Comments on: SanDisk Releasing Zire 71 Wi-FI SD Card

Note the absence of evil plots in my self-answer, though it in fact would explain a number of things - while agreeing with known facts and with what Mr. Combee (for example) said.
Of course there's still need for external confirmation, since it's only a guess - however well-educated I think it to be. But for starters it does not ask for blind faith, does it?

I have told you repeatedly that Palm has the SD Bluetooth drivers, yet you prefer to believe otherwise.

Yes, I have this nasty habit of believing in what I can check ... rather than the evil secret plots that some anonymous chap rants about on some website.

I even asked Ben Combee and Michael Mace to comment on the drivers on your behalf.
(I already did this, but OK, let's play it again)
You *even* asked. Wow.
(that's it. Want once more?)

Now I'm gonna ask them if they killed JFK and why they want to sell us as livestock to the martians. And if they don't answer, then we will now for sure that they are guilty. OK?

The (usually chatty) Mr. Mace is suddenly silent
Chatty? I think I've seen him here... about 3 times on the last 5 months. Let's say once a month. Is that chatty?

If the drivers did not exist, how could my contact have several Palms running SD Bluetooth cards flawlessly?

I don't know. Too much booze?

Why has Michael Mace simply not popped up here and issued a statement saying there are no drivers? Simple.

Yes, I can imagine Michael Mace poppin' up here, saying "there are NO drivers" ... and you staying all calm and cool, gracefully apologizing for your rants... and we all departing as good friends, enriched by the information exchange...
...erm, no, I don't think so.
If I were him, I for sure would not even try getting into this kind of stupid catfight. After all, Palm* knowledge base is there to remind us that those drivers don't exist. You know, officially at least. (*wink, wink*)

Palm purposely crippled the OS and it takes about a 5 KB update to add Bluetooth SDIO functionality back. A 5 KB patch. 5 f-ing KB!.

Would you care to ellaborate on that, please? Because it sounds a bit absurd. Are you talking about a 5 KB driver? Or about a patch? If the latter, then we still need the drivers, and as Mr. Combee said, it's easy to develop drivers that only will work on a single device. So...?
(not that I can see much meaning to the "5KB" thing... what would change if it was 100 bytes or 2000 KB?)

Ultimately, people have to weigh the evidence and decide for themselves.
EXACTLY. Now, where's your evidence? Oh, I see, you can only offer lack of evidence. "No one says anything, so I am right".

If enough people email Palm demanding the drivers, the update could be on their site by Monday. MONDAY.

And if we raid the offices, we could get the drivers RIGHT NOW!! Get the torches! This is war!

My man, don't you think they must have been asked a number of times about those drivers? How many people would happily buy the card? How many would buy bluetooth-less Palms, knowing that the card is there when they feel like upgrading?

I think you're starting to see what I've said is the truth, but you're too embarassed to admit it.

Yeah, now even I am part of your proof.
Oh my Dog.

Think about it, Frosty. Bluetooth implementation is NOT rocket surgery.

This coming from the guy that writes "JAVA", says that Windows95/98 was perfectly stable and things got worse afterwards, does not know what BSD is nor what it has to do with Unix, and does not understand what wireless file sharing could be good for.

You still have not answered what I asked some time ago: have you ever used a compiler?

Be happy. :)

You can have it!

Gimme my TH55 any day by comparison.

Unless... Anyone know how to override copy protection (which may be illegal) to transfer pre-programmed MMC cards to Memory stick?

I am sure if you want to read more tirades on Mem stick, go to the Sony suspension of clies article, there must be many there. Some find it menial, others find it everything.

In my case, I was upgrading from another Clie, so it was all good.

It was Palm's lousy workmanship that drove me to Sony. I had worse feelings over that.

-----------------------------------------------

clueless:

adj. 1. not providing any clue.
2. completely uninformed or unaware; hopelessly ignorant; utterly bewildered.
3. You.

Anyway, Alric, in case you didn't know, you can run Palm OS 4 on PocketPCs - and so you can run any Palm app you want... in case you don't find what you need native for PocketPC, of course. Which I'm starting to think is unlikely.

http://pocketprof.org/running_palm_os_software.htm

(if you try / have tried that, please tell us if it works OK!)

The funny thing now is that Facey will disdain that capability of PocketPCs saying that "it is only OS 4, not OS 5"... like shown here...

(wow, Facey, THIS is pityful! your post saying THIS was deleted! aw...)

Anyway, let's go on. The funny thing is that with his next breath he will say that the "difference between OS 5 and OS 4 is meaningless, as we already know"... as shown here:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=6915#95335

Learning logic with Facey: a mind-bending experience!

So, Frosty, have you actually used a PPC and run Palm apps on it with an emulator? Please enlighten us. Or are you just spouting more uninformed BS again. I told you before that years ago someone made a very crude emulator that was PalmOS 2 level. The new emulator you reference sounds like beta/vaporware. But no doubt you have extensive experience using it. Time for you to start advocating JAVA for Palm again...

So I guess I should accept, publicly, that this time you have a point - kind of. I didn't reach the actual downloadable when I posted that link, and I confess I thought it was right there. But actually looks like it was stopped cold about 2001 because of legal problems (note that: not because it could not be done!!). Abosco mentioned something about this, but didn't locate it properly (he said that when talking about the Zaurus, which looks like having the complete POSE emulator - not only as Linux source but also as a standard Debian package, which should be installable with a single command).

Let's see then what we DO have for PocketPC. For starters, there's still the basic question: which Palm OS app would you want that is unavailable, or without equivalent, on the Pocket PC side? (some time ago I already asked you and never got an answer, even though I gave you some examples of PocketPC apps not available on the Palm OS side...)

I'll make things easier for you and assume that for any reason you still want some kind of cute little calendar only available to Palm OS. Or perhaps you have some expensive software you want to keep, who knows, perhaps that can happen - even though sometimes the PocketPC alternative would be more capable and free (*chuckle*) (I'm chuckling a lot lately, heh).

So let's go for it. You have 2 different sources on Palm's website (Windows and Unix/Linux).
I'd try first to compile the Windows source using M$'s tools.
If that didn't work -which is probable, and I don't know how easy or hard could be making it work-, I'd try compiling the Linux version. Remeber that GCC, the "Linux compiler", got ported some time ago to run natively on PocketPC? Things got (even) better meanwhile. Looks like all the needed pieces are here:
http://mamaich.kasone.com/fr_pocket.htm
I'll translate that to you: Cygwin is the Windows "environment" that lets Linux programs compile and run on Windows. EVEN THAT has been ported to PocketPC. And so in that page you can see screen captures of Bochs - a whole PC emulator for Linux- running on the Pocket PC. And the emulator is running Linux (whoa!) and old MSDOS games. (Remember when you said "Pocket PC is a joke"?)

Now, to make things interesting, you COULD run the PalmOS emulator on the Linux installed on Bochs... or even install a full Win9x on Bochs, and THERE you could also run the Palm emulator. In fact you could even run the Palm Simulator, which is Palm OS 5 compatible and surely faster than the emulator. Nice, huh? :D
However, since that would surely still be slow, let's try a bit harder.

I would try using GCC+Cygwin on the PocketPC to compile the Linux source of the Palm OS emulator.
I can't assure it WILL work until I try, but I'm already eyeing M$'s tools (mainly the PocketPC emulator, since looks like I won't need anything else ;). When I try I'll report - whether it works or it doesn't. That won't happen until about mid-July, anyway. So you have about 4 weeks to pray for it not to work ;).

Disclaimer: I'm just talking about possible uses of GCC and Cygwin on the PocketPC platform to take advantage from existing code. This discussion is only for educational purposes; as already mentioned, porting (or perhaps even using) the Palm OS Emulator to a PocketPC could be (somehow?) illegal or at least frowned-upon by whole hordes of fully armed, trained to kill, well fed and bored-of-being-idle lawyers, so I'm not encouraging you to do so - in fact perhaps you shouldn't. Use these ideas at your own risk.
And don't use dangerous machinery while doing it, anyway.

(However, I'd like to know what would a lawyer say about using the Palm OS emulator/simulator over Windows9x over Bochs on the PocketPC... :)

The difference between me and you (well, one of them, thanks Dog), is that I like to start saying what I DO and DON'T know. If someone corrects me, good, because then I'll know more.

In the meantime, you postulate, predict, fail to produce proof of anything, and anyway insult anyone who fails to agree with you - and sometimes even the ones who are like minded. But surely that's just because you're experienced.

You have a bloated, unstable OS that makes simple functions (like closing programs) much more tedious than is necessary.

Have you ever tried putting 2 .jpg (or .doc, or .mp3, or whatever) files on 2 different folders on a memory card by hotsyncing? (is that simple enough for you?) It's not only tedious and SLOW for only 1 file - it's just impossible for 2 files.
Now, I must accept that Palm OS is not bloated. At all. In fact it could use some flesh to cover those bones.

You get a smaller software library, but this is definitely less of a factor in 2004, since most major Palm apps now have good PPC equivalents. Two years ago, this wasn't the case.
Hey, how did you realize that now is not, well, 2 years ago? Somebody told you, huh?

That's what you get.
Apart from a platform that does not consider itself as just "a glorified agenda". A platform capable of emulating a full PC or running a nasty full web server like Apache - and not only calculators and maps and book readers, even though they use the same 400 MHz processors. And if chosen correctly, you even get devices capable of switching OSes and behaving like full computers.

You don't get a stable, slick, intuitive OS.

Stable? I don't remember which one was the first app I installed, but I do remember that the 5th one was Crash - so that the device would soft-reset itself as necessary without having to take it out of the case every 15 minutes. But don't let that stop you, man. Tell me more about stability, you Windows-95-is-stable freak.

Yesterday I had to just delete Acrobat Reader because no app would run, and most would cause a crash. One of them managed to complain about low memory (before crashing), even though I had 15 MB free. Hotsync also reliably died, so I was damn stuck. And how did I think about deleting Acrobat Reader and not any other program? I had hotsynced a 20 KB PDF earlier that day, so just tried that. And it worked, thanks Dog. Surely that's intuitive - apart from stable.

You don't get the ability to easily code your own apps.

Do you know .NET, by M$? (No, of course you don't). Have at least ever heard anything about it? It's, erm, like say PDAToolbox, but BIG. VERY big. And POWERFUL. VERY powerful. And it's free. VERY... well, whatever, you get the idea.
So: have you realized how many apps are appearing based on .NET Compact Edition? (No, you haven't. Well, you should).
What is doing Palm in the meantime? Or better, what can they possibly do, apart from letting you toy away (after paying) with cute thingies like PDAtoolbox? Palm OS is right now just a nasty bottleneck.

Dear Dog, who would have guessed that ***I*** would end up actually defending M$... How sick. :P
Well, even the Open Source community is making 2 .NET clones (compatible and cross-platform), so Linux is covered. The problem is still: what about Palm?

Oh, about the apps... You mean there is no iSilo for PPC?
http://www.isilo.com/download/iSiloPPC.htm
(are you sure you don't want Avantgo with that? you're full of hot air, blah, blah blah...)

DALauncher? Hey, I thought that's exactly one of the kind of things you don't need on PocketPCs... they CAN multitask properly, remeber? So you can substitute minicalc, pop up calc and the-next-calc-hack-you-can-think-of by a proper calc.
Same thing for TealHack.
If there are specific functionalities of hacks unavailable on PocketPCs, please share.

And I see you like launchers. Cool. Reportedly they are not that necessary there... you know PocketPCs can install apps on external memory without problems, do you? Anyway, you can choose here.
http://www.hpc.net/file.asp?ObjectID=46881

McPhiling? I guess the standard, included explorer will be enough, thanks. You see, they have a filesystem, so they have utilities to manage it.

T9?? I'd prefer Fitaly...
http://www.textware.com/wince/pocketpcfitaly.htm
...but you could try PDAMill's TopKey or WordLogic's predictive keyboard.

Vexed? Irked is a direct port.

CryptoPad? eWallet is cross-platform.

Uninstaller? Remover looks more capable, and free - for now.
http://www.geocities.com/s_k_s_k_s_kru/util.html#remover

Icon manager and icon editor?? Are you joking?
http://www.pocketicon.com/

HanDBase? Man, that's available in both platforms.
http://www.ddhsoftware.com/handbase.html

HandyShopper? Ha! I've seen a number of shopping lists, but surely you'll ask for exactly this... Well, anyway the author has switched to PocketPC and is working on HS3... look for yourself at question 29 at HandyShopper's FAQ:
http://www.ggaub.com/hs/faq.html

Perhaps you should try using Google a little bit? (*chuckle*)

