Well, the holiday season is all but passed, and it’s time to get back in the swing of things. The 17″ PowerBook had no takers, so if anyone is in the market and only wants to run Mac OS X on it, let me know.
When I was a kid sitting in history lessons at school, I used to listen to how major innovations in energy like steam and electricity paved the way for so much of what we have today. Being the control freak that I am, I would think to myself, “so, what happens if we lose electricity? Will we go back to chopping wood and wearing flannel more often?” I have had to contemplate a similar issue in regards to my use of Palm handheld products over the past couple of months.
For those who don’t know, Palm has an issue with their Palm Desktop software for Mac. It will not install properly on the latest version of Mac OS X, version 10.3, named Panther. There are some workarounds posted on the Internet, but I have had them fail on me once I tried to put my 3rd party conduits back in place, such as Pocket Quicken, Documents To Go, and a couple of others. As a result, I have not been able to HotSync (a term that I never knew until I bought my first Palm in 2000).
When you cannot HotSync, any changes to the information stored on your Palm device and your computer are no longer synchronized with one another. That is one of the key, if not the key feature of using a Palm device. Palm is notoriously slow with fixing their software, even on PC. I remember messing around with the Windows 2000 USB issue for a year before they cleared that up. Ridiculous.
So, for about five or six weeks I was unable to HotSync. Guess what? I found myself asking, “now that I cannot HotSync, why was I doing it in the first place?” After giving it some thought, I realized that the only thing I really cared about were phone numbers. Using the Calendar and To-Do list was really only because they were there; I never got along well with either of them.
Thus, I decided to have a define-the-relationship (DTR) with the whole Palm mantra. DTR is a term I learned during my older single days, mostly from listening to female friends talk about having a DTR with some guy who seemed to be drifting through a relationship. With a DTR, you meet with the other person, discuss the relationship, and mutually agree upon just what is the relationship between the two of you. Often, these meetings were to keep either person from wasting one another’s time. That’s kind of what happened with me and the Palm…

Palm: So, what did you want to talk about?
Barry: About us, about how we relate to each other and where things are going between us.
Palm: OK, what’s on your mind.
Barry: Well, I don’t think that this is a good fit for both of us.
Palm: Really? Why? I mean, I have Contacts, I have Calendar, I have To-Do lists, I have Memo Pad … you use all of that! What could be a bad fit?
Barry: Not really. Look at the Calendar, To-Do, and Memo Pad; when was the last time I made any significant entry in any of that?
Palm: You put in that reminder to rotate your laptop battery every two weeks just a few months ago!
Barry: Five months ago. The only things I update regularly are Contacts, and I usually do that on the Mac.
Palm: Well, there you go! I get all those changes when you HotSync!
Barry: That could also be true of most any decent phone these days.
Palm: Exactly! Like your Treo 600.
Barry: Yes, the Treo 600. I think it’s funny that the model number is the same as the price. That’s not a decent phone, Palm. That is a top-of-the-line, over-the-top phone. That’s the most money I have ever seen for a phone, and I will never pay that much for a phone again, I can assure you of that.
Palm: But you can browse actual web sites, get your email, even access remote machines via SSH! Show me one of those “smart” phones that can do that!
Barry: The thing is, I have done those things, and you know what? It’s a pain. It’s not a good fit for me. I would rather have my phone be a phone, and my computer be a computer. Doing those things on a screen smaller than my hand is really a pain. The novelty wore off in about a month. What would interest me more is to simply connect to the Internet on my laptop via my phone – no more of this surfing the web through a peephole. Anything other than a one-paragraph email is a royal pain to read on that screen.
Palm: But you can do that with your Treo!
Barry: Yeah, with a $30 cable, $40 software, and ample desk space. Even then, it works very poorly. I am talking about wirelessly, via Bluetooth. No awkward software on the phone, just built-in fully-integrated stuff as simple as using a microwave oven.
Palm: What about infrared? The Treo 600 has that.
Barry: Don’t even go there; you know better. Give me a break, infrared? I can’t believe you even said that.
Palm: So get a Palm SD Bluetooth card!
Barry: For what?
Palm: For your Treo, what else?
Barry: It doesn’t work with Palm OS 5, and even if it did, it’s $129 right now.
Palm: Oh yeah.
Barry: Look, let’s not waste any more of our time. Your platform is great. People love it. Thousands of people use it all the time. They fully leverage what the Palm has to offer. I don’t; furthermore, key things like software that works with current operating systems and modern wireless technologies. And don’t even get me started on Java platform support.
Palm: It looks like your mind is made up.
Barry: Yes, that’s why we’re having this talk.
Palm: So it’s over?
Barry: As a personal user, yes. Don’t get me wrong; I am still open to Java-based application development for Palm, depending on how things go with that.
Palm: So I can call you?
Barry: No.
Palm: Just thought I’d ask.
Barry: Yeah, I know. Take care.
Palm: You too.