The unlocked version of Treo680 is on sell now at the Palm Online store US, price tag US$ 399 for an un-locked version, 4 different color (Arctic, Copper, Crimson, Graphite) are in the shelf!

Links:
Palm Online Store US – Unlocked GSM Treo 680 Smartphone

Ok, I am not trying to be mean or smart, but first thing I saw the news over PalmInfocenter, I felt very uncomfortable.

Quote from MercuryNews:
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”…..

The word of: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone…” sounds very bad in my own opinion, isn’t it their responsibility and job to learn what he thinks they did well and it took them to struggled a few years?

As a long fans of PalmOS, how “smart” then did Palm went in the pass few years? How many market share/maunfactuer/supporter were left? (I do agree the word “struggled” used in the speech tho.)

In an old Chinese slang, there is a say: It does not matter who started to learn first, who learn faster and better become the leader/teacher/master.”

I instantly thinks of the story about “The race of Turtles and the Rabbit”…

Just my 2 cents…
What do you think?

PalmInfocenter – Colligan Laughs Off iPhone Competition
MercuryNews – An Apple phone? Palm CEO says, “What, me worry?”
Louisiana Voices – The Turtle and the Rabbit Run a Race

Just read news over PalmInfocenter:
Rumor: CrunchGear is reporting a rumor this morning that makes the claim that the Treo 680 has been delayed due to a manufacturing error. Their reliable source states:

Apparently 144,000 Treo 680s were shipped out and had to be sent back because some genius forgot to connect the internal microphones.

The Treo 680 is being produced by Inventec. The 680 is the first device they have been contracted to manufacture for Palm.

Hum……..Thats a good mistake, that is just clever!
Wonder who did the QC/QA? I think he/she deserve to get a BIG thumb up AFTER recieving His/Her big envelope.

Link:
PalmInfocenter – Treo 680 Delayed Due to Manufacturing Error?
CrunchGear – Breaking: Palm Treo 680 Delayed Due To Manufacturer Screw Up

Little bit news in the pass week:

The New Commer



A company name Janam Technologies has join the PalmOS family, their device are design aimmed application-specific mobile computers, think it should be the first rugged, barcode-scanning Palm device running on Palm OS version 5+ (OS5.4.9).

Link:
PalmInfocenter – Janam Licenses the Palm OS, Shows New Devices
Janam Technologies

Someone came, someone gone


While Janam Technologies joins, Symbol has made decision they will conclude their PalmOS base devices, and final batch shall be ship in January 2007, Quote from the PalmInfocenter that: “They(Symbol) claim the decision to terminate Palm OS device production was reached not only due to economic factors but Access’ lack of interest in the Garnet OS in the company’s long-term plans”.

Well……alhtough the Symbol SPT-1550 and SPT-1800 is not commonly seen (I have a SPT-1550, and still sees SPT-1800 around in some shops), it is still sad to see yet one another company deciced to quit the scene…

Link:
PalmInfocenter – Symbol Concludes Palm OS Licensing Agreement
Symbol – SPT1800
Symbol – SPT1550

More bad news?


The great (or the only?) company with PalmOS base, buildin GPS manufacturer Garmin has announced to discontinue three iQue models in their line, 2 PalmOS base devices the 3600 and 3200 were marked discontinue…and the 3600a and 3000 is still alive.

Some info suggest that the discontinue may due to the EOL (End Of Life) for the older Freescale’s MX CPU used on these 2 devices, while the newer models 3600a and 3000 is still alive as they were designed to use newer CPUs.

Links:
PalmInfocenter – Garmin Discontinues Three iQue Models
Garmin – iQue 3000
Garmin – iQue 3200
Garmin – iQue 3600
Garmin – iQue 3600a

With the current “In and Out”, think we should do an update list of what is left on the PalmOSes orphanage….

One of a rarely seen PalmOs device reviewed by the great TamsPalm-the Palm OS Blog!

The Aceeca Meazura Rugged Digital Assistant, was design and aimmed for business solutions with IP67 standards.

Heads up TamsPalm for more!

Links:
The Aceeca Meazura review – size and looks
The Aceeca Meazura review – introduction, package contents
http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2006/11/13/the-aceeca-meazura-review-the-meazuras-screen/>The Aceeca Meazura review – the Meazura’s screen
Aceeca – Rugged Digital Assistant Product Overview

While we was “a little bit” disappointed about Core Player for PalmOS released last week, we now have another excitement!

The professional media player developer, Kinoma, has just released their new media player and producer, version 4 EX, Kinoma Player 4EX featuring:

MPEG-4, 3GPP, RTSP, HTTP, MP3, RSS, OPML, Windows Media (Windows Media 9 video and audio) , AAC, and Flash Video…

Not only promising WMV 9 (which is already known to be no no on CorePlayer 1.02), RSTP streamming…….

Stated in their website:
Sites like Google Video and YouTube serve up some of the most entertaining video available anywhere. Using Kinoma Player 4 EX, you can watch the latest favorites from these sites on your handheld. But be careful, you may spend more time watching than you expected.

Thinks it means FLV (Flash Video) used by YouTube, Google Video and a few other online video Content provider, so finally we can watch them on our Palm without the painly converting!(Don’t think other mobile devices do FLV yet, other than MPlayer/FFMPEG on a Linux Zaurus)!!!!!

Hum…………..wonder would VLS works?? (It would be JUST GREAT if it does!)

