It’s Not Rocket Surgery

Well, it’s been a good run, 6 or 7 years. But, the time has come to fish or cut bait. I have decided to cut bait. I have finally abandoned the Palm OS. Over the weekend I purchased a new device to replace my phone and my current Palm PDA. I have owned four Palm PDAs since 1998, or so. My first was a Palm Pilot Professional, purchased on clearance at CompUSA. It boasted a black and white screen and 2mb of memory. It would run for weeks on a pair of AAA batteries. I eventually upgraded it with a memory card that turned it into a Palm III. It had a upgraded OS, as well as bumping memory up to 8mb. I carried it constantly, storing my calendar and contacts on it. It was the first time I ever consistently kept up a calendar, since it would sync up with Outlook on my PC. Around the same time I aquired my first cell phone, a Nokia that was included free with a 1 year contract.

After a nasty encounter with one or more cars on a busy Kansas City street, what was left of my Palm Pilot Pro/III was retired. I found a deal on a Palm IIIxe online, and made the purchase. It had the same 8mb memory, but with a grayscale display, and a better design. It served me quite well for a year or two. I was now carrying a company mandated Nextel Motorola phone, you know the rubber encased construction worker brick. Palm PDAs were quite popular within the company, and there was interest in developing software for them as part of a larger enterprise project. I was given a Palm m515 to use for development and for my personal use. I sold the IIIxe to a coworker and reveled at the new unit. It had an aluminum body, a color screen, 16mb or memory, and a SD memory slot. The only thing missing was some sort of network communication ability. I did have a data cable that would allow me to connect the Palm to my Nextel phone and get dial-up access to the internet. That was interesting for a few days.

I carried the m515 for a year or so, then I found the Palm PDA I had been waiting for: the Tungsten C. 400mhz processor, 64mb ram, SD slot, color screen at 320×320 resolution, a QWERTY keyboard, and best of all: WiFi! It has served me well for over 2.5 years. I have used the wifi at home and at work. I have acquired a variety of programs, and a few accessories. During this time I have never been interested in any of the Windows Mobile based PDAs. Very few of them were as powerful as my T|C and those that were cost far more. I had never found another PDA, Palm or other, that looked like a likely upgrade path. I have been watching the Treo smartphones since they arrived. But, until the Treo 700p arrived, I wasn’t interested. The 700 had the memory, but gave up processor speed, and WiFi. And, the cost, $3-400 for a downgrade. And, I didn’t want to change carriers. I’ve had a T-Mobile account for 6+ years, and have been happy with the service and cost. But, T-Mobile quit carrying the Treo line before the 700 arrived.

So, I haven’t been paying to much attention to the whole smartphone market, since nothing really hit my requirements: smaller than my Palm T|C, QWERTY keyboard, WiFi, T-Mobile, and optionally Palm OS. Then, last week I caught news of a new offering from T-Mobile, the Dash. The size is right, the keyboard is right, the WiFi is there (as well as GPRS/Edge, and Bluetooth), and it’s T-Mobile. What’s missing? Processor speed is half my T|C, screen resolution is lower (as is the size), and it has the Windows Mobile for Smartphones OS.

I decided that Palm wasn’t going to produce a Treo that hits my requirements at a price point I’m willing to accept and even if they did, T-Mobile wasn’t going to carry it. It is going to be rough converting to the new smartphone. I use a PC with Lotus Notes at work, and a Mac at home, so syncing is going to be an ordeal. But, now that I will always be carrying it, it can now be the unit with the master calendar and contact list. I rarely carried my Palm on weekends or after work hours. Combined with a cell phone, it was just too much stuff.