Sunday, including PDA thoughts

[cellio]

Today we got together with my parents to celebrate mothers' day, our anniversary, and my father's birthday. We took them to Sunnyledge (I think that's the name of it), which does a very good Sunday brunch. Ironically, while the buffet usually includes a couple kinds of fish that I can eat (along with meat, which I can't eat, and other dishes, which I can), today the ocean-based offerings were shrimp, mussels, swordfish, lobster, and lox. So one out of five. :-)

My father recently got himself a PDA. I was curious to know more, because he has the same vision problems I do. He was constrained in also needing something Mac-compatable, so his choices were more limited than mine would be, but for one data point, his looks pretty good. He has a Tungston E, which has a crisp, legible display that can fit a fair bit of text in fonts I can read. The graffiti interface is also much easier than the last time I used one -- this was "Graffiti 2", and most of the strokes look like letters, rather than semi-thematically-related glyphs (like an upside-down "V" for "A", which I remember encountering before). I was completely unable to write a "k", and my attempts at "u" kept producing "v" instead, but I think a small number of hours of practice would actually fix that. And I could write resaonably quickly too without it getting confused, which had not been true before.

My father carries his in a shirt pocket. Women's shirts don't tend to have that pocket, and even if they did the placement would be, err, suboptimal, so I'd need to find something I could reasonably carry in a back pants pocket. I imagine this has constraints on size, heat-tolerance, and durability. (Or are there belt-based solutions?)

I'd also need to think about how I would end up using it; things like the calendar, address book, and standing grocery list are obvious, but can I use it as a text editor to, say, compose LJ posts or edit a D&D character sheet when I don't have a real computer to hand? I know there's a Hebrew calendar out there somewhere, and someone I know has a siddur for hers, both of which would be handy. I'd want some application that supports a table or database of all my books/CDs, so I stop accidentally buying duplicates; I assume that's straightforward. I'm going to assume that music applications are not feasible.

What do people who have PDAs end up using them for after the first few months? (I know that dglenn also asked this question recently.) What's involved in having web-browsing? (What do you pay in monthly service fees?) My father didn't have a browser on his, so I didn't get a feel for whether most web sites even render on such a small screen.

I'm not going to run right out and buy one, but I'm at least entertaining the idea now, which is a change.

Short takes:

Fun stuff: Anton Chekov's book-signing (and reading) in Union Square. Link from nickjong, who got it from Neil Gaiman.

Non-fun stuff: Soldiers in Iraq losing internet access, just in case they want to ship out more photos from prisons or something. (Link from insomnia; see also this one from tangerinpenguin and others.) Feh. Some of my coworkers are in Iraq right now (civilians, on a base, nowhere near prisons); if we stop hearing from them I guess we'll know why.

Comments

[jducoeur]

I had a Handspring Visor for a couple of years; I've since replaced it with a Handspring (now Palm) Treo, which is a PDA/phone. (Indeed, the Treo is actually my fourth palmtop -- I had a WinCE machine before the Visor and an HP OmniGo way back when.) Some opinions:

I concur that you want to get a keyboard if possible. The foldable Stowaway is really excellent for its size (and a marvel of engineering) -- not a great keyboard, but as good as many laptops in a folded form-factor not too much larger than the PDA. The Treo has a built-in keyboard, which I'm fond of for notetaking (significantly faster for me than Graffiti) but far too small for serious use.

The most important piece of software I run is SmartDoc, but it isn't clear to me that that's still available -- Googling seems to indicate that it's been replaced by the far fancier QuickOffice, which I haven't tried. SmartDoc is a very simple little editor that uses the common Palm Reader format. It's important mainly because the built-in Memo function is limited to a puny 4K per file. So I use SmartDoc for larger files (including, eg, our CD inventory).

The Blazer Web browser is decent, although it works best on graphically simple sites. I actually deal with many of my smaller day-to-day databases by turning them into web pages -- for example, my Dinner Shopping List is a page with a precis of the ingredients for all of the usual things I make for dinner. Some conventional graphics-heavy webpages are usable on the tiny screen, although it's helpful if you know the page's layout, to help you decipher how things wind up getting arranged. (All non-JavaScript pages render, but some can be hellishly confusing.)

My Treo is a 300, which runs on Sprint. In general, I'm happy about the plan -- it's not dirt-cheap (around $40/month IIRC), but has plenty of cellphone minutes for my purposes, and unlimited Web access. So I find myself using it at the oddest times: for example, at the wedding this weekend, I wound up Googling around to figure out the address of the site so that the JP could fill out her form correctly. And I often find myself looking up the Eastrealm OP or Laws at various high-court events, when a question comes up. (Yes, I try to at least be unobtrusive.)

I always wear a beltpouch, so that's where the PDA gets kept. Indeed, the reason I specifically wanted a combo PDA/phone was so that it would all fit into the pouch (along with wallet, checkbook, pillbox, Altoids, change, etc).

One downside of the Treo 300: if you wind up out-of-range, it can eat the battery very quickly trying to find a signal. I've had to get into the habit of turning it off during work, since my office is a total dead zone, and it can chew up the entire battery in the course of a work day. And the battery dies very ungracefully: when it starts to run low, it sometimes begins to throw fatal logic errors, which cause the screen to lock in the "on" position, which kills the whole battery lickety-split, forcing me to reload the memory.

So while I like the machine quite a bit, I'd check the service in your area before committing. You do *not* want to be out-of-range for long stretches of time with this device...

[geekosaur]

Yeah, the battery eating thing is a problem. Worse yet, there's a firmware bug where it sometimes loses the signal for no reason and can't regain it without a soft reset... turning off the phone part doesn't help because it tries to sign off from the cellular network. :(

The 4k limitation to the Memo Pad is only in PalmOS 3.5x and earlier; PalmOS 4 and later replace the Memo Pad with a Note Pad which supports unlimited sized notes (IIRC). Unfortunately, there's very little chance of the Treo300 being upgraded to PalmOS 4 (and no chance of PalmOS 5, which requires a different CPU).

[jducoeur]

Worse yet, there's a firmware bug where it sometimes loses the signal for no reason and can't regain it without a soft reset.

Ah -- I hadn't realized that was an officially-acknowledged bug. It's only happened to me twice, so I wasn't 100% sure, but yes, I've seen that one. It's actually a more minor inconvenience to me than the dead-battery one, actually -- a soft reset is pretty easy -- but still a nuisance.

The 4k limitation to the Memo Pad is only in PalmOS 3.5x and earlier; PalmOS 4 and later replace the Memo Pad with a Note Pad which supports unlimited sized notes (IIRC).

Nice to know. I was surprised that that limitation persisted in PalmOS as long as it did, since it was the single greatest annoyance of the OS, IMO...