Linux Connectivity for the Visor

Stickster asks: "What is the deal with Linux's ability to exchange information with the new Handspring Visor (Deluxe)? I realize that there is the USB/serial cradle hardware question which will affect people depending on their boxen, but right now Handspring says only WinPC/Mac can do things like HotSync. Isn't the PalmPilot connectivity solution set for Linux pretty well-developed at this point? And how does that bode for the Visor?"

Comments

How about battery life?

[moonboy]

Anybody have a Visor yet? How about battery life? This seems to be the weak link with most if not all portable/handheld devices. How does the Visor compare?

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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein

Re:How about battery life?

[killbill]

If anything, it should be superior to the existing (newer) palms. The architecture of the two units are very close, and use the same motorola dragon ball processors.

The biggest hitter on the palms is the RS232 serial port during hotsync. Without hotsyncs, the average pilot could probably go two months on a single set of AAA's. With hotsyncs, probably about half that. The RS232 specification requires that the port not be parasitically powered, so those little batteries have to do all the work.

I am not sure what the specifications for USB (which the visor uses) indicate, but I bet they allow for parasitic power delivery for the interface of low power devices.

Regardless, power usage for any of the palm devices is not an issue. At worst, just go to Best Buy and buy a few sets of AAA NiMh and a charger, and you should go at least a week at a time, even with lots of backlight and constant syncing.

It is the windows CE devices with their hungry CPU's and color screens that have the battery problem.

Bill

Info...

[pos]

I've seen them at the Internet Expo in NYC. Their booth was packed! They were showing off their 4 modules and had several 3rd party module manufacturers there.

About the waiting... They apparently have had 4x the orders they expected. Now their e-commerce site is up and they are probably rolling in more orders, even faster. Remided me of the G4 mac shortage ;) I ordered 5 about a month ago and they said it would be at least 4-6 weeks before they shipped. I asked when I could buy ~10,000 and they said volume sales won't be available until early 2000. Everyone is waiting for these things.

Soft/Hardware: The OS is PalmOS so everything is compatable. They added some nice new features to the standard apps, and the USB option is there to win over the Mac crowd. When you drop in a springboard module, it suspends the OS and runs a rom in the module. This allows the module to be always on and interrrupt the palm. It can theoreticaly turn the visor on and sound an alarm or whatever, whenever it wants. The visor has a microphone built in to it so that it can be turned into a cell phone at a later date. Pager modules, gps modules are all coming. Also, don't worry about compatability, the guys who started and run Handspring also invented the palm pilot.

-pos


The truth is more important than the facts.

Re:Palms and Linux

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

I use JPilot for desktop-side editing of the Big Four PDBs and synchronizing the changes, but I have lots more programs than just the Big Four that I want to keep backed up. In the meantime, I've been thinking of hacking conduit functionality into it (or, better yet, into pilot-link itself) but I'm not quite sure where to begin and it seems to me that malsync would need to be hacked as well, since the whole point to conduits is a single-session form of the separate syncs.

Doesn't JPilot just call pilot-link anyway? I mean, that's what it looks like it does...

I think the easiest way to add in conduits would be to add something into the pilot-link library for a sync program to happen in an already-existing sync session. Nice and simple, yaknow?
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