2 Bit Hacker

I’ve been giving some thought lately about the mobile devices that I carry with me on a daily basis. This currently includes the Palm Treo 700p and the Nokia 770, but I’m considering ditching the 700p and replacing it with a more conventional phone, perhaps the LG-VX9900 aka “enV”.

Why ditch the 700p? As much as I love Palm OS and the integration of PDA and cellphone, it’s fairly buggy. Before the latest firmware upgrade it had a tendency to freeze up when receiving text message, which was frequently infuriating while trying to hold a conversation via text. After the upgrade it likes to report an “Error 3000″ when you try to use data services, which requires turning the radio off and on to fix, a process that takes about 30 seconds, but gets annoying when you wanted to hop online to check something quickly. There’s also a problem where the 700p will go into a continuous reboot cycle, which can only be broken by performing a hard reset (wiping all data from flash, requiring a restore from backup.) I’ve only been hit by this problem once, a couple of days ago, but Delia’s 700p has done it on an almost monthly basis.

But for all it’s faults, I still like having a Palm OS device. I’ve accumulated a decent amount of paid software for it over the years, stuff like Pocket Quicken and Highway Manager, which I use on a fairly regular basis. If I decide to switch to the enV and the 770, I’ll be giving up some software I’ve been using for years without any good replacements.

I’ve considered a few solutions to this. There is a PalmOS emulator available for the Nokia 770/N800 OS. I haven’t tried it out yet, but if it’s usable, it might be enough to satisfy my appetite for Palm apps. If not, then I’m stuck either trying to find, or trying to write, replacements applications. I don’t think that would be hard in the case of a mileage tracker, but something to sync with Quicken might be harder to come by.

Of course, I could pick up another Palm device. A Z22 would suffice, though I think I’d prefer an E2, as it could tether to the enV for data access. Or perhaps a Zodiac, though discontinued and the company out-of-business, would make a good addition to my pockets. But with any of these, I’d be up to three devices, which gets to be a bit cumbersome. I think I’d have to carry either the 770 or the Palm; carrying both would be annoying.

Not sure what I’m going to do yet. I could just keep the 700p and deal with it’s issues, wait for another firmware upgrade, or maybe hope Verizon releases their version of the Treo 755p and hope that it doesn’t have the problems that the 700p has.

For the past week or so I’ve had a brand new toy, a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It’s a pretty slick device, 802.11b, Bluetooth, an 800×480 touch screen, running a Debian-derivative Linux. I haven’t done a lot of hacking on it yet, but just the built-in apps are pretty nice. I have installed Kismet, and it makes a nice little wardriving platform, though I’ll need to get a Bluetooth GPS if I want to track where I see APs.

I’m also planning on getting a Bluetooth OBDII adapter, so I can run Carman, a pretty nice looking application for monitoring vehicle information. I think with a GPS and the OBDII adapter, I’ll be able to use the 770 in place of a car computer for a while. A second cover for the device could be mounted to the dash relatively easily to give it a stable place to sit while I’m driving.

There are a couple of slight annoyances with it though. For some reason Nokia decided to go with RS-MMC flash cards for it, which are probably the rarest of the sub-SD flash card standards. But that’s not too big a deal. The on-screen keyboard requires two taps to get to some oft-used symbols, like hyphen, which makes it a pain when I’m doing stuff on the command-line. I’m considering trying out a Bluetooth keyboard with it, maybe even a Frogpad, though I’m not sure if that would make text entry more or less of a pain.

I do like the built-in apps though. The e-mail and RSS feed readers are usable, though not terribly special. The default web browser is Opera, and does an excellent job of rendering pages for the small screen. They included a Jabber client, which works well for Google Talk, but can’t handle multiple accounts online at a time, and refuses to connect to our internal Jabber server at work.

Here are some gratuitous screen shots: