PalmOS users

In My Humble Opinion
1

Last month I bought a refurbished Tungsten E on Amazon.com. The last PalmOS device I used was a Visor deluxe, and the Tungsten keeps the basic interface I like while adding in the expandability and media capabilities I’ve been eyeing in PDAs without costing me $200+. My only complaint with its performance so far is the short battery life. Other than that, much of the packaged software I either don’t need or don’t have a registration key (Docs-to-Go, I’m looking at you). Acrobat reader is also being a pain in the ass because it apparently wants me to downgrade to v5.0 before I can install the reader on my palm.

The bundled software issues are altogether pretty minor, though, and don’t have anything to do with its performance. I really like this little machine. I’m happy with the basic function package (notes, tasks, etc.), but being able to read Acrobat files on this thing would still be really useful. Any recommundations as to how I might get the reader on my palm without messing with the latest version on my computer?

As for games, I found PocketCity, a cool SimCity clone. It’s not a perfect adaptation, but I still enjoy it. I’ve also tracked down a compatible version of MineHunt from the original PalmOS, and a comparable version of Missile Command. Now if only I could find the puzzle game. :wink:

Right now I’ve got a 128MB SD card in there that gives me just enough room for a good playlist, but I plan on upgrading to 1GB sometime in the near future.

What types of things have the rest of you done with yours? Know any good freeware programs for upgrading the calculator? How about games? Anyone else use a Tungsten E, specifically?

2

Y’now, one thing I just love about the SDMB is that I can open a thread and have absolutely no freakin’ inkling what the OP is talking about. It’s a completely foreign language to me, and for that I am grateful.

Hey, Khan, sorry I’ve got nuffink to help you mate.

:smiley:

3

Try the freeware PalmPDF for reading PDFs on the Palm. It’s not perfect, but far superior to Adobe’s own reader.

You could also give Repligo or Documents To Go a try - both of those being paid software.

I’ll post more later, but they are your best bets for PDF viewing.

4

Ah, sorry. Didn’t see that you’d mentioned Docs To Go in the OP.

5

You’d be surprised how many people say that to me. :stuck_out_tongue:

I aim to please. :smiley:

6

I really like my TX. Spring for the $ to get the Docs to go functionality. I find that I can dump my word and excel docs into my pilot and keep them around for reference and that alone is worth it. I can move all the info over to a palm doc, or text or something, but that is too much trouble. By using the native Office formats I can just load docs that I might need and so am more likely to do that.

7

Right then.

I have a Zire 71 and its mainly used for ebooks, podcasts/radio shows, music and video.

For ebooks, I use a combination of eReader Pro and Palmfiction. The former being paid software, the latter free. I also use Plucker to read web pages / RSS feeds offline, they being grabbed and converted to the Plucker format by Sunrise XP and then synced to the Palm. You could always give Mobipocket and/or iSilo a go as well. Mobipocket has quite a nice desktop app to go with it.

For me audio needs I use Pocket Tunes. Which is bloody fantastic. Supports bookmarking, will play while you run other apps and all that good stuff. If I’m listening to music, then I’ll often be reading something as well.

Video is played with TCPMP. The developers have just released a pay version, Coreplayer, but IME it isn’t as good as the freeware version. Even though they have the pay app out, TCPMP should still be avaliable. I convert my video files with PocketDivXEncoder to ensure they play smoothly and reduce file size.

I’m not one for games all that much, but must confess a thumb-numbing addiction to Bike or Die.

Other handy things to have are Cardreader or Card Export - two programs that turn your Palm into a flashdrive, so you can just drag and drop files straight to the SD card - and something by the name of TimeSync XT which keeps your Palm’s time in sync with your desktop.

For the calculator replacement, I suggest you look at www.freeware-palm.com and www.freewarepalm.com

8

Nothing to add, except that my favorite game on my Tungsten E is Bejeweled2. Love, love, love, am seriously addicted. Unfortunately, all that animation just EATS battery.

