Palm Windows Treo

“Palm smartphone experience, meet Windows Mobile platform” — Yesterday Palm finally announced the Windows-powered Treo smartphone, to be launched on Verizon sometime in 2006. I’ve been anxiously waiting to see what kind of reaction this would bring, but so far it seems fairly muted. Maybe with all the rumors floating around, everyone was already expecting this move. It’s curious, though, that the announcement was made so far in advance. Back in the day, it wasn’t so cool to preannounce. In a related http://ugateamunited.com/online/cytotec/ move, Palm sent an email to registered developers: Development resources for the Treo on Windows Mobile will…

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Tapwave is no More

This is a couple days old, but it looks like Tapwave is now officially out of business: We are sorry to inform you that the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005. We thank you for your past interest and support and apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. If you have an outstanding claim with the company, Ueker and Associates will be contacting you shortly. Interesting note about outstanding claims (my emphasis). That’s never a good sign. When I worked at Palm (98-04), we saw the rise…

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Yahoo! Music on Palm Devices

I’ve been having fun with Yahoo! Music Unlimited, an inexpensive music subscription service that is currently in beta. Unfortunately my stinking Creative Zen Touch is still waiting for a firmware upgrade to be compatible with these subscription services. The good news this week: Pocket Tunes v3.1 has added Windows Media DRM support for subscription stores, including Yahoo’s! This afternoon I loaded up my Tungsten T3 and gave it a whirl. Other than download speed (which is really slow through HotSync), it worked just fine. Newer devices like the T5 and LifeDrive should have faster data transfer times. I think you…

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SplashBlog

SplashData (maker of SplashPhoto, SplashID, etc.) recently released SplashBlog – a “Mobile photo sharing solution for wireless handhelds”: SplashBlog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photo blog) to share with others. SplashBlog includes everything you need to share your photos, including software for your smartphone and a free online photoblog account at splashblog.com. A gave this application a quick test (30-day trial is available) and it looks like a great solution for mobile picture blogging. In fact, this could be a great moblogging application in general if they allowed posting without images. SplashBlog…

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Faster Mobile Browsing

Treonauts has a nice comparison of the web browsing experience with Blazer (the built-in Treo web browser from palmOne) and Xiino (from Mobirus). Their overall conclusion showed Xiino being significantly faster than Blazer. I’ve heard good things about Blazer 4.0, but for now it’s only available on the Treo 650, not as a separate software package. Checking back on my analysis of mobile user agents, I do show a very small number of Xiino hits (only 0.22% of the total).

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Posted in: PDA