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Limitations in Current Breed of Palm Handhelds?
JabrTheHut asks: "Having been a Palm user for over two years now, I've upgraded to a Tungsten T3. While the features I'm used to using have not changed, I have become increasingly frustrated by what I see as a lack of progress. It doesn't seem to want to deal with text files (there is no import feature for the Palm Desktop notepad or memo pad, for example). Also there seems to be no way to copy arbitrary files to the Palm - all files must be "owned" by an application. With a 256MB SD card I expected to use it to copy files between work and home. Has anyone else noticed these or other shortcomings and have figured out ways around them?"
The Palm desktop application sucks. You can work around some of the issues you mentioned though. Moving text files is pretty straightforward if you just copy and past the content. There are file size limitations though. A better way is to write to your SD card directly, and use (on the palm) an application (like FileZ or UniCMD) to access it.
In Palm Quick Install.. Click on "Add" then select files of type "All Files (*.*)".
:)
Alternatively, get a SD card drive, its faster
Documents 2 Go can handle text files, alternatively, you can use the Palm Desktop to copy/paste things into memopad.
There are various shareware/freeware utils that act as very basic file managers for the palm, with hexedit capabilities. (They can also be used to edit/delete your preference files - which can come in useful)
Third party applications are really the only solution to this problem, here's one I used a while back: http://www.tealpoint.com/softmovr.htm
Some Palms (and Palmish devices.. I have a Sony Clie) come with a gateway-type program you can use to put random files on the memory card. If yours doesn't have one built in, you may be able to find a third-party one.
mrg
You can install anything to a SD card by selecting "Install to Card". Alternatively, you can install anything to ram using a program such as RAMDisk. Palm uses a very efficient database file system, and they don't want it cluttered up with your MP3 files (just look at the problems they had with the T5 when they tried to allow any files to be stored in RAM).
You mean, like the ssh palm application:
h++p://staff.deltatee.com/~angusa/TuSSH.html
File Link|Create New Link|Application (Memopad) | File Path (Select your file -- even a
It will sync the file to the palm EVERY time you sync. Works great.
You can EASILY install ANY file to ANY palm with an SD card using either a USB card reader OR install-to-card on the palm quickinstall menu.
This doesn't even begin to address 3rd party solutions available, too. I have a LOT of problems with palm -- but what you are complaining about isn't a weakness in palm, but a weakness in your knowledge of how to USE a palm.
My current palm is a Zire 72 -- and I'm quite happy with it. Aside from the paint peeling off (DUH PALM!), it's VERY stable. My few work-mates who have PPCs crash almost daily.
I eventually found out from talking to the developers that version 0.12.0, currently in CVS, supports the uploading of arbitrary files to the memory card on the palm.
I downloaded 0.12.0-rc4 from CVS and it compiled cleanly. There's a new option to pilot-xfer, -D, to install arbitrary files to the filesystem on the memory card.
This worked perfectly, but I found it a bit slow for transferring lots of MP3 files, so I bought a cheap USB2 card readed, which I can mount like a drive, and use cp to copy the files across. The card readed only cost UKP9.95+VAT and is really worh it for convenience and ease of use.
Stick Men
You mean 'in Windows'. In the Linux and UNIX world, there are dozens of choices in how you want to talk to your Palm.
For "text files", nothing beats Plucker when carrying text, ebooks, manuals, HTML pages, HOWTO documents, and other items. The LDP even carries all of their HOWTO documents in Plucker format. Its the only format that is freely available, openly documented, and very extensible.
Just look at how beautiful Plucker is with the PHP documentation as one example...
You must mean '...in Windows' again. In the non-Windows side, including OSX, we have pilot-link which talks natively to your Palm and can do all kinds of things that the Windows tools cannot (including operating at 40% faster in some cases).
Commercial companies such as MarkSpace are using pilot-link (the core library of pilot-link anyway) in their commercial product, MissingSync which runs on OSX.