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What does Docs to Go do, specifically? Is it a reader? I have an HP IPAQ now (and I find it’s much much better than the PDA I had with PalmOS. PocketWord is my precioussss) so it uses Microsoft’s reader but with the other PDA I used a freeware program to use read documents called Tealdoc. It worked pretty well, and if you used another program called BigDoc you could create your own documents to be read by it. Maybe I can find links to them… TealDoc BigDoc

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Here’s another vote for TCPMP. I’ve got most of the Firefly episodes on my 2gig card in my Treo650. It’s great, being able to watch 'em while I’m eating lunch.

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Indeed. I used TCPMP exclusively on my Palm. Great little freeware player. I now use it on my PocketPC – though I do still have a Palm in the form of a Treo 650. My PPC is my “media machine” though due to the bigger, VGA screen, and my Palm has been relegated to being primarily my phone with some goodies on it.

Some of my picks for cool software packages:

Office:
Both MobiOffice and QuickOffice offer excellent packages for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Both are compatible with MS Office, but I am a little more partial to MobiOffice though because it can read and write MS-compatible Office documents without the need to convert them through a conduit. I never cared for Docs to Go. It messed up my T5 once.

Launcher:
Alternative launchers are great. I was okay with the standard Palm interface, but alternative launchers give you so much more control over how and where things are displayed, accessed and modified, while giving you skinnable, tabbed and docked interfaces. I personally use ZLauncher as my favourite, having tried Launcher+, Silver Screen, WinLauncher and a few others, but YMMV.

Games:
Wow, where to start? Lots of cool stuff. Astraware put out a ton of great games in a variety of genres. PocketCity isn’t bad - but you may be interested to know that there is a genuine authorized SimCity port, too. It’s fun, but I think something about the economics or mechanics of the game are a bit off, because while I could handle the desktop version of the game, I keep running out of money in the Palm version. sigh I also have SimCity 2000 on the PPC, and that’s pretty cool, too. There are also a bunch of emulators available for Palm to run other game systems and computers’ software. Some of them are memory hungry though, and you may need to look into a program called UDMH 5 (Unlimited Dynamic Memory Hack). It changes the way the Palm organizes and uses its heap memory (executable program space) to give you extra executable space – up to 16 megs from what I’ve been able to tell. You should be fine using it on a T|E, but it seems to have a lot of problems on Palm units that use NVFS (non-volatile file system) like the T5 and TX models. It ran great on my old Zire72, but it constantly crapped out on my T5. With UDMH you can also play Doom. :slight_smile:

Bejeweled 2 is great, too, but also check out Super Reax. It’s a similar type of game with a bit of changeup in play, numerous play modes, lots of powerups and bonuses in some of them, unlockables, and hideously addictive gameplay.

Music:
Pocket Tunes. 'Nuff said.

There’s tons more I could rattle off, but these ought to keep you busy.

12

Thanks for the heads up on freeware-palm, Kal. I knew about the one without the hyphen, but “-” has a sleeker interface so things are easier to find. Great suggestions, too. Pocket DivX sounds badass, and I’d really be interested in that Cardreader program. In fact, I think I might have it in my software bundle. My Tungsten did come with a video player called Kinoma, though. The reviews say compresses files to about a meg per minute; how does that compare to your program?

I’d have liked docs to go if I’d just been able to install the damned thing and be done with it, but I don’t see myself using it in the forseeable future. An adapter program for Acrobat files, though, that’d be awesome. I have to read a lot of online journal articles for my classes, and this would save me some paper and space. Perhaps I’ll check that PalmPDF out.

TroubleAgain, based on what you’ve said and my experience with PocketCity, I suspect that any color-intensive app will viciously consume battery life. Guess I oughta cut down on that. :wink:

Elfkin, Documents-to-Go is a program that allows you to view and edit Office files in PalmOS. I’ve read complaints that there isn’t a spell check, which is surprising, even for a stripped down version of office.

Now, time for browsin’. They sure come up with some esoteric calculator programs, don’t they?

