PDA's

Anyone have an opinion on the different PDA's offered by Verizon?

TIA and God bless

Ernest

"me" <hamradiooperator1967@yahoo.com> wrote in
news:3dqdnbXuUJhjNJDanZ2dnUVZ_hadnZ2d@comcast.com:

> Anyone have an opinion on the different PDA's offered by
Verizon?
>
>

Palm - simple software, syncs easily, battery lasts long, doesn't
crash.
Windoze - heavy code load, syncs sometimes, runs an hour, crashes
8 times a day hard, lots of excuses.

PDAs are growing old, in spite of Micro$oft's attempt to revive
them. I just bought the future and it's NOT a PDA:
http://www.nseries.com/products/n800/#l=products,n800
Runs Linux. No proprietary BS, hundreds of hackers working on
free apps easily downloaded/installed from Nokia-sponsored:
http://maemo.org/
Cruise through the download sections....(c;
Connections are via wifi for free, or using Bluetooth through the
phone modem to EVDO (slower) if you must.

NO SELLPHONE CARRIER TAMPERING BS! NO bean counter backdoors into
your OS trying to sell you what you already paid for. EVERYTHING
works....especially SKYPE, Google Talk, any other VoIP you like.

Being Linux, if something crashes it doesn't take out the whole
machine. Life goes on. If you really try hard and crash the
whole machine, you plug it into your Windoze PC with the included
USB cable, boot up the free bootloader also used for total OS
upgrades (also free), hold down the home button while turning it
on to access its bootloader....and just run the Win program to
download and install the whole OS in about 7 minutes on cable
internet.....not have to send it back to China to have its
proprietary, carrier-hobbled, secret OS reinstalled. I did a
full upgrade on my new one without a glitch right off the
webpages.

To install software, you go to the download page, pick it, click
INSTALL button or go to the software home page and the
Applications Manager just does it. It's almost too easy!

16GB of SD card storage in 2 cards at $68 ea from Amazon. Any HC
SD cards under Fat 16/32 just plug in. It doesn't even ask you
if you want them installed...they just work. One card is
removeable storage so you can easily share big files with your
desktop by plugging in the SD card into the slot.....of the USB
card reader ($20) because your card slot doesn't support 8GB SD
cards on your PC.

Take the tour of the websites. I'm living on 4 hours of sleep
because the damned thing just has me enthralled. The video
widescreen plays "most", but not all, formats out of the box.
The hackers have the rest of the codecs.

REAL WEB BROWSER! Opera 8 for Linux comes with it, installed.
This includes plugin support, Flash 9, etc.....not some ****ty
PDA browser that does text, not webpages. Opera on the N800
looks like a miniature Opera on your PC. Anything your PC will
play on its browser, the N800 will play, too, without trying to
turn pretty graphics and frames into text.

UNfortunately, some web sites and systems are way too close to
Micro$oft. I have MobiTV for PC. When I boot it on the N800 it
says MobiTV doesn't support Linux and it won't play without
Windoze Media Player's spammer. They'll come around, I hope.
This box is too much fun to fail. Nokia has done a wonderful
job.

Buy.com sold me through Google Checkout at $222.99, a nice
discount from $399 retail. The box has been out over 6 months,
so lots of the initial bugs are gone and LOTS of amazing new
features have been added to its kernel. IF you don't like its
kernel, look in SYSTEMS on Maemo and download someone else's
kernel for it. There's lots of pretty themes and gui gadgets to
play with, too.

Don't let the Linux scare you. The hackers are working VERY hard
to make this box into a user-friendly device. On some of their
websites, with them very intensely into coding, they might give
you the impression you're going to need a Phd in Computer Science
and be a Linux programmer to make it work. You don't. I
downloaded a really neat FULL SCREEN Youtube player one of them
wrote because he didn't like the picture size on the Youtube
pages on it. His software simply steals the YouTube flash video,
stores it on your SD card so you can keep it, then boots Mplayer,
one of Linux's many media players, and plays it FULL SCREEN! I
showed two YouTube videos to my friends at breakfast it
downloaded last night from the card. We didn't need the net to
do that.