Too bad there doesn’t seems to be a trial, I will see should I really get it, as there is actually no comments yet on the product.

Too much talking, heads up to Kinoma!!!

Links:
Kinoma – Kinoma Player 4 EX.
Kinoma – Kinoma Producer 4 EX.
PalmInfocenter – Kinoma Player 4 EX Released

A new Open Sourced browser is on the way.

Universe 3, base on their previous development WAP Browser, WAPUniverse, stated on their website it will pack with features that we dream of on our Palm, like Tab browsing, RSS reading etc..

Too bad developer already stated that they have enough beta tester, can’t wait to put hands on it….lets look forward for its release.

Quote from the site:
Features including…
A Tabbed interface (supporting up to 3 tabs)
An address bar featuring a url box and navigation buttons
An Integrated RSS reader
Private browsing (mask the history, cache and cookies)
Support for JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG (with alpha channels) images
Support for HTML/XHTML/WML/RSS 1.0/2.0
Support for WAP 1.0/2.0
Support for Hires and Hires+ screen sizes
No need for the Java VM!
Much more.


Planned Features Include…
Advanced 5-Way scrolling (based off of the Nokia S60 Browser)
Removing the 3 tab limit JavaScript support (using Apple’s JavaScriptCore)
gzip Compression for a faster browsing experience
Opening and saving files to the local file system
And more

Stated in the site, Screenshot simulated. There is no affiliation between the Universe browser and ACCESS.

Added 20061027110243:
Tams PalmOS Blog has a good preview on the beta, feel free to visit tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2006/10/26/a-new-browser-for-palm-os/

Link:
Officall site – WAPUniverse

Earlier I made a post about PalmDOSBOX on TC, in the comments, Reader Maxence MOHR mention question about dosbox.conf.

It is an important config file for PalmDosBox, as it currently still has no setting/preference form for user to set custom settings, nor there is no way to input commands as input was not supported.

I too have the problem at the beginning, dosbox.conf was mention but not welly documentated in
After a few search, I came up with info about dosbox.conf online by the Offical DOSbox, after download and installing it, I got a full dosbox.conf which was for DOSBox Win32.

Then I select the part I need, copy them into a dosbox.conf file and place it on the root “/” of my SD card by card reader.

Below are the content of the dosbox.conf I use:
—————————————-
[dos]
# xms — Enable XMS support.
# ems — Enable EMS support.
# umb — Enable UMB support (false,true,max).

xms=true
ems=true
umb=true

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
mount c /
c:
dir
——————EOF——————

Some Tips on using the GoogleMap Mobile (GMM):

Samsung SGH-i530 running GoogleMap Mobile var GPRS


TC (WIFI), i530 (GPRS) and Treo650 (BT PPP) running GoogleMap Mobile.

Click to enlarge

What to Install?
Although it is called GoogleMap Mobile for Treo, but it does works on other PalmOS devices, I have tested my TC, i530 they both work, forget about the J2ME edition of GMM which needs JVM to work, it is buggy, slow, although currently support a few more function like Favorites.

Zoom.
The Volume button on the Treos is the Zoom button, the 5 way is scroll.

Find.
You can use global find in PalmOS with the Long,Lat of your target location(or Name of the places), there will be an option on the find allowing you to go directly to the location in GMM!

Error.
You need LOTS of DBCache if you really want to play around with GMM on your Treo 650 (TC has lots of free heap, so not a problem, but for all other NVFlash devices…..), or it will report error, I remember my last error was with appox 2.3MB DBCache free (Max Free Chunk), a restart frees the Max Free Chunk, and GMM works fine again!

Others.
Unlike the GoogleEarth for Desktops, with our limited resources (RAM and CPU, Bandwidth wise), some feature like: Enlarge of map in satellite view is not supported, instead it will tell you the requested map is not available, please Zoom out; the fancy Earth view for user to select their wanted location, we need to use “Find”, scrolling is just too slow….

Whats missing?
Of coz, I wouldn’t lame for 3D images support on the Palm port, but looking at the officall discussion fourm on GMM, some features are on the top wanted list:

1. Storage of the Cached images on SD card, currently, they are stored in RAM, which of coz we want more on our Treo…

2. Sending GPS data to GMM, hum…it should be nice, then a “REAL” Map GPS program, maybe with tracking and routing……

3. Sending GIS data from 3rd party Applications to GMM, it would be nice, then the “Custom Field” of the Address Book (Contacts) would be useful!!

4. Most wanted! Storing favorites! we need that, we don’t want to search for our favorite everytime, and it would be really great if KML file by GoogleEarth desktop can be support (Online *.KML or VFS storage).

Links:
GoogleMap – Take the power of Google Maps with you on your Treo
Officall GoogleMap Mobile Discussion group
GoogleEarth – Google Earth KML 2.0 Tutorial

Google has just released Google Map service for the Treos.

Treo 600,650,700p are supported, but I suggest all other PalmOS (OS5+) devices with network connection should work.

The service itself is FREE, but you will need network connection to get GoogleMap for Treo work, like GPRS (which normally cost), BT PPP var desktop etc.

This seems to be the first release so it is not very rich in function, but I am really look forward like support for *.KML (POI and Path) from the GoogleEarth desktop, sending POI data to GoogleMap for location display, or even sending GPS data realtime to it for Tracking…

Heads up Google and install now!
🙂
Link:
Google – Take the power of Google Maps with you on your Treo.
Google – Supported devices
Official Google Blog – Maps in the Palm in your hand