Houston Palm Users Group

May Meeting

Matt — Sun, 09 May 2004 08:04:15 +0000

Today’s meeting was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone who came out. We started off with a presentation covering the new Zire 72. I’ll see if there’s a way to put the presentation on the web later. We had lots of interesting discussion on the best value in PalmOne PDAs right now, I think it’s the Tungsten E but Chris thinks it is the Zire 72.

After the PDA review we covered Bluetooth technology such as how profiles work between different devices. We tried to sync my Tungsten T to my laptop using its Bluetooth adapter and much to my surprise it worked. There was some general bluetooth discussion covering mice and keyboards (get Logitech) and the Treo all-in-one versus the Bluetooth Trio of a handheld, phone, and headset.

Finally we covered handheld PCs running Windows CE, 4 year old technology that is still pretty hot. The website Chris evangilized was Used Handhelds.com.

The other programs we talked about briefly during the meeting:

Job Oppurtunity

Matt — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 16:48:06 +0000

Stephanie Fowler wrote in to ask if we could post this job listing:

Lead Handheld Software Engineer

Position in Plano, TX. Our client is the leading developer of innovative business and productivity software solutions for handheld mobile computing
users.

This position will be responsible for development and maintenance of software Products. The ideal candidate will have the following qualifications:

Minimum of 3 years’ experience developing software commercially.
Must have one year of experience developing for Palm OS using C or C++.
C++ skills are required with at least two recent years of experience.
Requires a good understanding of object oriented methodology.
Experience with other handheld platforms such as Symbian or Pocket PC is notrequired, but would be a plus.

All interested individuals can send resumes to: sfowler@duffygroupinc.com.

If you or someone you know would be appropiate for the job be sure to get in touch with her!

Downtime

Matt — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 16:45:27 +0000

Sorry for the downtime guys, the hpug.org domain had expired and I forgot to renew it. Don’t worry, we’re good now until April of 2005. Now I just need to catch up with posting about the last few meetings.

Download HotSync Manager for Samsung?

Matt — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 03:40:37 +0000

Mike Hammack writes in:

Any idea where I can go to download the right hotsync manager for my Samsung SPHi300 pda/phone? Thanks. Mike

I spent some time on the Samsung site but I when I navigated to the i300 support page it said there were no files available. Anyone have any ideas for this?

Updating Links

Matt — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 01:05:05 +0000

Got this email from someone at PalmOne today:

Dear Palm User Group Member,

We are contacting you to get your help in updating links. As you know palmOne spun off from Palm and acquired Handspring. Now the main site for Palm powered handhelds and Handspring Treo smartphones is palmone.com. If you have any links on your site linking to http://www.palm.com, could you please update them to http://www.palmone.com . You can still leave references in your text to palm and palm handhelds, however we would appreciate it if you could update the linking url. Thank you for your help. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Rachel Bakker
palmOne
Online Marketing

I suppose I can try tracking down old links. The whole split is still a little weird to me. At least they’re not asking us to put the weird 1 in the middle of the name.

PalmOne Considering Options

Matt — Thu, 29 Jan 2004 20:43:17 +0000

There is an interesting article at The Register that suggest that Palm is considering other OS choices, such as Nokia’s and even Microsoft’s offering. For those of you unfamiliar with the recent split, the company we all knew as Palm split into two divisions, PalmOne which makes the actual handheld devices (and recently bought Handspring)… Continue reading

Free Palm Accessories

Matt — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 07:12:35 +0000

From Mark Madeley:

It’s been awhile since I attended a meeting, but I wanted to let you know that I have two items that I would like to give away since I moved to a different Palm.

~~The first is a memory backup module for the Palm m100, Pilot, PilotPro, PalmIII series or PalmVII series. It is a 2mb module from Northstar Mobile called Memory Safe.~~ Comes with disk for installation. I liked it a lot when I had my older Palm.

