Category Archives: gadgets

Palm Pixie: epic fail again

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You may recall that Palm Pre is kinda sucess, but, in fact, it’s sorta fail. Being in NYC, I usually see any new device being used at all time. Few years ago, Palm Treo was the one. Every time Palm released the new one; yeah, there were tons of them everywhere. For Palm Pre, I honestly say that I haven’t seen one being used yet. The sale figure is just too minimal, esp. when Sprint decided to stick Pre with Simply Everything Plan *only*skull_hero

Palm made news again! Palm Pixie, aka. stripped down version of Pre or Centro series of webOS. It looks badly similar to Palm Centro, but with webOS, it’s much much more interesting (or not?) At the very first, I was about to grab if Sprint doesn’t tie this tiny phone with any plan. Now I just see that it’s missing WiFi. WTH? My best bet would be like Sprint has something to do with it. They just want everyone to have this tying with data plan, so they can get $ more. No-go for me indeed. Why would I have to pay $30 for data while I’m paying $10 a month for data on my Treo and get the same thing. But if Palm won’t release either Pre or Pixie on GSM board + Wifi on board. Then PALM, this 4-letter, will fall out of the market pretty soon. Not to mention whether they are following App store’s policy from Apple or not.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Palm PRE – Will I get it?

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I still work on this question after get my dirty hand on tireless Palm Pre at local Sprint Store. Yeah! Although most of Palm powered devices don’t have any much more attention than any other device on the shelf, Palm Pre is an exception. It, honestly, doesn’t seem like a product from the company with 4 characters like PALM that used to know. Almost all people would like to have hand on such a new flashy device like Palm Pre.

I won’t deny that it feels great in my hand. The rubberized texture on the back does help a lot, but I hate to say the qwerty keyboard is too small & too thin—like Centro which I couldn’t even type comfortably and correctly. When sliding the screen up, I almost lost how to control the device between keyboard and the screen. It’s like keyboard couldn’t do anything to control stuffs and screen is way too far. I wish Pre was taller, had larger screen and used only on-screen keyboard or make the keyboard like what we have on Treo! That would be much better, but with only $199, that’s tough decision! haha

On software side, webOS does give such a nice feeling. Although I hadn’t tried to get to know it much, I feel it has potential to be real successor for Palm OS day, but what I couldn’t figure out is where the zen of Palm. Ease of use? Well, let me tell you one thing, Calendar, and all PIM are only the reason why I still wait for Palm. However, when I made new event for calendar, I had no clue how to get out of that page to the day/week/month view. I have to get to main page, throw the card away and call calendar again. At least, one thing I can say is it’s not that intuitive like what I’m waiting for. Learning curve is definitely helping here, but it’s sad somehow losing all that feeling from this company. Other than not quite intuitive UI like what we have on iPhone, I don’t feel Palm Pre has the edge over iPhone much. Honestly, I don’t like iPhone much, but it still rule mobile’s world.

Time… is the factor here. This is only first time—10 mins perhaps. I might not know the OS and the phone enough to say that it’s worse than iPhone, but the smaller screen, below-par keyboard, not any notification besides screen doesn’t help Palm Pre cuts the edge over iPhone. We’ll see how 3rd generation of iPhone looks like. Then I definitely make a decision whether I will be Palm fanboy like old days or turn myself to be cool carrying iPhone.

I still wish webOS found the way to have PDA-style device on its own. I would buy it in matter of second for sure =)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Verizon Hub – VoIP Renamed

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Verizon hub Well when I first saw the ads about Verizon Hub as “the Home Phone Reinvented.” I thought it was such a good idea integrated some sort of little computer into home phone. With a nice interface, that could really help technology grow exponentially into non-geek folks.

Verizon hub

That’s really neat. I couldn’t wait figure out what is running behind. As a result, it comes with unknown processor, 128MB RAM (as storage??), 10/100 Ethernet, WLAN, support most video and audio codecs, and 7” (800×480) touch screen. On application layer, it has sort of gadget for weather, traffic, movies, traffic, calendar, contacts, tracking system w/map, and messaging (I assumed that it is e-mail?)

