PalmOS Page (cont'd)
Oh good... there you are. You haven't given up on me eh?
Okay so where was I? Oh yes.. SPUG. Nice bunch of people. It was also here that I learnt that I could easily upgrade my Palm IIIe from the normal 2MB to a full-blown 8MB, even though Palm Inc expressedly forbids it. Cost me $100, but it was worth it. After the upgrade my Palm IIIe (remember, it was supposed to be the low-end model!) was equal to any other Palm device out there. I had oodles of memory to load software and do some experimental "software development" on. By the way, my experiments didn't really take off :) I'm still a rank novice at writing software for the Palm, but I'm in no hurry...
 Palm IIIxe, with 8MB RAM |
So anyway, tragedy struck on 19 Dec 2000 (1 year and 4 months later). My Palm died, and I had to get a new one (See pic on the left). I committed my Palm to the memory of the Palm Graveyard. My particular obitury is listed here. When my Palm committed suicide, I had no choice but to go out and get another one. "Upgrading" wasn't even in my mind. I just wanted the same thing I had been using all along. When you get your own PDA, you will find yourself getting very attached to it, trust me :)
By this time, the Palm IIIe was already "obsolete". They were not sold anymore. The next closest thing was the Palm IIIxe, a newer version with 8MB already onboard. Okay okay I know what some of you are saying ... "8MB only? Where got enough?!". Well, remember, this is a device NOT made by Microsoft, and so it's not running any "bloatware". The stuff on it are small and fast, and each software does its own job very fast and very well (Unix philosophy). 8MB is definitely more than enough. PocketPCs, on the other hand, need faster processors (100Mhz or so) compared to the Palm (16Mhz), and need 32MB or more RAM too. No prizes for guessing WHY though :)
Once I got home, I just plopped that little guy into the cradle, pressed the sync button and viola! All my stuff were back in the new Palm, just like the old one. Good thing I had the backup software called BackupBuddy! Without it, I would have had to reinstall every software from scratch, but since BackupBuddy was working as advertised, it was as if nothing happened! While you're there, check out the other stuff made by them.
The Palm IIIxe served me well. In December 2001, I decided to finally upgrade to a Zire 71. At the time it was THE multimedia Palm. It has a VGA Camera, able to play MP3, has a colour screen that finally could be read under bright sunlight (one of the reasons I didn't get a colour screen Palm before was they all used TFT and you can't read anything under the sun), and with a movie-player software, you can even watch movies on it.
Yes, today, I am still using the Zire 71. The only thing I am missing right now with it is that it doesn't have FM Radio. Carrying around MP3s (or OGGs or WAVs etc) is fine but sometimes I just want to listen to the radio for the news you know? So I bought a MP3 player. Yeah I joked with my friends that I have a brand new thumbdrive that could play music, but then again it's not far from the truth - an MP3 player essentially is a thumbdrive that could play music on its own. Yes you can use your MP3 player to save other kinds of files too! If your MP3 player appears as a drive on a computer, it is a "thumbdrive that plays music" heheheh!
Update - 7 Oct 2006
My Zire 71 finally took its last breath, and died on me.
Actually, it didn't :) Age and wear and tear must be catching up to it,
because for some reason the writing recognition started to fail and I
keep writing the wrong letters. No amount of fiddling with it the digitizer
could fix the problem, so I thought I may as well go get a new one. 4
years of service from the Zire 71 is pretty good.
So yeah I went and bought the Palm TX. This is probably the last Palm PDA that Palm will ever make, since their business strategy appears to be headed in the direction of smartphones (Treo650s, Treo700s etc). This TX better serve me for the next 4 years till 2010!
Update - 3 November 2007
So it's been a year since I got the PalmTX. So far it's been working like a champ, although there must be some conflicts between the apps. When it's totally empty, like when you first take it out of the box, all the default apps run fine. However when I load my stuff into it, the default WebPro (web browser) would crash upon startup. I'm lazy to figure it out so I guess I'll live without it.
Anyway, the hardcase I bought for it looks battered and worn. Truly worth the 50 bucks. My PalmTX inside is almost unscratched. The screen protector was changed once some time this year, cos somehow the writing area of the protector developed a HOLE. Well, this new protector hasn't seen any holes yet.
As you can see in the above pic, even my friend (face blurred intentionally. I don't wanna get scolding for putting her face up on the Internet) can't resist poking at her PalmTX during drinking session. She's just sooooo busy!
