Father, Partner, Architect, Music enthousiast, Avid reader, Idiot
a new pda
I have been with a palm pda since 1998. A palm V was the first one, with a whopping 2mb of memory. I used it for reading, notes and the calendar.
Slowly over the years the palms got upgraded in chronolical order:
- Palm V
- Palm Vx
- Palm M515
this had a color screena and around this time I started using the pda as a navigation machine. using tomtom. My library of ebooks was growing and I was pleased.
- Palm Tungsten T.
This was the first machine I did not like. Apparently Palm did not like it either and they dropped it quite fast. Tomtom never really supported it, A jvm was never really supported on it either. It had a good screen though.
- Palm Tungsten T3.
I loved this one. Nice fast machine. Tomtom ran on it, a jvm ran on it. A good screen too. I lost it in the most horrible way. I left it on the roof of the car when I drove off. You know how you put stuff on the carroof when you want to get your keys or your hands are full.It's a pity.
- Palm Lifedrive
I have always had a love/hate thing with the lifedrive. The 4gig harddisk was awesome, the NVFS memory loading from the harddisk was really slow. The screen was awesome. Wireless and bluetooth!. I never did use the wireless. The bluetooth was used a lot as it was a great way of sending material to and from the computer without having to cradle it. Battery life was bad. especially if you used it as an mp3 player. After a year of heavy usage it started dying. Of course this started after the warranty was expired. I still use it so every now and then when I am coding in a cldc.
- Palm Tungsten T5
This little machine was used alongside the lifedrive for a while. It is a good machine. No comments on that. It did everything it needed to do and it did not shine in anything that it did. A workhorse and a dependable one at that.
Then Tomtom dropped support on most palm devices on the new tomtom mobile. Only the treo models were still supported. And I don't like most of the smartphones at the moment. This dropping was in the middle of me not being happy about slugging around a lifedrive and a T5 in case the lifedrive fritzed again. (I was not happy about a lot of things, but that is another blog). While looking at what was happening on the mobile/pda/small market I found the replacement machine. A Windows mobile, now there is some getting used to. it's an HP Ipaq 5940 travel companion. It has tomtom 6 pre installed :). 
The screen is less then the lifedrive or the T5, but that is the only negative thing I can say about it. It has gps, wireless and bluetooth installed. It's light, it's fast, it has a normal mini usb connection. It supports all the readers I used on the palm. Battery life is impressive. Several tools I used on the palm are available for windows mobile 5. Several even had guides on going from a palm to a windows mobile.
Some problems still need to be solved. Syncing on a linux machine for one thing. There is a project on going called synce, but it is far from stable. I bought cardexport from softick so I can use it as a usbstick, but that hangs the linux kernel :(.
So there are still things to be solved, but I am happy with this machine. There is a supported JVM from IBM for it and you can even use the CDC profile and SWT on it. I just need to figure out what toolset will be the best to use.