The BFC Computing Weblog

In the long and continuing saga to have a decent mobile Internet solution that is friendly to Free Software, I’ve been working out a porting strategy to get rid of my Treo 650, which, while it’s been useful, is now beyond the end of its useful life. The replacement for the Treo is a Nokia n810, which is not a phone, but can use a phone over Bluetooth to get Internet access. It’s a great little linux box, with a Mozilla-based browser with Flash and wealth of 3rd party apps via .deb repositories. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS, etc. Meanwhile, I want a phone with good phone audio quality (pretty much rules out smartphones - bummer), EVDO, Bluetooth, and 4+ hours talk time (so I can run it all day without charging). A flip-phone is really what I want, to avoid accidental dialing in my pocket (DAMHINT), not just for the Captain Kirk factor.

I have a decent workflow established with the Treo 650 and Missing Sync on Mac OS X that works pretty well for me. Access, the company which owns Palm OS, released, a while back, a PalmOS 5 emulator for the Nokia n810 which runs all the basic Palm applications. I tried getting this working earlier but wasn’t successful.

Now that’s changed. One unexpected checkbox later and I have full HotSync between n810/Garnet and Missing Sync 5.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.11. Here’s how to do it:

First, in the Sharing Pane of System Preferences, make a new firewall exception like this, to allow in Network HotSync preferences:

Now, add a new handheld in Missing Sync, and change the Preferences, to include these:

And set the various standard conduits to overwrite data on handheld with desktop (once only).

Now, on the Garnet VM, put in the IP address of your Mac (dns didn’t work for me), and click the HotSync button. You should get a successful sync. Do it again to make sure it does nothing, quickly, indicating successful sync. Change some data on both ends and make sure it syncs. OK, you’ve got sync.

Now, go back and uncheck the allow-all-handhelds-to-network-sync box to protect your data. Make sure ‘Network’ is set in ‘Edit Handhelds’, and it’ll continue to work. I’m not sure what happens the first time, but there must be some handheld negotiation that’s required without permissions. Minor inconvenience, just needs to be documented.

All the iCal stuff should sync just fine, but MemoPad apparently doesn’t allow a way for sharing Memos between handhelds. So, to get this you also need to copy the Memo data file; copy:

~/Documents/Palm/Users/treo-profile/MemoPad.memopad

to:

~/Documents/Palm/Users/n810-profile/MemoPad.memopad

and sync again. You should have all your common Palm data on the n810 at this point.

Have fun. I ordered a new-in-box Motorola e815 radio from eBay for $90, which meets all my phone criteria. From here, I’d like to move to KDE PIM apps, and perhaps OpenSync. OpenSync to iSync is a non-starter, currently, but perhaps SyncML can bridge the gap.

Ouch. I was waiting until the end of the year to get a new phone since Palm had announced its linux-based phone would be out before Christmas. Today they announced they’ve slipped a year on that schedule. Bummer, they should have started on this back in ‘03 or ‘04 when Access (sp?) was trying to convince them to get off old the crumbly old PalmOS.

I can’t handle PalmOS for another year, it’s too creaky for what I want. Apple is committed to a closed platform. Nokia is pushing its phone as an open development platform and some feel passionately about it.

Feedback on the E90 welcome!

A few days ago I wrote Apple to Spank Palm Again where I speculated that Palm would do better than Apple in the cell phone market.

I think I made the mistake of assuming that Apple doesn’t realize what the game is that’s afoot. They’re smarter than that.

The Economist has a piece about Apple’s learning from its failures. It inspired me to consider that Apple might be learning from a big failure before it even happens - they signed up with AT&T (nee Cingular) for a 5-year exclusive. They have to realize that cellular customers have plenty of reasons not to switch over to AT&T and I think they’re probably well aware of that and OK with it. They needed Cingular to be in love with the iPod and give Apple the latitude to do whatever it wanted, including changing their network, so that the iPhone could be a real mobile computing platform. Things like visual voicemail and probably other features interact with the network in a way only previously available to Internet-connected phones, the coverage of which is hardly pervasive. Yeah, I can do Visual Voicemail on my Treo with a web browser and Asterisk - but then I’m limited to using it where I can pick up a Verizon tower with 1xRTT data services. Plain-old-voicemail is clunky and works everywhere.

But now that the hype machine is in overdrive on the iPhone shareholders of the companies that passed on the iPhone are no doubt ready to hang the current leadership there. Fortunately they have a savior on the horizon - the Palm phone that I referenced in the previous article - and, by golly, after Apple has sold 3 million iPhones over the weekend they’re going to give Palm any hooks into the network they need to avoid losing their golden parachutes.

OK, so what was the topic of this article again? Oh, right, Apple. Now, back to Palm. So Palm got a massive infusion of cash and Elevation Partners, its investor, set up Jon Rubenstein, former Apple Senior VP of iPod, as Chief XYZ at Palm. Have a look at who is running Elevation Partners - many former Apple folks. Fred Anderson is the guy who took the fall for Apple’s accounting problems with the SEC. Bono, buddy to Steve Jobs, is on the investment team. Is Elevation Partners Apple’s BayStar Capital or In-Q-Tel?

