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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."
... you can finally do what people probably wanted to for a long time - keep track of your appointments in glorious 320x320 full screen anti-aliased 12 bit color 3D!
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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
Linux to play oggs? Why not just write a native decoder and keep access to the thousands of other Palm apps...
I love linux and run it on my desktop, but it doesn't make sense everywhere!
Okay, these are very sweet systems, BUT this seem to cut off the air supply of some of the "Pro" versions. So are we going to see some new "Pro" hardware from PalmOne? When will be see a Palm OS Cobalt (PalmOS6) system?
I really like the look of the Zire 72, but the new 31's colour looks a bit "iffy" in the pictures (like the colour of old BluTack). Anyone seen one of these in real life?
How do these stack up against the latest phones?
There are Palm programs like Pocket Tunes that support playing Ogg Vorbis.
About god-damned time. MP3 audio and a memory expansion slot also? Great!
It seemed like for the longest time, colour MP3-capable handhelds cost in the $400-500 range and up. For that price, you might as well buy a used notebook or subnote. Finally, they're not trying to bend you over and screw you just to get a colour screen or audio abilities.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I think PDA:s will never reach the main-stream and may very well have seen their peak as consumer products.
The new smartphones will edge PDA:s out of the mainstream market (why have two devices?), but I do however think that PDA:s will have roles to fill in niche-markets for corporate users.
Palm would probably do best trying to retrench into devices that have more specific uses for the corporate and public sectors, such as wlan enabled (like the Tungsten C) PDA:s for warehouse workers, POS, healthcare etc.
Trying to compete with smartphones is a fools cause (and CEO:s ego cause) as long as they cannot keep up with Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola et al at their own game.
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.
Don;t be stupid, pick one and wait for it to show up in Palm's outlet store. At least then you are not paying the over inflated price.
where the answers are
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
Hey Palm: take a lesson from Jobs and cut back to three or four models max instead of seven. Focus on developement and not just marketing. Bring the prices down to something a little more reasonable like:
$100 for a Zire 31 with a 320x320 screen
$250 for a Tungsten C without the 802.11b
They also need to bring back something like the springboard for GSM, 802.11b, bluetooth, whatever. IMO palm is a real mess compared to their early days.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
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.
Recent industry reporting seems to indicate a big slump in the PDA market. The trend is toward devices that incorporate cell phone features.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I think PDA:s will never reach the main-stream and may very well have seen their peak as consumer products.
Why would you say that? You might as easily say PDAs will eventually replace cellphones. They're already making PalmOs cellphones (the Treo 600 to mention one, have a look) and to me it makes more sense to have a PDA/cellphone than, say, a Nokia Communicator. I like the Palm way of doing things and have had a Palm for years so I guess I am biased.
To think they couldn't keep up with Nokia et al may be justified. That remains to be seen. I sure hope they will, because for most my needs Palm has been the right answer and Nokia most certainly has not.
I know PDAs are not selling as much as cellphones. But they ARE selling better than smartphones at the moment I think. To me that says people want a phone that is not too smart and prefer to use a PDA for stuff like that.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Looking around the offices in the past 5 years I'm seeing less and less people using Palm's and those that are have the old Vx's or 50x series. Almost everyone who has a PDA these days has a PocketPC. Even I moved from a Vx to an iPaq and probably won't go back.
If I did then it would be if
- Support of the fields that Outlook has is better than on a PocketPC. Sure I can install another application (KeySuite) but then I can't integrate that data with other applications.
- A decent today screen with plugins. I don't want something flexible that allows me to define what my today screen shows and the order that it shows it.
- Continious syncing. This is a big one for me. If I take my PDA out of the cradle then I want to know that it is up-to date at that very moment in time. This is especially important when I have someone else managing my diary so I don't necessarily know when I have to sync. I do not want to have to remember to press the "sync" button 5 minutes before I want to take the PDA to a meeting.
Palm kind of remind me of Apple, in the sense that they have only a few people making their hardware. Microsoft on the other hand has a large number of hardware manufacturers which means that they are pushing the specifications further and quicker than Palm are.Camera, Bluetooth, wireless networking - all came from the PocketPC first because there was competition from the hardware manufacturers to differentiate their product from others. With Palm, there isn't quite so much of a need and so I get the feeling they're playing catch up (even though their screen resolution is better than the PocketPC's - but still no virtual grafitti area)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
I've been a big fan of Palm since around their 3 series (got a 3xe pretty close to when they came out). Back then, it did everything I wanted that I expected a handheld to be able to do--i.e. I never expected multimedia support or anything.
The most recent offerings, however, have been atrocious in my mind. To get Bluetooth, you had to go with a Tungsten 2 or 3, both of which have a slider design that's notorious for breaking the digitizer. The Tungsten T is almost as good, but doesn't feature any extra connectivity--i.e. no "Universal Connector" (the wired connection that most phones that connect to Palms use) and no bluetooth (and as yet, no bluetooth drivers for the SD cards that give you bluetooth). The Zire series is great for affordability, and they finally added bluetooth (yay!), but the damned camera...some people aren't allowed to take into work (and technically count as recording devices--MPAA says you can't take it into a movie theater).
I'm waiting for the day when Palm or some other company begins customizing handhelds much like Dell does for computers. Then I could get my wireless connectivity, no camera, customize the memory and processor (taking into consideration battery life) etc. Then I'll be truly happy. Until then, I think I'll go shopping for a good phone.
I noticed because I've been PDA window shopping for the past few days, checking out palms vs. clie vs. zaurus. The T2 was the Palm model I was looking at, comparing w/ the TJ37 Clie and the Zaurus for value in price range. Yesterday I went back to Palm's site to see how the new Zires (particularly the 71) stacked up against the current offereings, and...Hey! Where's the T2?
Actually, what I really think is...
That's a pretty low resolution screen these days. The old Palm IIIc and some of the Treo's use it, but it pales in comparison to a 320x320 screen. Yeah it's color, but pictures look grainy at that resolution. $50 bucks more will get you a Sony Clie TJ27 or Palm Tungsten E with 320x320 screen. It's a better investment.
AnimeNEXT 2004 (NY/NJ/CT, June 18-20) "the next evolution of anime convention"
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 ?
_________________________________________________
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.
Such as:
- surfing the web via WiFi
- email
- viewing digital photos
- transferring from SD card to a microdrive
- listening to mp3s
- viewing video
- playing games (I'm thinking Chess here)
- viewing DivX that you've recorded with your PVR
- looking up maps
- looking up dictionaries
- storing and reading PDF manuals
I use my PDA for all of these things. Sure there are probably devices that can do some of these individual tasks better, but a PDA is a single general purpose device that can do all of these.
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