The possibilities of this gadget is only limited by the number of
hackers working on it.....and there seems to be no shortage of
those!

I've paired my Nokia N800 with my Motorola E815 on Alltel EVDO,
quite painlessly. Alltel hasn't shutdown DUN or OBEX like
Verizon. I took them both to the Alltel store to buy the $25/mo
unlimited data for the phone modem. It went off without a hitch.
I'll put up with the slow internet Sellphone companies deliver
over EVDO, compared with the real broadband at Panera Bread for
free next door. I can select the best connection, not just be
strapped to Sellular. I like it when I can choose....(c;

Skype over the bluetooth amazed the reps at the Alltel office on
the N800's stereo speakers. They could even understand what my
crazy Japanese buddy in Osaka was saying with his heavy accent...
(c; Skype has one deficiency. Skype, yet, does NOT support the
N800's pop-out webcam for Skype video calls. When I called Skype
to ask about it, her comment was, "You're the 50th caller, TODAY,
about that." Skype usually follows through with that kind of
interest....(c; It'll happen. Google Talk and the other free
internet phone apps all use the popout webcam just fine!

Larry
--
I think my PDA has been retired for good this time.....(c;
PDA stuff works very well over free web-based PDA simulators with
LOTS more storage and NO SYNCING!

At 12 Oct 2007 17:39:13 +0000 Larry wrote:

> Palm - simple software, syncs easily, battery lasts long, doesn't
> crash.
> Windoze - heavy code load, syncs sometimes, runs an hour, crashes
> 8 times a day hard, lots of excuses.


And again, we must remind Larry that his four-day test drive of a
defective Dell Axim he bought on eBay isn't representative of a
Windows Mobile experience.

While certainly not 100% stable, WinMo phones/devices do not "crash
eight times a day."

Memory "leaks" do force me to reboot mine every two or three days,
however. For it's functionality I'm wiling to live with that.

> PDAs are growing old, in spite of Micro$oft's attempt to revive
> them. I just bought the future and it's NOT a PDA:
> http://www.nseries.com/products/n800/#l=products,n800


The future, like it or not, is in convergence. A better example of
the "future" is probably something like this:
http://www.htc.com/product/03-product_htcshift.htm

A full-blown Windows PC, with a WinMo device built-in for "instant-
on" functionality.


> Runs Linux. No proprietary BS, hundreds of hackers working on
> free apps easily downloaded/installed from Nokia-sponsored:
> http://maemo.org/
> Cruise through the download sections....(c;


Why mess with a limited-market platform, when you can use a
ubiquitous one with much more development going on, like Palm or
WinMo? For all of those N800 apps you've pointed to, it's a
miniscule fraction of what's available for Symbian or WinMo.

> Connections are via wifi for free, or using Bluetooth through the
> phone modem to EVDO (slower) if you must.


Now your stuck sclepping two devices again- that's why I bought my
PPC phone- I was tired of carrying a pocketful of crap with
overlapping functions. If carrying a webtablet plus a phone is the
"future," I'll happily stay here in the present!


> NO SELLPHONE CARRIER TAMPERING BS! NO bean counter backdoors into
> your OS trying to sell you what you already paid for. EVERYTHING
> works....especially SKYPE, Google Talk, any other VoIP you like.

They all work on my phone too.


Just because YOU pick the wrong cellular carriers, don't blame phone
manufacturers. Plenty of full-featured uncrippled phones are
available.

On Oct 12, 2:30 pm, Todd Allcock <eleccon...@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote:
> At 12 Oct 2007 17:39:13 +0000 Larry wrote:
>
> > Palm - simple software, syncs easily, battery lasts long, doesn't
> > crash.
> > Windoze - heavy code load, syncs sometimes, runs an hour, crashes
> > 8 times a day hard, lots of excuses.
>
> And again, we must remind Larry that his four-day test drive of a
> defective Dell Axim he bought on eBay isn't representative of a
> Windows Mobile experience.
>
> While certainly not 100% stable, WinMo phones/devices do not "crash
> eight times a day."
>
> Memory "leaks" do force me to reboot mine every two or three days,
> however. For it's functionality I'm wiling to live with that.

Heh. I'm on 3+ years of use with my Dell Axim X30 with WinMobile
2003SE and I barely ever *have* to reboot, although sometimes I'll do
it just because it's as easy to hit the reset button as it is to close
multiple apps at once. And it takes serious multitasking to cause
memory issues.

Having said that, I'm starting to find I use my Env more for PDA tasks
than my Axim. Times are a-changin'.

Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote in news:feoek9
$2ud$1@aioe.org:

> And again, we must remind Larry that his four-day test drive of
a
> defective Dell Axim he bought on eBay isn't representative of a
> Windows Mobile experience.
>
>

And, I'd like to remind YOU my ****ty WM5 Dell x51v PDA was from
the Dell Sales kiosk in Northwoods Mall, North Charleston, SC,
where I paid full retail for the defective operating system.....
(c;

I took the Nokia N800 to Alltel, today, and bought the unlimited
data plan ($25/mo) which paired right up (DUN and OBEX) with my
unmolested-by-Alltel Moto E815. I called a friend on Skype
through it to Bahrain on the other side of the planet and I must
admit, though the Sellular data link IS slow, compared to real
wifi, it did work very well on Skype. The pretty girl who waited
on me was quite impressed....with the N800, not me...(c;

Dammit.



Larry
--
You can tell there's extremely
intelligent life in the universe
because they have never called Earth.

Guys, Thanks for the replies. I read that palm will not continue to support
their software. Is their any truth to that??


"me" <hamradiooperator1967@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3dqdnbXuUJhjNJDanZ2dnUVZ_hadnZ2d@comcast.com. ..
> Anyone have an opinion on the different PDA's offered by Verizon?
>
> TIA and God bless
>
> Ernest
>
>

At 13 Oct 2007 02:19:30 +0000 Larry wrote:

> And, I'd like to remind YOU my ****ty WM5 Dell x51v PDA was from
> the Dell Sales kiosk in Northwoods Mall, North Charleston, SC,
> where I paid full retail for the defective operating system.....
> (c;


Pardon my error- you still had a defective Axim, IMHO. I've been
playing with WinMo devices since Win CE 2.11 and never had one work
as poorly as you described.


--

"I don't need my cell phone to play video games or take pictures
or double as a Walkie-Talkie; I just need it to work. Thanks for
all the bells and whistles, but I could communicate better with
ACTUAL bells and whistles." -Bill Maher 9/25/2003

Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote in news:fepo5q
$el8$1@aioe.org:

>
> Pardon my error- you still had a defective Axim, IMHO. I've
been
> playing with WinMo devices since Win CE 2.11 and never had one
work
> as poorly as you described.
>
>

Todd, have you played with Orb from Nokia?
http://corp.orb.com/n800

It's a really neat video, audio, TV, picture, document, and other
media SERVER that installs and runs on your WinXP/Vista mainframe
on broadband. It catalogs all the videos/audios/document/picture
files on your system you configure it to broadcast (took over an
hour on this beast). Then, in my case from the Nokia N800, I
open its secure webpage through the Orb server to my running XP
box where 4.8TB of RAID are now accessible....right from my Nokia
N800 Linux media player.

The server converts everything to more realistically-
transmittable Realvideo/audio streams! Nokia's media player
plays all realmedia formats on the little linux box without the
Realplayer spammer.

I'm watching a 1 hour and six minute Pink Floyd concert over it
on my N800 via wifi as I type this....in stereo, of course. The
video is amazingly smooth and as detailed as you could want on
such a tiny screen. I tried it over the Bluetooth data link to
my Alltel Moto E815 and it plays great, there, on EVDO, too!
It's, of course, faster buffering on real wifi broadband. I
connected to my neighbor's wifi router on Comcrap with the N800
to see how the over-the-internet compared. Worked great between
our two different cable companies, too!

I told the N800 to change connections and am now playing another
1 hour concert video through the Alltel E815 via
Bluetooth...first class...no balking at all! Streaming data over
Bluetooth just eats E815 batteries. The whole phone gets HOT! I
may have to use an external battery pack:
http://www.naval-
technology.com/contractors/electrical/enersys/enersys2.html

How cool! I can listen and watch and see all the files on my
whole RAID stack streamed to the little Nokia N800 in
realmedia....my own CLOSED broadcast station...(c;

There's over 1.7M MP3 files on one little hard drive in the
array...(c;

It'll work with any browser-based handheld that has a Realplayer
plugin or player in it. I tried it on my WinXP Gateway laptop
over wifi through Firefox with the Realvideo plugin and that
works great as well, even on a non-Nokia box.

Welcome to Linux Broadcasting....(c;

Buy.com's price went back up $7 to $229 if you use Google
Checkout. Came in 2 days via ground.
http://www.buy.com/prod/nokia-n800-internet-
tablet/q/loc/101/204055141.html

Larry
--
This stuff keeps getting better'n better if you don't resist the
changes.....
But, alas, I just GOTTA get some sleep, tonight! Playin' with
this damned little Linux box until 4AM is killin me!

I can't WAIT to show the boys at Verizon and ATT's iPhone kiosk.
"Can that do this?".....(c;
What a dirty bastard I can be if provoked....

At 14 Oct 2007 02:44:33 +0000 Larry wrote:

> Todd, have you played with Orb from Nokia?
> http://corp.orb.com/n800


Nope. I know a few people who do, but I'm not much into streaming.
My T-Mo connection is too slow, so I generally load up any media I
want on SD cards are take it with me for trips.


> I can't WAIT to show the boys at Verizon and ATT's iPhone kiosk.
> "Can that do this?".....(c;


Then both kiosk guys will whip out their cheapest, crummiest phone,
place a call and ask if your tablet can do THAT without connecting
through another device first! ;-)


--

"I don't need my cell phone to play video games or take pictures
or double as a Walkie-Talkie; I just need it to work. Thanks for
all the bells and whistles, but I could communicate better with
ACTUAL bells and whistles." -Bill Maher 9/25/2003

Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote in news:fes3nu
$heq$1@aioe.org:

>> Todd, have you played with Orb from Nokia?
>> http://corp.orb.com/n800
>
>
> Nope. I know a few people who do, but I'm not much into
streaming.
> My T-Mo connection is too slow, so I generally load up any
media I
> want on SD cards are take it with me for trips.
>

You should try it, anyways. Just being able to download
documents and pictures is well worth the few minutes it takes to
configure. If you want to show someone a video/audio/doc/picture
on their computer, all they need is their browser and player for
which ever encoder you choose....WM, Real or a couple others it
supports. It will also download files off your hard drive to the
remote computer, if you like.

It was playing a rock concert in the truck through Alltel EVDO on
the way downtown, today via bluetooth. It balked just once for 8
seconds or so. That's pretty neat, considering.

I left it playing MP3s off my RAID stack while I was working in
the boat this afternoon. Yeah, I know, that's crazy...(c;

>
>> I can't WAIT to show the boys at Verizon and ATT's iPhone
kiosk.
>> "Can that do this?".....(c;
>
>
> Then both kiosk guys will whip out their cheapest, crummiest
phone,
> place a call and ask if your tablet can do THAT without
connecting
> through another device first! ;-)
>

Not at all! We loaded Orb onto one of the guy's XP laptop that
had some videos and MP3 on it, then called it via his WM5 PDA to
see if it would stream under WMP. It worked for him, too.

PS - my phone won't make calls without "going through another
device", either. It requires a whole cellular system, which
costs a lot more to use than Skype on the net from the tablet...
(c;



Larry
--
You can tell there's extremely
intelligent life in the universe
because they have never called Earth.