e-mail.
Another interesting new application in there is "messages" -- it sends and receives SMS, MMS and e-mail.
You can listen to ogg-files on palm with the PalmOs, I recommend Aeroplayer (which I currently use), it supports several formats (ogg, mp3, etc).
:p
Why even bother to install linux on it? Half the price is prolly for the PalmOS itself
Since Palm already includes has a Java machine environment, why not simply install as java ogg player otherwise here's some info about native ogg players http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/oggpalm.ht ml
regards
Adrian Suri
If you look at the product page for the 31 on palm's site, you'll notice that you need an expansion card for mp3 playback.
stuff
Gizmodo has a post-NDA review roundup.
No. ARM licenses their processor designs to other companies rather than manufacturing them themselves.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
They use ARM code. Which is actually quite fun to write by hand, if that's ever required these days.
ARM started as a spin-off from UK computer company Acorn (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machines, although as it was exploited away from its parent company it was renamed Advanced RISC Machines). The ARM2 processor was used in their Archimedes machines, which at the time were probably the most powerful thing on the market. As Acorn started spiralling out of the home computing market, ARM was spun off as an entirely separate company, licensing its processor designs to other companies and improving them in the process (StrongARM with Digital and XScale with Intel being the most obvious big-name successes).
(All from memory - apologies for any inaccuracies. You can probably find out more at the ARM website...)
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Who has no virtual grafitti area? Palm? The Tungsten 3 does, in fact, have a virtual "silkscreen" as they call it.
Recently I ended up doing a college project for my old palm vx(os 4) on my powerbook (it was a wiki). I used prc-tools and I developed it on os x in c. During the course of my project (8 weeks) I noticed a few things:
1) Most mailing lists relating to palm software development seem very very quite these days.
2) Not much new software seems to be emerging for palm compared to a year or two ago and all the open source stuff seems to be people just updating old programs to deal with palms new os's.
3) I thought palms docs (for stuff relating to os 3.5/4 anyway) seemed a bit crap.
4)from prc-tools home page "The current release, prc-tools 2.3, was released on 2003-09-18."
5)Getting access to palm os roms through offical channels was a total pain in the ass (I had to go to a warez channel after my requests were ignored time and time again).
My question is have things gotten any better ? From my own experiences and what I see on freshmeat interest in the palm platform seems to be dwindling. Any one care to comment ?
_________________________________________________
- Zire (21/31/71/72) -- Personal/home use, (matching the Apple iBooks 12/14" versions)
- Tungsten (E/T2/T3) -- Business use, (matching the Apple Powerbooks 12/15/17" versions)
There's a bunch of other models, but I don't find PalmOne's product line any more complicated than Apple's. Count in all the eMac, iMac, xServe models and Apple starts to look a lot more complicated.
By "expansion card" they mean an SD card for holding the MP3s. There isn't enough internal RAM for the OS, the Real or Audible player, and your MP3s. You may have meant this, but figured I would clarify for anyone reading.
I have a Palm Zire 71 I received last May and it has the same requirement--all MP3s must be stored on an SD card.
-- get on Freenet!
Don't know what your best option for an assembler/dev environment would be for the Tungsten: I haven't played with ARM code outside the Gameboy Advance and back in the days of Acorn, but these links might prove useful:
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I'd like to run linux on it too. Basically I don't want to pay for a bulky Zaurus or iPAQ. People always say that linux isn't good on PDAs. Well PalmOS isn't that great either. One poorly written app and you can kiss all your data goodbye.
Linux would be interesting because you'd have access to plenty of apps. You could host the compiler on the device (if you had a big memory card). You can get keyboards for these PDAs so if you really must try out some neat idea for an algorithm while you are on the road, you can.
You could use CVS, Intermezzo or rsync to sync to a desktop. If you had it use iCalendar file format (RFC2445 you can easily integrate with MS Exchange, Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, OpenGroupware, or various free web calendars you can find around.
What you say, Linux doesn't do database type files in a natural way like PalmOS or WinCE? Take a look at SQLite. It's a very fast and lightweight SQL engine with some interesting extensions. It is also Public Domain, so you don't have to worry about GPL if you have some political problems with that license.
People say Linux sucks on PDAs, but honestly if you look at the work for libraries, applications and kernel features geared towards embedded Linux products it's pretty obvious that Linux would do quite nicely on a PDA. Take the AgendaVR3, Zaurus or iPAQ for example. They all do a decent job with Linux.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire