Another T5 Buyer

Partying Is Such Sweet Sorrow - I Am Cyborg (part II): "I bought the T5 with a WiFi card. The T5 was largely panned by Palm fanatics when it was released because it doesn't include a bunch of features like a voice recorder, built-in WiFi, or (insert pet feature here). But I had no expectations so I was able to look at it with a tabula rasa. The Zodiac is a nice machine but I'm indifferent to games, so the video card was meaningless to me, and I wondered if the older processor would be able to run Palm OS6 (if that's ever available). I would like to have dual SD slots (the T5 only has one SD slot) but it's not a deal-breaker. The PocketPC devices had built-in WiFi and better screens, but cost more and ran an awkward OS. I just couldn't justify spending $100 for VGA when the tiny screen size renders the difference in resolution moot.

When you consider that the T5 will be a replacement for a laptop, an MP3 player, and a book reader, it's a good value."

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Fitaly Virtual

Now that I'm running a T5, I can use Fitaly again. (Actually, so can you Zod users, since Fitaly for the Zodiac came out just weeks after I ditched my Zod for the T5.) For those of you that haven't tried Fitaly, it's a replacement keyboard with a layout designed for a single stylus rather than ten fingers. The most commonly used letters in the English language are clustered in the center of the keyboard, with N and E in the very center along with a spacebar on either side. Letters get rarer as you get closer to the corners, with the four least used letters in English, Q, K, X and Z, sitting out on the corners themselves. I think the record for Fitaly speed is 85 words per minute, but most people settle around 30 to 60 wpm. Frankly, that's about as fast as I touch type, so if I can get up to that level (right now I'm faster than Graffiti 2, but still slower than I type on my foldable keyboard), I'll be much more "mobile" and won't need to unfold or even carry my keyboard as often.

The Fitaly learning curve is substantial but once you learn it, no form of pen input is faster. I have a few suggestions to get Fitaly speed up quickly. One, play the FitalyLetris game that comes with the Fitaly installation. Unless you're trying this on a Zodiac, which seems to crash running this otherwise completely tame program. It's a simple game, but if you stick to it for 30 minutes a day or so, you'll start to see your speed go up. As you do that, start to visualize the patterns words make on the keyboard and you'll start typing by word rather than by letter. Ever notice (those of you that remember the days before speed dial and dialing by name) that sometimes you remember a phone number not by the numbers, but by the geometric pattern it makes on the keypad? You can dial the number all day long, but you're stumped if you run across a (now I'm really dating myself) rotary phone, or someone asks you the number? Fitaly works the same way. I'm already noticing that common words like "the" seem to type themselves, automatic muscle memory. Lastly, force yourself to write everything on your device with Fitaly for a few weeks. It might be tempted to open up a foldable keyboard or jot something down in Graffiti 2, but don't give in. Once you've mastered Fitaly, you can go back to being flexible.

Another feature that will really help your Fitaly speed is sliding. Instead of just tapping on each letter, you can also tap, and then without lifting the stylus, slide the stylus point off of that letter before lifting it. Depending on the length and direction of the slide, you can make different letters than the one you tapped. The most common use for sliding is capitalization. By default, sliding off a letter makes that a capital letter instead of lower case. This in and of itself is much faster than hitting shift before the letter that you need to capitalize. But you can configure Fitaly to do far more than that. For instance, I have mine configured to that an North slide capitalizes every letter, but other directions do different things. A West slide off an A gives me a @. You can set this up pretty much any way that makes sense to you, and you can even set up macros on slide for commonly used words or phrases, like Palm OS shortcuts on steroids.

One last tip. If you haven't installed a screen protector, put one on now. The older Fitaly Stamp doubled as a screen protector. It was a plastic sticker than you stuck to your Graffiti area. Needless to say, this doesn't work for devices with 320x480 screens. Fitaly Virtual shows up as just another input method, replacing the "wide" 3-cell Graffiti area. If you practice with it enough, you'll develop a distinctive Fitaly wear pattern on the screen consisting of small round dot smudges connected by smaller still vertical scratches (from sliding). This isn't a big deal if you can just peel of your screen protector every three to six months and replace it, but it can be a real buzzkill to permanently mar your screen with Fitaly dots.

Wow. Practice, learning slide patterns, changing screen protectors... Fitaly sounds like a lot of work. It is, in the beginning. But it's so worth it if you do any significant data entry at all on your handheld, and if you're a writer, it's almost a necessity. Even though I haven't used Fitaly in about a year, it's been like coming home.