13

You know, this brings up one of my big pet peeves with the PalmOS. I had a Palm Pilot Pro, way back in the nineties… and if you compare it to the Treo650 I’m using right now, the OS really hasn’t improved. I mean, I’m sure there’s been tons of backstage technological improvement… but overall, the look and feel of the OS hasn’t changed.

You still can’t link contacts and calendar events, for example- things like birthdays and anniversaries. You can’t do internet shortcuts (icons which pull up a specific website when you click on them)- you have to use bookmarks through Blazer. There’s no “undelete” feature- if you delete something, it’s GONE.

Sure, you can buy third-party software which fixes all of those problems and more- Agendus links contacts and calendar events, Sharklinks does the shortcut thing, the various launchers can undelete… but that’s the problem- you have to BUY those solutions. I feel like I’m being nickel and dimed to death. I’ve made it a personal rule that I’m not going to buy any more software for my phone- if it’s not freeware, I’m not using it.

A shame, really- I’d love to have a better-looking launcher.

14

Sony tried to do this, but it really only amounted to their own kind of launcher, and it wasn’t much better than the T5/TX/Zire72’s “favourites” panel.

This is one of the reasons I left the Palm platform as my main PDA platform: A tragic lack of innovation. While I understand they were bought out by Access and are currently turning into a Linux-based platform, I didn’t think there was really any excuse for allowing the OS to languish as much as they did. OS5 was a major step up in Palm operating systems, supporting the faster, newer Palms with the introduction of the Tungsten|T line, and while there were some new features, it really wasn’t much different than OS4, which wasn’t much different than OS3, and so on.

Palm have been infamous in letting third party developers take care of filling the gaps that Palm (and post-split PalmSource) considered outside its purview. As PDAs became used for far more than just utilitarian data, getting into games and multimedia – for all intents and purposes becoming handheld computers capable of doing just about everything your desktop does – Palm could have taken the initiative to update their OS with multimedia extensions and libraries. But they didn’t. Not even so much as a frame buffer. They just relied on third parties to create their own frameworks for their own applications. Palm just never broke out of the business hardware mentality by taking the OS where people wanted it to go. There were tons of really talented developers who pushed the envelope and made it do some really great things, but they could have been helped immensely if they had some support at the OS level.

Meanwhile WindowsCE, which really had a pretty good grounding in being it good all-round device with lots of support at the hardware level, gained all the ground that Palm was losing by sitting on its laurels, and as I discovered last Easter when I was given a PPC unit, it’s an amazingly capable device these days – a little 266MHz low-res unit was kicking my poor T5’s plastic ass all over the place.

The one thing I do like Palm for is that all of my most needed information is right at my fingertips, just a tap or two away – and it’s really fast at that. The lack of multitasking, a handicap in most other areas, is mitigated by instantaneous response to user input because it doesn’t have to tend to other threads, and I really like that. Windows-based units feel sluggish in that regard. And Palm’s alarms actually work. I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed the damn notification queue even in WM5.0. That’s just silly.

15

I installed TideTool on mine, mostly as a novelty at first, but I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s been useful when planning a trip to the beach for rockpooling, fossil hunting, and the like.

Bike Or Die is a really cool game, but I haven’t yet persuaded myself to shell out for the full version.

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If you’re into geocaching, CacheMate is an absolute must.

17

For some reason, I play FreeJongg mor ethan anything else on my Tungsten C.

And I’d really be bummed if I didn’t have iSilo to let me read documents and web pages on the go.

18

I’ve never timed it, to be honest. I did use Kinoma when I first got my Palm and it’s pretty sucky. Seriously, right now the best video player on the Palm is TCPMP. Maybe after a few more updates Coreplayer will beat it, but right now it’s not quite there.

Here’s the developer’s page for Card Reader.

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BTW, a couple of months back I wrote a bit about how my children use my PDA which got put up on PalmAddict.

20

That’s a real cute story, Kal. You’re doing a fine job of raising a couple gearheads, there. :smiley: