Palm Enthusiast

I haven’t updated this account like I wanted to, but with a cert comin up, work, family, church and video games there just isn’t time. w/e

I still see the odd question or two online (as well as people IRL when they see me using a PDA) what possible reason could you have for actually trying to use or cling to such old tech like that? Well I won’t speak like I know why anyone else does it, but I shall elucidate my own reasons in no particular order.

1. Always Had ‘em

I pretty much grew up with a Palm PDA of some sort. I got my first one before the age of ten in the year 1999. It was a Palm IIIe. I only had 2mb of Ram to work with but I was a kid so I mostly was all about the games it could play. Later I’d upgrade to a Handspring Visor Deluxe, a Visor Prism, a Tungsten | E, a Treo 650, Centro and finally a Palm Pixi Plus. So really to me it is just what I am most used to.

2. Legacy Software

Strange as it may sound, there are some applications I prefer to use on a Palm than on anything else. Some are paid for and so are pretty nice such as Document to Go v11 or Pocket Tunes Deluxe 3. Some are free and just so incredibly useful like BigClock, CardTXT or TCPMP. I personally like how some of this software is laid out as well, for pen input. There isn’t really a compelling enough substitute for some of those programs. 

3. The PIM

The Personal Information Management these devices have rivals the phones we have now. If you take the last version of Palm OS 5.4.9 and compare some of the built in apps to ones that you’d find on any smartphone these days, you would find more in common than you think. Also because of the way a Palm works it is simply faster than any smartphone for some basic basic operations. The only thing the Palm can’t compete with is social media and email due to the ever changing tide of internet services and that is to be expected of any live service.

4. It simply works

Just like one of Apples old slogans, Palm devices just work. Unless I am experimenting with lots of diverse software on one device I rarely if ever crash. I’ve had my Z22 from teh day it launched in 2005 and it’s original battery still lasts almost a week with normal usage. My Nexus 4 I bought brand new in 2013 can barely last half a day of normal usage and gets quite toasty when anything intense goes on (My iPod Touch 4g, Lolz). And for the even older models like the excellent Trg Pro, all one must do is provide fresh AAAs and it works pretty much just as well as it did when it was new. 

5. Privacy

I suppose this ties in with point number one but it is pretty important in its own right so w/e. I use my Palm to keep track of my money, be it a credit card, bank accounts or monthly bills. I also keep all my important passwords for all of the internet services on my Palm with several hard back up copies on SD cards in various locations. Like anyone with a password keeper it leaves me able to make long and ridiculous PWs for everything so that when a company gets breached they can’t just use that PW in anything else. And no one can see my PWs because they are disconnected from the internet entirely.

6. It’s Retro

Kind if a funny thing to say but it is true. Some people like to get the actual retro game console to play their old games. Others build beast computers from the late ‘90s or early Y2Ks. I like to collect and use old PDAs. Ask any of the others and you’ll know why. Emulation can only go so far. POSE/PHEM does emulate a Palm OS4 device pretty much perfectly but it isn’t the same. Styletap can run most OS4 applications and many OS5 apps and even if it could run all the apps it still wouldn’t be the same as the physical device.

7. Hardware advantages

These things have real actual buttons that can be programmed to open applications or perform certain actions. The same cannot be said in any capacity for Android or iOS (other than ‘hacks’ to reprogram digital assistants like the Bixby button) Palm devices all have IrDA ports and so can act as a TV remote, fairly useful and it is standard. Palm phones (and indeed many many phones of the era) had physical keyboards with tend to work better for me than onscreen ones. They have headphone jacks (iPhone 7 and on, Google Pixel, lookin at you)

8. Old databases

I personally don’t have this tying me down but i know of some where this applies. You use a Palm long enough and the database for appointments, contacts, tasks, notes and such get huge. There are also many 3rd party database programs where you could make one for anything and transferring it to something modern would be either impossible, a huge hassle or you wouldn’t care because it still works. The thing about these databases is Palm’s device search could find stuff pretty fast so it still has it’s uses.

I’ve gotten this question several times over the years so let me explain. 

And you can skip to the last two paragraphs if you want the “too long; didn’t read” edition

There is nothing quite like finding almost ancient software for a long obsolete system and trying it out for the first time. 

From Shareware to Freeware, big companies to single individuals, buggy and in beta to years of polish; There was once so much out there that it kinda amazes me when I do come across something.

I been on and off trying to make a sizable catalog of Palm software for a few months now. Before that I was going mad trying to find any scrap of software I could find. Basically every .prc file I found I downloaded. I have very nearly exhausted all my known areas for software.

Next, I looked for OS patches and Upgrades. This turned out to be much harder and more difficult than I expected. When HP bought Palm, they also inherited all the IP, the website and all its resources. Among those was all the Palm knowledge base articles, all the HotSync binaries, every OS upgrade and patch. When TCL purchased the remainder of Palm’s IP (brand names, logos and the website) They hinted at some kind of revival for the Palm brand and as far as I can see all they’ve done is use the ‘Pixi’ name on a few lower end Alcatel phones. But, in trying to convey this message they essentially erased all of the Palm website and replaced it with a looping MP4. All links to former patches and binaries are dead. I found it difficult to find these.

It is getting harder and harder with each passing day to find old palm applications and programs. When I first started looking for old software in late 2013, the landscape was already getting very sparse. Very rapidly small shareware programs were going offline forever, moving onto new venture without supporting legacy software or being bought by bigger companies. 

The few companies that still have standing websites are very far and few in between. The best example of this is TealPoint Software. I’ve used stuff from them 10 years or more back. But their website is still live today. I say the best example but it really is almost the only example. 

I remember going to Palm Source to get a look at the Palm approved higher dollar software. It was nothing like App stores are today but it was something similar in its idea. If you buy a Palm_OS 5.4.8 or later device you’ll have software called Addit and it is remarkably similar to an app store, albeit an unofficlal one like Amazons is for Android. But Addit gave you a list of software you could look at, see a couple ratings, how big it was compatibility etc. You could buy software through it and the next time you Hotsync’d with your computer it would get installed. If you were proficient enough, you could do a network Hotsync and get the app right then and there if you had an internet connection. 

There are many software creators and publishers that have all but abandoned palm_OS as a whole and it is understandable. Even in 2008 and 2009 Palm_OS5 was stagnating and becoming ancient. In today’s world it seems downright prehistoric to use anything from before the iPhone first came out. Anyways, I can understand the reasons why devs left palm long ago, Palm_OS today is pretty archaic for many things. But I do wish companies from this time had a way to purchase keys for old software.

Astraware, CoreCodec, Kinoma and Dataviz are some that I can name off the top of my head. These companies created and published some of the best software for Palm devices. Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to legitimately buy keys for almost any software anymore. Even more so is the fact that most of the original websites, devs, software repositories and information on such software has basically been wiped clean from the digital world. 1src.com, dead. Freewarepalm.com (along with all its sister sites) are dead and gone. Mobihand has long disappeared. I had downloaded much from these places before they were gone for good. 

Archive.org is where I got at least a quarter of my software now. Some I had already. A few I got from old pre millennium japanese websites. Still others are from CDs I still have from mobile computing magazines. I have exhausted almost every area of the internet to find some of this abandonware. I only have one option left and that is software CDs and SDs from those days.

Yeah, back when people still bought most computer software on CDs inside retail stores you could also do the same for mobile devices. Palm_OS and PocketPC software was available on CDs for quite a while. Just like games are now a days you bought a CD with the installer and inside the disk case was the product key.

I am therefore left with one option, and that is to buy some used product CDs so as to get software that is no longer live on the web anymore. As always, Amazon and Ebay are the absolute best places for this. I actually have at least three or four of my own CDs from those days. As I am writing this, a CD I bought from Amazon arrived in the mail, hopefully it will have some software I don’t already have.

That’s it for now, have a good day to any who may come across this!

First I got to say, beast of a phone even nowadays. It’s the phone that won’t die and it earned that title wholly.

It came out in the tail end of 2009, the flagship device for HTC. For the record, while I am a Palm user to the end, I cannot discount the competition simply because it isn’t what I usually use. I definitely remember the mobile landscape around then, HTC made some of the best looking and preforming WinMo phones out there. I had my small collection of Palms at the time and even I wanted to have an HTC smartphone in ‘08 and ‘09.

Forgot to talk about it, but some of the last ever Palm OS devices made by Palm was released in October of 2005, namely the Z22 and TX. I own both of these and in fact have had my Palm Z22 since 2005. It needs a new digitizer and battery but my ancient data is still on it. (digitizer died 3 or 4 years ago)

My mother and grandparents got me my Palm Z22 on Black Friday in 2005, originally $99 it was reduced to $79 at Fry’s Electronics.

I have a Zire 72 special silver edition, I may buy a Tungsten T|2 for it’s smaller stature though. Either one will soon be my wireless Bluetooth mp3 player, hopefully I can get some SDHC cards to work with my Zire 72 since there is a driver for it, might have to buy an older card. Unfortunately the T|2 doesn’t have the same luxury and in fact even the Tungsten T|3 didn’t get that driver and that is just a shame because otherwise it could have been the second most awesome Palm to use in ‘modern’ times; it has flash storage, the Palm Wi-Fi card, and it could be physically smaller by sliding it closed. The only thing it possibly misses is the SDHC driver but whatever, the Dev that created that driver was infinitely talented and the fact that it is freeware now is just incredible. 

I find it both interesting and hilarious that expensive and high end phones these days come with Infrared ports on them. 

I remember a time in 2008-2009 when the last vestiges of Palm_OS devices got bad rap for even having IR on them. I’m not sure that people discounted their usefulness as a smarter universal remote but it seemed like it was simply “outdated” for high tech people. And as far as data transfer is concerned, it was.

But that isn’t all, back in the late 1990s, Palm released a new device that was the Palm III, and it had something awesome, wireless connectivity. It was IR of course, and Palm even made special “Palm III” card inserts for the Pilot Personal and Pilot Professional to add the capability to them. It was very special that you could “Beam” information wirelessly when in those days WiFi was something brand new and pagers were the thing to have.

These days it is called an “IR Blaster” and almost exclusively it is for controlling TVs, cable boxes or almost anything with a normal remote control. You cannot move files though these IR ports with stock roms and I am not totally sure you could even with custom software because, I think the phones that have these ports are one way only. I think they are only transmitters and not transceivers but I could be wrong on that.

It really is interesting to see the changes to both these wireless technologies over just 10 years. 

WiFi has definitely gotten faster, stronger and safer since 2005 when Palm devices came out. (well 2003 for the T|C) The encryption has also changed, all the way up until recently, many home WiFi networks did not have any encryption whatsoever, you could just walk around a neighborhood and usually quickly find open hotspots, those with encryption almost always used WEP. And that was fine for that era; but as time went on and WEP was compromised and a new encryption was made, WPA. Well fast forward to today in 2015 and you cannot connect these legacy devices to brand new routers, using default settings will get you almost nowhere unless you disable all the security and enable a Wireless b/g mode. WEP isn’t even an option on most new routers at all. So easy connections are usually at open hotspots at McDonalds and the like. So unless you disable all security or downgrade to an older router your Palm most likely will not be able to get to the Internet easily via WiFi (also note that even open hotspots will require a good enough web browser to ‘sign on’ to use the Internet)

Bluetooth is surprisingly much simpler in most ways, but not all. If you have a modern computer, tablet or phone with the latest and greatest Bluetooth radio you can still easily pair and send files between it and nearly any BT enabled Palm. And as an added bonus, third party drivers such as Softick Audio Gateway (adds the A2DP BT profile) will work with just about any modern peripherals. But the dark side comes in the most used feature of bluetooth to a Palm, Hotsyncing. It is actually amazing how hard it is to get this working flawlessly. And it all depends on the OS, the BT radio and the driver said OS has for it. Sometimes it’s a cinch but usually it is difficult; but it is doable it just takes time. My advice would be to use a cable for Hotsyncing, there’s 64 bit drivers anyways and cables are cheap. Keyboards, you need drivers from Palm themselves to use their own keyboard so using any generic BT keyboard will likely not work. Let me know if one miraculously does work though. 

I have owned Palm Powered devices since the year 2000 when I was 8 years old. I’ve been using Palm_OS since around 1998 or 1999 (kind of hard to remember when I was 6-7, but I do know for a fact that I was using them before the whole Y2K ordeal)

Currently, I own a Palm IIIe (My first ever palm and it still works great!), Palm IIIc, IIIxe, Handspring Deluxe (Ice), Handera 330, M125, Sony Clie SL-10/U, Tungsten | E, T|X, Z|22, Zire 31, Zire 72 Special Silver Edition, Treo 650, Centro and a Verizon Palm Piki Plus.