1SRC Podcast Thirteen

1src - The One Source for all things Palm-powered related. :: Podcasts : 1SRC Podcast Thirteen: "This week, we cover:

* Fitaly and SkinTW released for the Zodiac
* Review correction: VersaMail is very cool IF you use IMAP
* More doom and gloom in the press, but they don't see the big picture (or count smartphones as PDA sales)
* Casemodding my T5 hardcase
* MobiSystems Office 6.2"

Yeah The PDA Is Dead So What?

Okay, get up. I know no one expected me to say that. But while I object to the funeral dirge tone to some of the recent articles on the late, lamented PDA, I can't argue with the facts. The standalone PDA, the digital organizer that we all know and love, doesn't have much of a future.

The PDA is dead. Long live Palm OS.

What do I mean? I mean that the Palm platform isn't about organizers. It was, once, but it's evolving. Let's take a look at the Palm Powered devices of the near-future.

The first "new" form of PDA is the smartphone. These are already on the market, and finally, PalmOne isn't the only company making them. New smartphones from GSPDA (in China) and Samsung will run Cobalt, and feature a pretty damn compelling suite of telephony and data features. Move over, Blackberry, these will be the executive toy-of-choice because they complete the "mobile office." A Blackberry can read attachments, but it can't make changes and send the updated file back out. This "round-tripping" will make the Treo everything the Palm Vx was in its day.

But the Palm market isn't just about smartphones. There's also feature phones. These are the same camera phones that you probably own one of yourself. But in the very near future, they'll sport the same launcher, same date book, same address book that you're used to in a Palm OS handheld. That $100 phone you get when you sign up with a new carrier will have the same elegant user interface and PC-syncable data you'd get in a Zire 31. What it won't have is a touchscreen. Like a Windows Mobile Smartphone, it will be controlled by the directional pad and numeric keypad. For a clue to how this might work, look at the one-handed UI features in the new Treo 650 and Tungsten T5. The feature phones also won't be able to run standard Palm OS applications, but that gives those who need more than the basics the reason to upgrade to a smartphone.

The high-end PDA that I and others like me use will most likely be replaced (in 3-7 years) by the UPC. An Ultraportable Personal Computer is about the size of a large handheld, but features laptop power. Current UPCs, like the Sony VAIO U series and the OQO, cost about $2000 and run Windows XP. I expect that price to come down eventually to the $500-$800 mark, depending on capability. I also expect a lot of these devices to run Palm OS for Linux, which is both cheaper than Windows and better suited for a smaller, pen-based screen. I also expect to see Palm OS for Linux on cheap ($500) 10 inch screen laptops designed for students and others on a tight budget. Palm OS for Linux opens the door to move the Palm Platform into desktop-class, if still mobile, computing.

I also expect to see Palm OS make a strong run into media players. Tapwave is already working on this by partnering with Virgin Music to reposition the Zodiac as less of a gaming console and more of an all-around entertainment console. With access to online music stores and a better interface for syncing and playing music, the Zodiac could carve out a nice chunk of that market even if it doesn't dethrone the iPod. But the bigger market in this space will be video players. Palm OS devices are ideally suited to this, already having access to players that support ASF, MPEG4, divx and other popular video formats. As PalmOne has proven with the T5, even Palm OS Garnet can support non-volatile storage (like hard drives) and it seems a no brainer for someone to make a Palm OS unit with a 30GB hard drive and take on Archos.

Garmin has done a pretty good job so far of using Palm OS to power a GPS handheld. This trend will continue, with the iQue and devices like it getting smaller and more affordable to average consumers. I'll also point out that Garmin tried their hand at a Windows Mobile version of the iQue, which didn't do as well in the marketplace as their Palm OS units. Turns out usability counts.

And that's really what it comes down to. The PDA isn't really dead, it's just evolving into new devices that both do what PDAs do and include new features that wouldn't have been possible or affordable just a few years ago. The Palm OS interface will bring elegant usability to devices that desperately need it (cell phones) and power new devices that challenge the iPod and laptop computers. Even if no one carries a "PDA" in five years, the future for Palm OS has never looked so bright.

Artists Break With Industry on File Sharing

Yahoo! News - Artists Break With Industry on File Sharing "A prominent group of musicians and artists, breaking with colleagues and the major entertainment studios, is urging the Supreme Court not to hold online file-sharing services responsible for the acts of users who illegally trade songs, movies and software.

The group, which includes representatives of Steve Winwood, rapper Chuck D and the band Heart, said in court papers to be filed today that it condemns the stealing of copyrighted works. But it argues that popular services such as Grokster, Kazaa and others also provide a legal and critical alternative for artists to distribute their material."