Re: Retro tech

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 2:50 PM, [email protected] [peditors]
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Seems odd to be writing to the group again. I have been trying to shake things up a bit. I'd decided that I was done with my old Palm stuff, threw out my archive backups and got rid of a couple of non-functioning devices. Then I got interested in getting my Zire 71 going again. It was like a time capsule of 2008. And I was reminded of why I found Palms so interesting in the first place.
>
> So now, I have lots of new stuff, including a couple of Clies and a Life Drive. Low End Mac is letting me do a column on Palms and there seem to be some active Facebook groups about them. I carry a Palm plus iPhone these days. I've never enjoyed the iPhone. It's a good phone and camera, plus it's always connected to the internet. I really don't want to be on the Net all the time. I'm actually able to do some planning and keep track of reference materials now. I would encourage you to charge up an old device and mess around with it a bit. It's a lot of fun. I am working on a new blog, pocket-retro.org, but there's not a lot out there yet. Now, if I can just find time to relearn all the pscripting I've forgotten.

I still have a working Palm TX, currently down because I need to get a
new charging cable.

I also have a couple of non-working Tapwave Zodiac 2s, which might be
turned into one working one by parts swapping.  The Zodiac aspired to
be a handheld gaming device as well as Palm OS PDA, and had an ATI
video card on board doing 2D graphics in 320x480 resolution. It also
had 128MB RAM, two fill sized SD card slots that could take 4GB SD
cards.  You could get an SD card that was a Wifi adapter and go online
with it.

Tapwave was never able to get a critical mass of game developers
involved, and went out of business.  This was a case of
misunderstanding what they really had.  The killer app for the Zodiac
was an open source product called TCPMP that could decode and display
a variety of video formats.  There were reams written online about how
to rip DVDs to a form that could be dumped to an SD card, and you
could view them on the Zodiac. Had they realized they had a handheld
media player instead of a games device they might still be with us.

One of the things I looked at back when but did not get was a Nokia
N900.  It was a concept phone running Android, but could also run Palm
apps.

Before Palm went under, they were working on a new version of Palm OS
to replace Garnet.  It would be multi-threading and multitasking and
would be called Cobalt. It apparently was actually completed, but
never got used in any devices.  Japan's Access Corp picked it up, and
announced plans to get it running under Android sou you could run Palm
adds on an Android device.  Android would be the OS under the hood,
and Cobalt would be the UI and provide what Palm apps wanted to see,
converting the Palm OS system calls into Android equivalents as
needed.  They vever3 successfully got Cobalt running, but did
implement a VM in which Garnet could be run, and an assortment of Palm
apps could be run under it.  It actually worked reasonably well.  Of
course, using Android as the basis for a future Palm OS instead of
trying to roll their own is what Palm should have done to begin with,
but the business cemetery is filled with the graves of firms who made
the wrong coice in which way to go and died horribly.

My current PDA isn't a Palm OS device.  I got a pass-along Alcatel
Fire phone from a friend who lost it, replaced it, and when it
resurfaced it got passed to me.  It has a quad core 1.3 ghz processor,
16GB of storage, and a 2.75 x 5" 23 bit color display. It runs Android
Marshmallow 6.1. I don't use it as a phone. It's in a PDA form factor,
and effectively, it's a PDA with Wifi and a decent 8MP camera with
front and rear facing lenses, but I do the same sort of things I did
on the Palm.  It's easier to connect to and share information with my
desktop, which was always complicated with Palms.

I still have a variety of Palm apps archived, so if there's something
you are looking for I may be able to assist.  (I got free or open
source where possible, so that's what I mostly have.)
______
Dennis


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Posted by: dmccunney <[email protected]>
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