~~The second is a Palm Modem (33.6kbps) that will fit the Pilot, PilotPro, PalmIII series or PalmVII series.~~ Great for dialing into your ISP. If you load AvantGo, you can browse at home or pull your data down. Also comes with some email software and other apps. Battery or AC power supply (included). Since the PalmVII series is already wireless, the modem is great for dialing into your local ISP when at home or near a landline and avoiding using up your wireless service plan.

These are free to the first person who contacts me to get them. Otherwise they hit the recycle bin.

How very nice of Mark! Get in touch with him if you can use either of these.

December Meeting

Matt — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:38:10 +0000

Thanks to all who came out and brought food. Our meeting which was shared with the Web Technology SIG actually had a bit more content than I expected. We covered the Christmas PDA rankings, had a discussion on the best cell phone service and PDA/phone combinations available, and finally a bit of information from Christopher Hurtado about his thoughts on Graffiti 2. If you took any pictures at the meeting please send them in and I’ll attach them to this entry. I hope everyone has a great holiday!

Meeting Time Clarification

Matt — Sun, 14 Dec 2003 04:01:43 +0000

It seems like the email I sent out announcing the meeting yesterday arrived a little late for some people, so it refers to the meeting being “tomorrow” and you may have received it on a Saturday. Rest assured that our meeting time has not changed, we’ll still be meeting today (December 13, 2003) at 1… Continue reading

Holiday PDA Comparison

Matt — Sun, 14 Dec 2003 03:36:11 +0000

A little bit of the logic behind this table: First off, each table heading is sortable, so if you click any of the table headings you can sort the rows by that criteria. Street price is a rough measure of what I found the lowest price to be online, it may be a little low but is more accurate of what you’ll pay than the list price. Weight is in ounces, memory is in megabytes. The pixels column shows you the total numeber of pixels, which is expressed in the screen dimensions. “MattRating” is a subjective rating of how I think each unit rates as a gift, taking into account all its features, expandibility, the unit in comparison with what else is available, and price.

Model	Price	Weight	Memory	Pixels	Dimensions	MattRating
Palm Zire	$40	3.8	2	25600	160×160	4
Palm Zire 21	$70	3.8	8	25600	160×160	6
Palm Zire 71	$210	5.3	16	102400	320×320	6
Palm Tungsten E	$180	4.6	32	102400	320×320	9
Palm Tungsten T2	$220	5.6	32	102400	320×320	5
Palm Tungsten T3	$345	5.5	64	153600	320×480	7
Palm Tungsten W	$420	6.4	16	102400	320×320	2
Palm Tungsten C	$330	6.3	64	102400	320×320	6
Sony SJ22	$130	4.9	16	102400	320×320	4
Sony TJ25	$160	4.9	16	102400	320×320	5
Sony TJ35	$260	4.9	32	102400	320×320	8
Sony TG50	$260	6.2	16	102400	320×320	3
Sony NX73V	$230	8	16	153600	320×480	7
Sony NX80V	$420	8	32	153600	320×480	4
Sony NZ90	$550	10.3	16	153600	320×480	1
Sony UX40	$510	6	104	153600	480×320	2
Sony UX50	$560	6	104	153600	480×320	7
Handspring Treo 90	$135	4	16	25600	160×160	3

chart: Buying a combination PDA/Phone, like the popular Treo series, is an entirely different kind of decision than buying a straight PDA. First of all, the prices on these tend to be rediculously high, but very few people pay anything close to the list price because phone companies subsidize the cost of the phone when you sign a contract or as a reward for being a good customer. Since many people are already attached to a particular phone carrier, their choices will be limited by what their company offers. Second, with a PDA/phone purchase, most people want a phone first and a PDA second, which means things like weight and size are more important to the final decision, while those can be compromises in case of a regular PDA, such as the Handspring Prism, which was a hefty unit but very popular because of the features it offered. Finally, battery life is crucial in making a PDA/phone buying decision, and there is no good objective way to quantify battery life in a way that we could compare each unit side by side except with unit testing, and without access to any of the models that can be tricky.