Yeah, sounds nice, but when it comes to the price and how to hook it up, that really kills the deal since it basically is VoIP phone and you need *your own* broadband to do so. $200 for device and $35 more a month for service. That is about $420 a year excluding all surcharges. If it really is home phone with DSL + access point, that would be fine. However, this thing uses up our internet. Nationwide free unlimited call is what you can find for free or much cheaper, e.g. Google Voice, or ~$15 for 4 months free US call with VoipBuster, $10 with T-mobile@home, etc, thus this is not counted. That’s just too much $ for Verizon to ask.

Briefly with this setup, I guess $15 or $19.99 for service charge would be an okay point, $25 maximum! For me, I would love to have Eee Top thing + T-mobile @Home over this any day, but hey! this would be nice replacement for Vonage-like users though. In the end, Verizon hub is just another toy with premium price basically, not any innovation or evolution as I expected. You still can’t make a phone call when blackout. If you want more info then jump to VerizonWireless.com/hub [This is not even on Verizon.com]

note: This setup costs $620 for first year + $420 more next year, while Eee Top 15” touch screen costs $600 + $120 a year for T-mobile @home. That’s 7” with limit vs 15” with almost anything :-P

Popularity: 8% [?]

SmartQ Q5 – the most affordable MID in town!

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200903230021I am not exactly sure how good it would be, but its official price tag is as low as I ever see—900 yuan (around $130) That price was on smartdevice.com.cn press release, so it should be reliable enough although it might hike up a bit when across the ocean to the US, but it should be under $200 anyway!

Look at the spec you’ll get from $130:-
- 4.3″ 800×480 capacitive touch screen
- SDHC support
- Wifi A/B/G/N
- Bluetooth with phone tethering support
- USB 2.0 host with full OTG driver stack and support for USB ethernet, 3g modems, and GPS. USB gamepads, as well
- Dimension: 120 * 74 * 14mm
- CPU: Samsung ARM11 S3C6410 667MHz
- 128MB DDR RAM
- browser: WebKit [here]

SmartQ Q5 - WebKit

This ARM CPU has quite good feature, MPEG4 codec, h.264 codec, OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 (datasheet) From the spec and price tag, I wonder how they can make this cheap. I hope it would be available pretty soon. I would give it a try indeed.

There are also applications for Q5 already; as far as I know, SDK will be available right after this product releases officially. It looks promising and it indeed makes MID much more interesting than “Intel” MID. I hope this would give a new low-cost trend for all MID in the future as well.

SmartQ Q5 - media player SmartQ Q5 - e-mail client

Check it out smartdevice.com.cn & more screenshot at mp4nation.net

Popularity: 16% [?]

Fennec – ready to try

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fennec

Fennec – Firefox mobile if you say – is ready to try on almost every platform: Maemo, Windowns, Mac OSX, Linux. It’s basically the binary files, ready to run.

 Fennec -- browser tab [left bar] Fennec -- Navigator[right bar]

It’s really nice interface for touch environment if you ask me, really clean, pretty nice for small screen device like Nokia N8xx – Maemo platform. I’m really happy to see another good browser engine on mobile device, besides WebKit.

Give it a try if you have <7” device, here, otherwise, you won’t find any advantage of Fennec over Firefox ;-P

Popularity: 2% [?]

iPhone OS 3.0 – Major update to crash Pre?

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image

No matter how Apple wants to say this is a big update. It looks like updating features waiting for Palm Pre to me.

* copy & paste
* SEARCH!!
* finally more Bluetooth support!
* Apple Push notification service [seems like Apple wants taking control of everything to me though]
* more GPS support
* etc.

Apple Push Notification Service Apple SDK iPhone 3.0

Although there will be thousand of new API, I still don’t think it will change anything and make anything more exciting to well-established platform like iPhone. Jail-breaker one still is the way to go anyway—more apps, much cooler apps without any interferer. However, there is one thing that could make a difference—search. I would love to see how Spotlight goes in this update, that’s probably the only thing that makes Palm Pre look so great over iPhone to me. With the delay of Pre, I bet iPhone will rule mobile arena for another year comfortably. But $9.xx bucks for iPod Touch user again? That’s a lot. Thinking of $20 last time for 2.0 and a few more for minor updates. Such a greedy Apple.

