Gizmos Grabowski

The News Depends on Who's Reporting

Competing reports on Palm's Q4 earnings report...

From fan site PalmInfoCenter, only positive news in the RSS synopsis in Palm Reports Q4 and FY 2008 Results:

Palm, Inc. today reported that total revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008, ended May 30, was $296.2 million. Smartphone sell-through for the quarter reached a record high, totaling 968,000 units, up 29 percent year over year.

"We continue to invest in Palm's future and remain focused on building long-term value," said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer for Palm, Inc. "Centro is a tremendous hit, we are gaining market share, and we believe with this momentum, and the launch of new Windows Mobile products, we will turn the corner and return to revenue and margin growth."

From dour Silicon Alley Insider, only negative news in Palm Stinks Up Q4; No Big Deal:

Palm's Q4 was even worse than analysts' low expectations, and shares will probably drop Friday morning. (They're down 7.8% after hours, to $6.03, after losing another 4.4% during Thursday trading.)

But it doesn't really matter! Why not? Because Palm's long-term prospects are completely tied to top-secret phones running the top-secret, Linux-based mobile operating system it's working on -- which won't go on sale until next year.

How to Watch Google VideoOn Your PalmPilot

Google Video has a new button that lets you download its videos for "iPods and Sony PS game computers." Well, only slightly misleading.

The downloadable videos are in MP4 format, at 320x240 resolution. Ugly for today's 21" widescreen monitors employed by desktop computers, but just right for handheld devices -- like my Palm TX.

Here's what you need to watch full-length movies on a Palm:

1. Get a high capacity SD memory card for storing the movies on the Palm. I use the cheapest 2GB card from SanDisk, which are as little as $30 now.

2. Get a copy of Core media player software. It's around $20-$30 (sometimes on sale), and is needed because it has the codecs for playing back MP4 (MPEG-4) videos. Install on your Palm. (The free version, TCPMP, doesn't support MP4.)

3. Go to Google Video, and download the movies you want. I find that Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies tend to be about 1.25 hours long, which generates an MP4 file that's about 250-300MB. That means we can fit about eight hours of movies on an 2GB SD card.

4. I use a card reader to copy the MP4 files from my computer to the SD card. (I created a folder called VIDEO on the SD card.)

5. Start the Core player, select the movie file, and enjoy full-screen viewing on the Palm's 4" screen!

What's great about this new Google Video feature is no conversion! You just download and copy over. Unlike, say, my Samsung digital camera that also plays back videos -- the catch being that I have to use dreadful software provided by Samsung that takes forever to convert the movie to Samsung's proprietary format.

The only pain is that sometimes the download is unpredictable. When I downloaded five episodes of MST3, only two downloaded smoothly; the other three kept stalling.

Palm OS: Fixing Digitizer Drift

My just-over-1-year-old Palm TX (ie, just out of warranty) began the giving me the pain of digitizer drift. That's where you need to pick below buttons and other points for them to activate. Using the Preferences | Touchscreen calibration tool just makes things worse, because using it seems to force the misaligned digitizer to get worse.

I did some reading on the Internet, and found it is a fairly common problem, although not one that has affected me for ten years and through five PalmOS devices -- until now.

I tried a few different ways of touching the Touchscreen calibration tool, and finally found one that works. Instead of picking the center of the three bull's-eye targets, I found that it works better to drawn a circle around each target.

In each target, I moved the stylus in a circle around the smallest red circle. The PalmTX was happy, told me I passed the test, and the touchscreen is now correctly aligned.

On second thought, it appears it was not the circle movement that worked, but touching the targets too high. Touch the target points higher than their centers. You may have to try a few times to see just exactly how high to touch.

T|X vs iPhone

A couple of Apple's new iPhone specs caught my eye, because they compare with Palm's T|X:

Resolution

480x320 -- same for both products
Horizontal and vertical display -- same for both, but auto rotate for iPhone.

Screen Size

3.5" (diagonal) for the iPhone.
3.9" (diag) for the T|X.

Max RAM

8GB for iPhone
2GB for T|X

My 10th PalmPilot Anniversary

It was ten years ago today I bought the first of five PalmPilots:

1996: US Robotics Pilot 1000

I bought the Palm 1000 following three experiences:

- I desperately needed a way to keep track of appointments and contacts. I had tried all sorts of systems, and none worked for me.
- For Christmas, my youngest daughter got a 2KB, girl-oriented day-timer-style pocket computer ($15), and as I played with it, I realized this could be the key.
- Palm spent big on an ad in Fortune magazine, with a full-size cardboard Pilot you could remove form the page to hold.
- Oh, and the Palm 1000 was on sale following Christmas.

Shortly after buying it, I experienced the amazement of discovering all kinds of software that could be added to the device, some of which I use to this day.

1999: 3COM Palm III

I bought the Palm III after the Pilot 1000 froze up for days. Naturally, after I bought the new one, the old one began working again.

2001: Sony Clie 760
2003: Sony Clie 760

The Sony Clie 760 was such a finely-crafted device that I bought a second one, after the first one became unrepairably damaged. I continue to use it to this day. It pretty much set the standard that's still in place today: high-resolution color screen, MP3 player, memory slot. The only thing missing is WiFi.

(2004: HP iPaq)

I briefly owned an HP iPaq, given to me at a conference, later given away to a friend who'd lost his (he subsequently lost this one, too). HP made a marvelous piece of hardware, but it was hobbled by the Windows-based operating system and applications software. The software was so hard to use that I ended up using the iPaq for streaming radio broadcasts over the Internet.

2006: Palm T|X

Earlier this year, I treated myself to the T|X with its big 480x320 screen, 2GB memory expansion, WiFi and Bluetooth, etc. It has its disappointments: no status LEDs, no scroll wheel (as on the Clie), and the bundled portable keyboard is dreadful. But it's fast, the WiFi is beautifully integrated with software, and the big, bright screen makes browsing the Internet plausible (no need for any Origami device).

And it has 1,024x more internal memory than the first Palm 1000.