If so, why would Apple want to prop up Palm?

The Networks.

Palm has existing agreements with all of the other major networks. Palm is busy working on a new phone that will run on these networks, built on XScale (like the iPhone) and built on a portable unix (like the iPhone).

Now, say Apple snatched up Palm. It could be said to be about consolidating competition against Microsoft or Symbian. Or about gaining CDMA experience. Or even bringing home the prodigal son. But it would be about the network agreements.

So, Apple can’t very well go break their AT&T contracts and bring the iPhone over to the other networks so blatantly. But it wouldn’t make sense to maintain two completely different but very similar products. Over the next five years there can be made commonalties shared. I often wondered why the iPod, so named because MP3 playback was just one application for the device, didn’t get promoted to ‘iPod Mobile’ status, and instead we got an iPhone, obviously an iPod but without its name (and getting so pedestrian a name at that). The new Palm phone can remain a separate product but gain iPod features. The PalmOS compatibility will remain, but be deprecated for future work. If we do see YellowBox for Linux next week this will be why - so Palm Phone developers can get a new modern toolbox, compatible with the iPhone. I expect that’s for next year, though, not next week, but heck that would be a neat surprise. While the two devices live on ‘independently’, developers can write-once deploy-many to Palm and iPhone devices and five years from June 29th the two products can converge - PalmOS 5 will be gone.

Once the new Palm Phone is available on all of the networks, for real, and feature-complete (network engineering), that’s when Apple can do an acquistion, not before.

There’s one potential problems with this theory. Fred Anderson took some jabs at Steve Jobs when he left Apple. This may have been real animus, it may have been a CYA action, or it may have even been misdirection. We’ll see. Why did Jon Rubenstein leave - what’s he been up to? Maybe he was just burnt and needed some time, who knows? Maybe these guys are just going after Apple’s market competitively and aren’t even talking to them - I’d buy that with enough evidence if Bono weren’t on the team.

Update: Some folks on Slashdot pointed me to Bill Gates’s Worst Nightmare.

I just notice over at Businessweek, there’s a big shakeup at Palm today. They sold a quarter of the company to an investment group, kicked out the CEO, and Jon Rubenstein, former hardware VP at Apple, is taking over and is going to be working with Jeff Hawkins on their new products.

For those of you who don’t assiduously watch this space, that new product is a linux-based smartphone to launch at the end of this year.

Apple went too early with the iPhone, wanted to do something new with cell phones (good), got turned down by Verizon (expected) and got stuck on Cingular (bad). Now, you have to be a Cingular customer to own an iPhone and they’re in that deal for five years. This will be the first category of Apple products I won’t own. There ain’t no service here on AT&T and if I lived five miles to the right they couldn’t even write me a contract.

I will, however, buy Palm’s answer to the iPhone, assuming it’s no worse than my Treo (that would be hard). I think they learned some of the ‘obvious’ clues from Apple, the networks all get that they missed out on the iPhone, and they’ll work with Palm. So the iPhone will be available on AT&T and the Palm Treo replacement (Quatro?) will be on Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, MVNO’s, Skype, SIP, etc.

Let me tell you about this device called a Newton…

At the end of an article at PCMagazine about Jeff Hawkins’s new company, they ask him how Palm is doing. An interesting bit he included:

And we just bought the rights back to Palm OS from Access. We did a Windows-based product because we were worried that we wouldn’t have access to the Palm OS.

Update: and here is why he’s not afraid of saying that now. Rock on.

The Cellulon LaserKey CL800BT is an input device designed for small portable computers. Like my Treo 650. It supports Bluetooth for input and lasts a decent amount of time on battery.

<p>Oh, yeah, and it projects a virtual keyboard on any flat surface and lets you type away as if you had a full sized keyboard.  </p>
          <p><center><img src="http://www.celluon.com/products/images/pro_img1.gif"></center></p>
          <p>I can’t do much better than 3 characters per second on the Treo keyboard, which is less than half of my normal typing rate, so it’s a bit frustrating. </p>
          <p>This isn’t something that you can clip to your BatBelt reasonably so it’s not ultra-portable, but the technology will start coming built-in to PDA’s eventually.  In the meantime, the LaserKey can alleviate the need for me to take my iBook along for all but the most serious computing needs.</p>
          <p>It’s not being distributed in the US yet but you can order it for ~ $333 shipped from Europe from <a href="http://www.handit.com/index.php?fuseaction=detail&katid=443&produktid=2444">Handit</a>.  I’m hoping when it comes to the US for distibution the price will be somewhat lower than the weak dollar allows an overseas purchase to ring up at.  I mean, the keyboard <i>should</i> be cheaper than the computer.</p>