All in all, I hope there would be a lot more “potential opponents” like Palm Pre over the next year, so iPhone 3.5 or 4.0 will catch up all iPhone 1.0 promise such as Flash eventually. What the heck are you doing Microsoft?? You were better than this  :-P I was so wrong; Windows Phone (formerly Windows Mobile) and all RIM army are still out there standing firmly—we shall see if they will be over hype of Jesus phone or not.

Q4 2008: WM beated iPhone in term of sale, not hype; also RIM shipment over last 2 years never go down a bit [over iPhone always of course]

That’s going to be much more interesting this year. If I were Palm, I would quickly unleash Palm Pre before the *hype* was gone although there still are several bugs or unfinished work—just disable/hide it like Apple did to iPhone.

Popularity: 10% [?]

It’s about time–multi-touch on passive digitizer

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Reply

For old-day-PDA folks, we usually were obsessed by touch screen. Tapping on the screen with our nail to make it a precise touch is just great. However, once Apple released iPhone, it seems like capacitive digitizer rules everything else by multiple-input captured capability.

Now it looks like passive (or resistive or whatever you want to call) digitizer finds the way back.

Well done, now we would have precise touch + eye-candy feature at the same time. When the time is right, we will have a chance to try in person!

via Engadget

Popularity: 3% [?]

Rest In Peace – Palm OS

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Due to webOS and Palm’s laziness, they finally confirmed that there would not be any Palm OS powered anymore at an investor conference. I don’t know what you guys think of this, but for me it’s real sad. It’s the only OS I feel comfortable using it as PDA. Although I gave up on Palm OS after getting Treo, I couldn’t find any replacement so far. Windows Mobile? Too complicated. Apple iPhone? Still not the right one for me. Android? haven’t had a real chance to try—G1 is a phone. I just don’t want PDA phone. I don’t need phone to be smart. Phone is just for calling/answering the ring. Indeed, I doubt that webOS would satisfy my need. We’ll see. I hope Pandora could be the one.

Centro is the best Palm OS Phone ever, I can tell, and it IS the last Palm OS powered device. It’s fast like T|T3 or T|C which you couldn’t find from Treo 650/700p/755. It’s just damned too small and far too late to gain a market share. By all mean, Palm OS still has potential to serve all PDA’s need. Palm, however, just left it cold and was not even care die-hard PDA user. I hate you, Palm, Inc!!!

I decided to resurrect my old Palm powered device list and comparison matrix. It didn’t cover all Palm powered device out there—esp. newer than T|T5, I guess. But it should have plenty more than you can imagine–you will see how much I love Palm OS! If the mood is right, I will update one last time. You may check it out below:-

Good bye, Palm OS!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Palm Pre: worth waiting this long?

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Eventually Palm folks could be sort of exciting of what it will be releasing tomorrow like what we always had long long time ago. Palm PRE! newest release device from Palm, Inc.

It’s a PHONE. DAMN! I still want PDA-only device, but will watch this closely how they deal with Zen of Palm.

Only 2 things I am so anxious to try out are PIM–I still want easy and intuitive calendar like the old day–and e-mail–which is supposed to be as great as Chatteremail. Stay tuned!

Check the Pre out at Palm.com

No word on price, but as expected it should be up as high as Palm could do–$599 probably?? You know? Palm just needs money to run damn bad business.

image image image image

Well there are tons of features which they claimed:

- GPS navigation software (made by Palm, really? I just don’t think it’s Garmin or Tomtom)
- Full Web experience (Well, no words on real engine yet–Webkit? Gecko? well hope it’s not what Palm cook themselves :-P ) [it's Webkit with no flash support, according to pocketables.net]
- The rest is what you can expect from every phone these days.
- Oh I miss another one, fat design device. Palm just wants to differentiate itself from today’s trend I guess and be like what it was all the time.