Well, now let me ask for some apps. Note that I have hardly used PocketPCs, but these are some of the interesting apps I've stumbled into and I can't find for Palm.
VNC server
WiFive323 (Voice over IP)
WiFiFoFum, or PocketWarrior (or any other WiFi scanner)
Any of the lot of games using GAPIdraw, which only recently got ported to Palm OS (there are 126 of them!)
GCC, Cygwin (full development power everywhere you go)
Python (scripting - very fast app creation, even with GUI with adequate add-ons)
a selection of JVMs (forget you are on a strange platform)
MAME and other emulators, including a full PC emulator (Bochs), capable of running Linux and Windows 95/98 - hey, you didn't say a thing about this! :)
Quake

(I will not ask for Apache - the web server - and the like, though they ARE available for PocketPC. Yuck)

If you can come up with a STABLE PalmOS 4 or 5 emulator for PPC in the next month, I will pay you $100 for the file. There are thousands of us that would love to use PPC hardware yet still have access to our (superior) PalmOS app library.

Hey, imagine how much would be paid for some way (like, drivers?) of making Palm's BT SD card work on OS 5 devices! : >

Others wiser than you have tried and failed, Frosty.

I already said that the emulator was stopped because of legal reasons - not because it was "too difficult". In fact the emulator was in Beta and had a publication date. So now, if things go like they should, there will no need of wisdom. The pieces are there, my man, and I already outlined the process - even though porting and C programming are not my strengths.

Now, imagine which kind of herculean task would be emulating Windows CE on a Palm PDA...

Come up with the emulator in the next 4 weeks and you'll get my $100
Yeah, sure, I believe you. Anyway, read my post again: I said I'll be able to start trying on mid-July, if all goes well.
But I'll let you know what comes out, wheter it's positive or negative. You know, I don't like that game of "if it works then I was right. If it doesn't work, then I was right and there is some evil plot against me". Sounds familiar? :)

Okay, so which PPC app is it that can edit native Microsoft Office files without converting them to some "Pocket Office" format which removes basic office features such as tables? I didn't think so.

Plus, is there anything like the PWCPP for PPC? I didn't think so either.

Anyway, I.M. Anonymous: I'm NOT, repeat, NOT advocating for Pocket PCs. I'm just pointing out to some points that they have incredibly better covered than Palm OS. And that's not because they're good, it's just because Palm OS is SO BAD. And while people keep singing how perfect Palm OS is, the more stale it will get. Facey is the perfect example: if you read his posts you'll end up believing that there is no need for Palm OS 6, because everything you can possibly want to do with a PDA was covered with OS 3 at most - surely with earlier versions too. "PDAs are not desktop computers" - a genius, I tell you. (Now looks like Sony stops Clies and starts OQO and such - heh)

Then, of course, you will casually see what PocketPCs can do, even on older hardware or previous OS versions - and your jaw will feel like lead. I'll repeat what I've said some times now: Palm OS was surely PERFECT for older/limited devices (m100 series, Zire) , but selling T3-class hardware with Palm OS 5 IS a crime. Hardware several times more powerful that many of the computers I've used on my life, and yet it does - what? Calendars? Thanks Dog it plays MP3. My 120 MHz PowerMac with 16 Mb RAM did that, and a bunch of other things too - all at the same time. (and the OS on disk could be reduced to about 20 Mb...)

And put it all in context: we're talking about Micro$oft, who in a lovely (though, for the people that know them, perfectly expectable) irony can't come up with a good Pocket Word, and being Micro$oft it's just logical that Dataviz won't try to do a Documents To Go for PocketPC, so the platform is stuck with that contraption. I LOVE that, believe me. But where is Palm OS going in the meantime?

As if this had not been said enough times: Remember Internet Explorer 2.0? And Windows 3? Previous versions where abysmal, but these were kinda "good enough - and cheap!" for some people.
What happened when M$ put out IE 3? And Win95?
And what was the competition doing?

:(

If you think the mobile device market (PDAs/smartphones/MP3 players, etc) will go the way of PC market, yes, Dell has commoditized the market. But, Dell only has 6-7% of the total PDA market since launching its first PDA more 18 months ago, which is significantly less than the 25% market share they were predicting at the time.

One needs to look no further than the cell phone market to know that form factor matters. Nokia is losing market shares these days mainly due to its lack of flip phones product offerings.

While T3 may not compare favorably to the new Dell, the Zire 72 holds its own against Dell....about the same price with the same processor but one trades the wifi for a 1.2 mp camera. Of course, there is always that Palm OS vs Pocket PC debate.

Just my $0.02