For desktop replacements, PIMs, and other tools, there are dozens of alternatives. Here are several, in no particular order (with Coralized links to protect the bandwidth of the various projects):
There are many others, but these are the top contenders. They all also rely on the libraries and language bindings provided by pilot-link to communicate with your Palm device.
Yes, stop using Windows. Stop using the featureless proprietary tools provided by these vendors who only listen to their profit margins, not to their userbase.
Seriously
It doesn't seem to want to deal with text files (there is no import feature for the Palm Desktop notepad or memo pad, for example).
I found the lack of a decent text editor so annoying that 18 months ago I started writing a text editor for PalmOS: SiEd. It opens text files straight from SD-Cards, as well as Palm DOC files in main memory. You can use it to convert between the two as well.
Get an iPaq, install Familiar. Or get a Zaurus.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...with the Tungsten T5 and the Treo 650. Each of these handhelds has two types of memory built in - the usual RAM that we've had for years, and non-volatile memory where all of your user data, programs, etc are stored. This memory is formatted with a standard FAT filesystem, and can be mounted on the desktop with no special tricks. Essentially, this NVRAM acts as a "hard disk" for the Palm, and should be every bit as flexible as one.
From the T5 spec sheet:
256MB (215MB actual storage capacity: 160MB internal flash drive, 55MB program memory for applications and data.)
And from the Treo 650 spec sheet:
23MB user-available stored non-volatile memory [doesn't list program memory - I believe it's 32MB]
See the following for more details:
How does the Treo 650 memory system work (NVFS)?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I think you are confusing a couple of issues.
First, Sony has nothing to do with the "Secure Digital" format of memory cards. They compete with it (with MemoryStick and MagicGate) and are not even a member of the SD Association.
Second, the "Secure Digital" part of the SD card is an optional layer of DRM that allows an application writing to the card to specify what can be done with it. While this is DRM, and thus icky, it is not some magic tech that identifies what file types are written to it and decides what do do from there. The vast majority of SD devices do not implement any sort of DRM on the cards.
The limitation the OP is talking about is a software limitation either in the PalmOS itself or in the implenation of external interfaces to copy files to/from the device. As others have pointed out this can be solved with a number of 3rd party or opensource programs, but the fact remains that the published interfaces into the PalmOS and it's filesystem are lacking for handling files that live outside of it's native database filesystem.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Second, because Palm apps used to do that - when you entered an app it put right where you were when you last left it. Strictly speaking they never launched or terminated, they were just active or not.
PalmOS lost it's focus a long time ago, it's very depressing.
Clear, Dark Skies
Way cool things are coming with GPE, the Gnome Palmtop Environment. It's not quite ready for prime time on OpenZaurus yet, but it's beautiful and has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Syncing software for that platform is in the works and already exists, I think, for Evolution. The further away from non free you get, the better things are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Only if you are running familiar or OpenZaurus. GPE has excellent handwriting recognition. KPIM works almost exactly like Palm datebook +. Then you also have browsers, wifi, media players and other not considered "palm" programs.
I'm still using a Handspring Visor to organize my life, but I can see great advantages to newer platforms. With a little work, I'll master syncing with the Zaurus. If I do that and can find as good a calculator as the Visor has, that's it for the visor.
There's no way I'll find what I'm looking for in a Pocket PC running Microsoft crap. The last time I looked, those keyboardless things without decent hadwriting were a huge pain in the ass to use.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Things I am missing from the current generation of Palms, but I find as built-in features on my [tr]usted HP-100LX are:
- A rechargable battery that runs for about three weeks.
- The ability to plug in standard AA bateries when the rechargable battery runs out.
- A plain vanilla 12V charger port and a backup batery when the two options fail. (In 12 years I have only lost data once, when the machine fell from my bike in a shallow water ditch).
