Saturday, September 24, 2005

Palm and Microsoft, together?

According to My Way News, Palm has teamed with Microsoft to create a Windows-based version of the Treo smart phone.
Aaargh, no it can't be, it's unnatural!

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Opera Browser now totally free

According to My Way News, the Opera Browser is now free, with no advertisements.
This free version of Opera can either be downloaded from Opera.com or Download.com.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Contrast in Sizes

The Abacus PDA Watch is a contrast in sizes. It is a large watch (although not as large as I'd feared), but often the tiny text on the 0.9 x 0.9 inches (24 x 24 mm) grayscale screen is almost impossible to read. You also need ample lighting to read the screen as in dim lighting the screen becomes unreadable. The backlight sometimes just seems to make it worse. This is going to limit the programs I can (usefully) run on it. I already have my Address Book loaded - beamed from the Treo - that should be useful. The multiple watch faces are great - what do I feel like today: Analog, Digital or wacky?

Friday, September 09, 2005

Wait, and wait some more

I finally received the Abacus Wrist PDA. It needs to be charged for 4-6 hours before use according to the manual.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Palm software bargains

I have been evaluating pedit32 - one of Paul Nevai's excellent Palm programs. Pedit32 is a Palm Memo and doc editor - among its numerous features it can export and import to and from the MemoPad and Palm doc files. It stores 32KB memos in its own database file. I quickly got used to features like "Restore Memo" - the standard Palm undo feature is very limited, and if you mess up a memo by overwriting some information you didn't mean to, the only way to get it back is with a restore from a backup. Anyway, prior to buying it I thought I'd have a look at peditPro, the flagship of the pedit family. It combines pedit04 with pedit32.
Pedit04 puts powerful editing features on top of the standard Palm MemoPad. Of course peditPro is quite pricey - selling for $32 at PalmGear.com, (excluding a 10% discount valid until the end of September).
I found a bargain elsewhere though. Like a small percentage of Palm software, you pay less if you buy pedit directly from the developers site. What I didn't notice at first was that if you buy pedit32 through PayPal, you get a free registered version of peditPro. This said "Buy Me!".

Out of interest, PalmGear.com (and Handango.com) take a substantial cut for each application sold (with a minimum of several dollars). In comparison, PayPal or other payment processing methods only charge a fraction of this. Don't get me wrong, I've bought a lot of software through PalmGear - they have a wide selection. I'd also use them to sell any Palm software I may write. On the other hand, if I can get software cheaper directly from the developer, why not? This doesn't just apply to small developers like Paul Computing, but also to software companies like TealPoint. With a large selection of programs (just check out their TealPoint's site), I'd also rather deal directly with them. Actually I can't think of any other developers who sell directly, other than upgrades: SplashData and the developer of ZLauncher, zzTechs.