PalmAddicts

Treo 700p thoughts

Well the the Treo 700p is here, and all I can say is it looks like a fantastic device.

You guys over in the States are amazingly lucky, unfortunately for those of us who have a GSM, UMTS cell networks ( 70 % of the world compared to around 20% for CDMA ) we're stuck with the Treo 650. I say, stuck, the 650 is a great little device, but when you see the shiny new 700p, well!!

All I can hope for is a GSM, UMTS 700p before the end of the year. I'm not hopeful though, all the rumours to date have been of a slimline WinMobile GSM / UMTS Treo which will be released globally on Vodafone this summer over here in Europe.

Will I buy it? No, I'm a Palm OS man to the death.

So come on Palm, show me the 700p for GSM!!

( Well it's either that or move to the states! Are you not tempted to buy one only for your NY visits Sammy? )

How I use my Palm: A day in the Life of me and my LifeDrive.

24 hrs in my Palm Addicted Life...

6.00am - My clock radio wakes me up, I climb out of bed and start the 30 minutes of stretching / core stabilty exercises I do each morning. I cycle competitively at a club level and this sort of stuff keeps the rest of my body in good shape.

6.30am - While I'm doing this my LifeDrive is sitting downstairs in it's cradle. At 6.30am Resco Backup kicks off a backup of the LifeDrive memory to a 512MB SD card in the back of the device.

6.45am - I head downstairs and enter the password in my LifeDrive to unlock it. I always have my LifeDrive set to auto-lock after 2 hrs use to protect the valuable documents I have stored inside, it is a 'Life' drive after all. After this I hit the hotsync button to sync the device with my desktop machine and update my AvantGo channels. Go to grab the ktichen and grab a coffee, ahh, no milk, make a note in my LifeDrive to buy some later!

7.00am - I leave for work but I'm going swimming on the way, I take the bus as car parking near my office is quite expensive. On the bus other people are reading newspapers but I am catching up on the headlines by reading BBC News and Guardian Unlimited on AvantGo.

7.20am - Arrive at the swimming pool and do a quick 1500m. After leaving the pool I walk to my Office about 1km away. On the way I log my swimming to The Athlete's Diary app. on my LifeDrive.

8.30am - Arrive in work. As I sit down at my desk I hit a button in the Timesheet app. on my Lifedrive to start recording the time for the day on the particular project I am working on. As an engineer I work on several different projects trhough the week each of which I have to 'book' or log my hours worked to. Doing this on my Palm greatly simplifies the process of filing out my project logs at the end of the week. I then have a quick read of my email before reviewing the meetings and code reviews ( I'm a software engineer ) I have to attend that day. Also look at the TODO list in the LifeDrive to identify the key tasks for the day.

9.00am - Start work properly, let's start coding! To get me in the mood I listen to a bit of AudioSlave and SoundGarden from my LifeDrive.

1.00pm - Break for lunch. The alarms on my LifeDrive also remind me that I have to give the bank a call to query a charge. I use the LifeDrive to look up the contact number and details of my account.

2.30pm - An alarm pops up on my LifeDrive indicating that I have a code review meetng starting in 15 minutes. I gather my things and head off to the conference room.

4.00pm - That was fun, thankfully not many changes required to my current implementation as it stands. While in the review I was able to note these changes to the TODO list in my LifeDrive rather than writing them on a bit of paper which could possibly get lost.

6.00pm - Leave work to go home, again using TimeSheet to 'clock out' my time loggin for that particlar project. On the way home I have to pick up a few groceries, I check a memo on my LifeDrive to see what I have to buy, ah
milk, that's right.

6.45pm - Arrive home, despite being in the house I keep the lifeDrive clipped to my belt safely stowed in it's Piel Frama case.

8.00pm - Sitting in the lounge looking through some mail, while I'm doing this I have VeriChat running on my LifeDrive ( connected via wifi to the internet ) so my friends can contact me.

9.00pm - The LifeDrive alarm notifies me that one of my favourite shows, House M.D. is about to start on Channel 5. I turn on the TV and put my feet up.

10.30pm - The LifeDrive goes back in the Brando Sound Dock cradle and I head to bed.

11.00pm - ZZZzzzzzzzzz

What a busy day, I never really just how much I use my Palm LifeDrive during the day!

Defragging your LifeDrive: The results

Earlier today I posted about an article I had read over at Brighthand showing how to defragment your LifeDrive to hopefully speed up drive reads.

When I left you the LifeDrive was still defragmenting, so after a couple of hours of defragging here are the results...

First a bit about my LifeDrive and the state of the drive:

Volume LIFEDRIVE
Volume size 3.73 GB
Cluster size 16 KB
Used space 3.13 GB
Free space 607 MB
Percent free space 15 %

Before:

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation 15 %
File fragmentation 32 %
Free space fragmentation 7 %

After:

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation 1 %
File fragmentation 0 %
Free space fragmentation 2 %

So as you can see I had a decent amount of file fragmentation to start and by the looks of it, it's now gone. But what does this mean?, afterall, this reduced drive fragmentation is moot if the user cannot notice the benefit.

And can I? Sort of... well it's hard to tell. I did a few tests, searching for all the music on my LifeDrive ( about 15 albums ) using Pocket Tunes and searching trhough about 500MB of documents in DocsToGo. The process of searching and opening files did appear to be quicker but I can't be sure as I didn't take any sort of qualitive measurements before hand.

So should you do it, I don't know if it's worth it but if you're LifeDrive's sitting idle for a few hours, why not give your drive a spring clean and tidy up.

Defragging your LifeDrive.

Ed. over at Brighthand has posted an interesting article concerning defragmenting the internal hard drive of the LifeDrive.

With a drive this large storing multiple small files file fragmentation, where by files get scattered across the drive out of order, can be a problem and slow down disk access and file searches. Since the LifeDrive can be mounted as a removable disk in windows it's just a matter of running the standard tools to defragment a volume.

A word of warning though, this process can take hours, so it's probably best to start the process running just before you go to bed at night. Finally, although you can mount SD / MMC cards in windows, don't attempt to defragment them. For a start the process will be incredibly slow and worse still flash based memory has a limited number of read/write cycles. By trying to increase the speed of your memory card you may effectively be reducing it's life time!

As we speak my LifeDrive is churning away and hopefully I will see improvements. I'll let you know how I get on.

Palm 700w GSM coming soon?

I was browsing Expansys this evening and while looking in their coming soon section I came across this page. The photograph is of a Verizon CDMA 700w and the blurb underneath mentions EVDO ( i.e. CDMA ) and not UMTS or GSM / GPRS. It's probably only Expansys trying to create a bit of pre-launch hype for an as yet unannouced product but it's interesting none-the-less.

No mention of a release date though.

And would I buy one? I think I'll wait for a Palm OS version myself.

More thoughts on Palm's rumoured new OS

There has been a lot said about the rumours of a GNU Linux based OS authored by Palm themselves rather than going with the Access / PalmSource version.

Palm needs to build something that is very tightly integrated to the hardware and which runs efficiently in a power friendly manner. If they were to go with the ALP OS from Access they would have something that is akin to a jack of all trades, good for feature phones, smart phones and also PDAs but not fantastic on each of the platforms. The basic ALP OS would require significant modification. By way of example, the Palm OS we see on Palm devices is NOT the version that comes direct from PalmSource but rather a Palm modified version that they integrate closely with their hardware.

As many have pointed out, getting a GNU Linux OS running on a Palm PDA should not represent a major hurdle. So why should Palm licence something from Access that they will most likely have to modify extensively to tailor it to their hardware. Why not develop something in house? They set their own requirements for the OS, implement it to the specs of their own hardware, and most importantly decrease time to market on new devices using it.

Palm needs to create an OS that sufficiently abstracts the user from the underlying mechanics of the OS, something efficient and intuitive like the current Palm OS while also having the extensibility of a Linux based OS. The best example of this is Apple using BSD Unix as the core of OS X. Someone using OS X wouldn’t know they were using Unix but under the hood the stability is there and power users can get their hands dirty using a terminal. Creating an OS like Apple’s OS X is not a trivial task but in Palm’s favour integration issues would be reduced if they designed both the hardware and the OS.

What do you think, thoughts in the Forum...

New from Google...

As a company Google never cease to amaze me, a true innovator they constantly push back the boundaries of technology on the web.

In view of this I have great pleasure in announcing Google Romance. It's still in beta but offers hope out there for all the lonely souls looking for love.

It may have be launched a bit late for Valentines day, this being April 1st, but I think this will be big!

Share the Google Love...
[SAMMY] April Fools?

Palm developing their own OS?

We've heard all the recent rumbling from Access and PalmSource about the new ALP OS, but Palm has always been strangely quiet on the matter. Maybe this is why...

David Beers has a good piece on his blog were by he talks about a rumour, supposedly confirmed by a Palm analyst that Palm are developing their own version of Palm OS on Linux.

I have to say this is a great idea, although in theory hardware manufacturers and software manufacturers can exist completely separately, it does help if both are available in house. Palm can develop an OS specifically tailored to their own hardware and one that would not have to be generic for multiple applications
like ALP seems to be. The post also points out that most of Palm's engineering workforce specialise in software and that a lot of new Linux engineers have recently been hired, so something must be happening.

At this stage this is still a rumour but given how far the release of ALP is in the future and how long in the tooth Garnet is looking now. I hope it's true. What do you think?

Additional coverage also at PalmInfoCenter.

Palm, you've come a long way...

With Palm turning 10 years young the other day I decided to use my Palm IIIc and remind myself of how things were in days gone by.

What struck me the most was that although Palm has come a long way in those ten years with colour displays, hard-drives and sophisticated audio and video, the user interface has mostly remained the same. I  can use the IIIc just as easily as I can the LifeDrive which I use everyday.

That's not were the real benefit lies however. I usually keep the IIIc connected to my computer as a backup just in case the LifeDrive fails or I lose it. What I love is the fact that I can copy the datebook, contacts and memos files directly from one device to the other, no conversion required. I can keep two devices in sync, quickly, easily and efficiently.

People sometimes slate Palm as their GUI, features and OS seem stuck in the past. But Palm have been loyal to their userbase, respecting their customers and ensuring backward compatibility for their data. Palm devices today are as usable as they've ever been, how many other computer platforms can say that...

Test Your Knowledge

Are you a Palm Pro?

CNET are running a short quiz over here.

Test you knowledge and learn more about the PDA that has become so much more.

And my score? Why 10/10 of course!