- Real (though not preemtive) context switching. When I enter one application, the other one is suspended in the state it was, and will be resumed at exactly the same state when I return to it.
- An industry standard file system (FAT), and support for cheap standard PCMCIA memory cards.
- A complete spreadsheet (not just a viewer) that includes macros, and graphs.
- A customizable database supporting complex queries and a visual form builder.
- Customizable calendar, phone book, and note-taking applications, based on the above database.
- A scientific and financial calculator with an equation solver, and graphing capability.
- Locale support for Greece (fonts, keyboard, sorting) out of the box.
- A sturdy design that can withstand 12 years of (ab)use.
The flexibility and stability of the machine's software is legendary. Over the years it has adapted to a change in the daylight savings time rule, Y2K, the introduction of the Euro symbol, and a number of phone renumbering exercises (it contains a world city database with a dialing prefixes and a map). The software is fixed in ROM; all needed changes were made via configuration files.Solution to about 99% of the above complaints:
Open the Palm Install Tool.
Click "Add"
Change "Files of Type" to "All Files (*.*)"
Select the files you want to install (don't worry about whether the files are "owned" by an app. It's totally irrelevant).
Select the files you want to install. Non-Palm apps and databases will default to installing to your expansion card.
Sync.
If you know anything about installing *anything* to a Palm, you may have noticed that this is the exact same process for installing apps and databases, except for the part where you specify the file type.
This ain't rocket science, kids.
Palm just announced that the next generation Palm environment is going to run on top of a Linux kernel with a standard (though, presumably, trimmed-down) Linux user space. They have also fixed severe problems with their database format and other parts of their system.
If they don't go bankrupt before shipping the Palm/Linux environment, that should turn out to be a good handheld.
There is one problem with this suggestion. Windows CE is about the least stable and least compatable form of Windows ever created. I've owned a number of Windows CE PDAs (in both major form-factors, palm-top and HPC) and though there are a lot of nice things about Windows CE, it is simply too buggy and too unstable. Case in point, I have a Jornada 680E. The Jornada 680E is an HPC with a touch-typeable keyboard, a wide screen (1024x360 I believe), a PCMCIA slot, micro serial port, and a CF slot. In other words, it's not cheap, and it's not meant to mess around. It had a desktop-scale processor and enough RAM to be an adequate substitute for a laptop (at least in its day) The problem is, though the hardware itself is magnificent, the software used to run it is awful Case in point, windows CE is notoriously bad with stylus operation. So much so that it's nearly impossible to get it accurately calibrated. Secondly, it's quite frequent that windows CE will simply give up and the machine will lock with no useful error messages of any kind. This can't be blamed on third party software, because it happens when using the Microsoft bundled applications just as much as any others. To further bolster this claim, I have installed an SH3 version of Linux on the device and it has never locked up in this fashion. Furthermore, Windows CE is horrendously incompatable with itself. So much so that there is little to no backward or forward compatability between applications. Applications that ran fine on my Uniden PC100 failed miserably on my Jornada as well as on the Toshiba that by ex roomate used and frequently lamented. Windows CE can also be quite the battery hog as well, I've never heard of a Windows CE device lasting as long as a Palm device under normal operation. I will admit that the task switching of Windows CE is a lot easier to fanangle than that of Palm, especially if one is not used to Palm devices. However, I feel that that single benefit outweighs the overall poor performance and reliability of Windows CE in general. There is a reason Windows CE is often abbreviated as WinCE. Palm has its down sides (directory structure anyone?) but it's vastly superior to Windows CE in enough ways that it's far worth the trouble.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
I use Linux daily at work. It's the only OS I use for development. I tried to swttch from a Palm to a Zaurus and it was a tremendous failure. First off, I could expect crashes consistently that would trash all of my PIM data. Secondly the apps (or lack thereof) made me carry my Palm as well as the Zaurus. The Zaurus wasn't good a s a PDA or as a "mini laptop", IMHO.