Palm Problems

[bjarvis]

I love having a Palm PDA. I've carried one model or another continuously since at least December of 1998, transferring my accumulated data from one to the next. They're wonderful little devices, but still not quite perfect.

My current Tungsten E2 model has a couple of annoying bugs: unlike it's Tungsten E predecessor, this model can't handle SD cards larger than 1 GB, and the search function is broken. Still, I've found ways of working around these minor issues and life goes on.



I usually sync the E2 with my iMac since the iMac is on 24x7 and my Windows XP box is only turned on when absolutely necessary. The E2/iMac sync works well via USB cable but I wanted to sync them via Bluetooth. Ideally, I'd like to sync them via the Mac's iSync utility as well so that I could effectively sync the same address book data against my cell phone. The best of all possible worlds would also let my E2 talk to my Bluetooth-enabled cell phone directly.

Palm doesn't support my Motorola E850 telephone directly but I managed to trick the E2 into thinking the phone was a supported model. Not optimal, but it works.

While the E2 recognizes the iMac's Bluetooth signal, connections fail despite every permutation I tried. Damn.

While the E2 does place nicely with iSync to iCal and Address Book, every other Palm channel fails: it can't sync up my note pad, my photos, my AvantGo account, etc.. Using the Palm Desktop allows all of these to work adequately, but then I can't sync the Address Book automagically between my cell phone & E2 via the iMac. Crap.

Worse, the various attempts to get everything to play nicely loaded a huge amount of duplicate calendar & address entries *into* my Palm. Fortunately, I did a complete sync against my Windows XP box before playing; I wiped the E2 clean then resync'ed all of the data back from the XP machine. Everything is at least no worse than it was before I started.

I really hate using my XP box but I suppose one possibility is to outfit it with Bluetooth, then resume using it as my primary sync box. I'm not aware of any method which would allow updates to be channeled into my cell phone but that's a relatively minor annoyance.


So close, and still so far away.

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I wasn't impressed with the last round of Treo models I saw. They were largely good but seemed unpolished. I haven't looked at the products in the last year however so this may have changed. Noting how Verizon Wireless forced my E850 to be dumbed down (no Bluetooth file transfer allowed, although <lj user=dr_scott pointed me to a resource to fix that), I also worried about giving Verizon even an iota of control over my PDA. Mostly though, I'm simply adverse to having too many eggs in one basket. I don't want to lose all of my PDA functions when, say, the cell phone craps out, or vice versa. Keeping my devices separate allows me to upgrade either one individually rather than having to purchase a newer, more expensive device when the old becomes faulty.