New Phone: one step back
========================
There was an opportunity to get a new (newer used and still in its
original packaging) Palm Pixi Plus phone [1]. I was not able to resist
so I got it.
Of course, it is not the phone which I has been searching for. It is a
smartphone with the WebOS [2] (an OS which is actually as alive as a
zombie). It probably can be used as a basic phone but with battery life
of a smartphone. But, you understand, it's one of the last Palm
products so I have had to get it.
The phone was new thus it required activation via (long defunct)
Palm/HP servers. There are tools to bypass the activation (one needs a
"devicetool.jar" and the "novacom drivers"). The drivers can be found
in a *.deb package for Linux (in a binary form as a i386 and x86_64
packages only, unfortunately - I had to revive my partially defunct
Lenovo x61s for that - fortunately it survived the complete procedure).
After that I tried to install the PreWare software catalog. In has more
than 1000 items but some of them are (of course) compatible with the HP
TouchPad [3] only and others are not working.
One of the problems was that at the moment I am not able to update SSL
certificates (there is a package for that but it calls the "curl" which
I don't have and don't know where to find it). Thus I have no access to
any https:// stuff. And of course many of the apps are defunct because
of their age - for example the Flickr and the Geocaching clients use
old APIs so they are useless.
Not it is not bad device at all and the OS is actually fine.
It is very small and comfortable to carry. For my hands a bit larger
device would be better. The keyboard has backlight and the keys are of
high quality, albeit they are small.
It has a remove battery and a full-size SIM slot! I can understand why
batteries of much bigger devices are not removable but don't understand
why people use nanoSIM slots in 7" smartphones.
The screen (albeit small: 320x400, 2.63") is bright and easy to read.
There is even a 2 MPix camera (it makes pictures of acceptable quality)
a GPS chip (no navigation software came pre-installed, though) and WiFi
and Bluetooth chips.
At the moment I only tried to use and to install some software (with
mixed results). The Calendar syncs with Google only (I have found no
CalDAV), the ToDo application is less user-friendly as was in the
actual Palm OS. There are alternative apps in the PreWare which claim to
be more close to the Palm OS build-in apps but they are not much
better. There is even a passwords storage program called Keyring but I
have not found a way to import passwords from the Palm OS Keyring.
The WWW browser is actually usable (please note that I was only to test
older and simpler sites which still use the old plain http:// protocol).
The next step is to use an activated SIM card to test if it can be used
as a phone...
References:
[1]
gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Palm%20Pixi
[2]
gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/WebOS
[3]
gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/HP%20TouchPad