The Palm Pixi is a nice device. It's tiny (it is probably even a bit
smaller than the tiny Palm Centro phone) and thus cute. It has a
hardware keyboard and other nice features.
And it runs the WebOS. Yes, it is a HTML5/JavaScripy mess running at
the top of the Linux kernel. It has its features (no special IDE is
needed for software development, for example) but it also has its
limitations. And some of them are very strict. For example, the barcode
reader is not able to use some native stuff so it was implemented as an
on-line application. Yes, it does not process barcodes off-line. It
actually does not process anything at the server which it used is no
longer available.
The device has relatively slow hardware (for HTML5 and JavaScript as
600 MHz CPU is really not slow and 256 MB RAM is a huge amount of
memory, I think). So loading of e-books in the ePub format is slower
than on my Ben NanoNote (with its 336 MHz MIPS CPU and 32 MB RAM) and
for bigger e-books if fails with an information that it too big for a
memory available for the JavaScript interpreter...
So the applications:
The dictionary (the HoshiDict) does not work at all. It seems that it
requires a newer Web OS than the poor Pixi has.
The e-book reader work well for smaller ePub books (<3.0 MB). It does
not understand Plucker files (it should work with DOC format which is
used by the CSpotRun).
I has not able to use any of synchronization tool. I cannot set up
account for Google, I see no WebCal support and SyncML client seems to
ignore me.
Also I was not able to find a mail service which can work with the
e-mail application.
An old Palm stuff cannot be used here. There used to be a classic Palm
OS emulator but it is no longer available.
But some things work: the WWW browser can be used for some pages (even
for some https:// one), the DopeWars work and there are the ToDo, the
DateBook and the Memos clones that work at least locally). The Music
application is simple but works.
By the way, if the headphones are used then the sound is much better
than sound that can be produces by the semi-modern Gemini PDA.