Personally I don’t like glossy finish of this device that much, but would love to try if this WebOS (can they think of better name? Nova is much better, dude) is good as we are expecting. I’m just afraid that Palm couldn’t reach our old Palm OS folks’ expectation because its web, Palm Pre’s web, still is broken somehow–so unprofessional. Could you think of Apple’s site broken like this? Never..

broken Palm Pre web site on Firefox

All we have is “hope” to have more than 2 great mobile OS besides iPhone’s one and andriod.

Well head over jkOntheRun, for some info about WebOS. I found out that all apps are natively running on browser. In other words, they all are just HTML, CSS, and javascript. We’ll see if that’s the only thing they got.

Still no exact words on PDN about SDK. If it’s really only a “Web” OS, I’m not jumping on this board for sure!!!

Added[Jan 09, 2009]: Pocketables.net has such a nice detail in Palm Pre Lounge; Pre’s feature makes me think of G1 indeed–no on-screen keyboard, small battery capacity. Also no memory slot with that fat design??

Look like the world responds to Palm Pre pretty well–about 40% stock price up. Wait and see if it’s real or just a hype.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Hurting developer’s heart? STUPID MOVE from P*lm

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All P*lm developers should be aware, P*lm will follow you guys and ask you “politely and forcibly by the power of the law” to drop off “p” word you are using as your trademark or whatsoever.

This is what Dmitry, one of the most talented P*lm OS developers, had faced. As a result, he had to move his web site from http://palmpowerups.com [06/07/2005] to http://PlmPowerups.com to avoid such a confusion (perhaps because P*lm couldn’t do any better than him?) and change the SDHC driver to “PlmSDHC” since it has no relation or approval from P*lm [of course, since they DON'T EVEN CARE all predecessors' product]

here is the first post of palmpowerups.com:-

Palm Powerups opens

Palm Powerups opens today. This website will offer to you the software needed to make your palm more powerful, usable, interesting, and exciting. The currently available products include UDMH, warpSpeed, skinUI, Picsel Accelerator, and SysNfo. Of course you can expect many more great programs from Palm Powerups in the future, and your ideas are always welcome in the forums

Posted by dmitrygr on Tuesday, June 07 @ 16:50:43 MST (15 reads)
(Read More… | Score: 5)

I haven’t seen anything telling he worked at P*lm, just one developer that wanted to make Palm device more powerful! [which is a good thing for them, right? I'm not so sure if P*lm thought the same way]

P*lmRevolt [1/4/2006] and P*lmInsiderPro [03/20/2006] also got a notice and changed the names to pRevolt and ZInsider respectively. I don’t know what P*lm think really since all these programs and names has been up *PUBLICLY* for many years ; why now?

“The letters P-A-L-M reflect a prized brand with significant customer awareness and earned loyalty,” said Ed Colligan, palmOne president and chief executive officer. “Innovation, power, ease of use, and elegance all are attributes of the brand, and we intend to invest to turn what is a strong name today into a household word synonymous with leadership in mobile computing.”

What they are proud of when getting it back from palmsource [$30M -- 3.5 years installments from 5/24/2005]  — I just realized they haven’t paid off it yet! [few more months left =)]

Just putting a note ” *** is not affiliated with or endorsed by P*lm Inc in anyway” isn’t enough? They support you & they do everything to help you get better product but you just want to destroy that, what a shame! although you have all right to do so. How come you haven’t chose more mature way, e.g. releasing policy will effect the software released after this day or something or mentioned this at the first place. Oops I just realize that they probably use Garnet for a long long time without releasing newer OS, so they have to think of such a dated software as well.

It’s just plain STUPID. I think the doom day is closer than you think.

Go back to work, P*LM.

update [2 weeks later]: Palm seemed to react to this issue as they should do firstly which is letting PalmPowerups.com continues its name. However, all product names which has this-4-letter-word still need  to abandon their name. I think they ain’t busy working Nova enough.

Popularity: 2% [?]