Whittle down my Palm to a Thumb?

June 14, 2007 10:40 AM

Cross-platform, portable PIM? Not wearing a winter coat anymore, I find my Palm T|X is larger than I want to carry.

XP at work. OSX at home. Lots to keep track of, want to keep in sync both places.

So I've been using a Palm T|X with Palm Desktop in both places. There are some small hassles in differences between the Palm software for each OS, but they're manageable.

But lately I've been using a flash drive for PortableApps a lot, and finding that it's pretty cool, and it might be a smaller, easier to carry alternative to carrying the Palm back and forth every day. I'm finding that I don't update it on the fly as much as I thought I would, so just a portable PIM would work fine.

BUT...PortableApps doesn't work for OSX.

SO I either need

a) a portable app that's cross-platform (I can handle not being able to use the rest of the PortableApps functionality on OSX as long as I can drill down to a usable PIM app on the flash drive somewhere)

OR

b) a way to run the Portable Apps suite on OSX without spending tons of time/money on Virtual PC, etc. (The Mac is PowerPC, so no Parallels, dual-boot, etc possible.)

OR something I don't even know about yet, that y'all can suggest.

Anyone?

P.S. A piggyback on this - I could probably be convinced to keep carrying the Palm every day if I could find a way to use my Palm to watch the videos I get from my Mac's Democracy player. If there's a way to watch Ask a Ninja on my commute, it might be worth the bulging pockets.

posted by bartleby to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Assuming you already carry a mobile phone, how about getting a Treo to consolidate?
posted by exogenous at 12:31 PM on June 14, 2007

Because of similar sync problems with multiple devices, I've pretty much moved to Google to keep track of things. This avoids the need to sync, as things are always in sync. Google calendar works great this way, as does Google Docs. If you want to backup your calendar to a local machine, in case you're ever offline, you can set up iCal on your home machine to sync with Google calendar. I've done this and only start up iCal once in a while when I want to download my appointments - but I usually just work from google calendar.

The downside to this system is you can't access your calendar well when you're not online. Butthe advantage is you don't have to carry anything between home and work.

Contacts are on GMail. PDFs are the only thing Google hasn't really gotten a handle on yet, unfortunately. Maybe have a flash for those.
posted by cahlers at 12:34 PM on June 14, 2007

bitpal maybe? used it in the past, was flakey but improved.

http://bitpal.com/

and for the second question, i think the core player TCPMP plays everything but i think is palm os 5 only, but i might be wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core_Pocket_Media_Player

use a version on my tapwave, it's great.
posted by spyke23 at 12:36 PM on June 14, 2007

My solution for a very similar problem was to switch to using a BB Pearl. It's about as much hassle to use the BB as it was to use the Palm. The Pearl works with Gmail just fine.

Watching videos on the Pearl isn't as nice as the Palm---samller screen---and you have to transcode them.

Still the Pearl is a nicer device to use than the TX and certainly much easier to carry. Price is a real factor though.
posted by bonehead at 1:08 PM on June 14, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses:

@ exogenous: I've got a conveniently small phone , and I've got to have that on me at all times. A Treo is bigger, more expensive and more fragile (I am on the trail a lot when not in the office, and have pulled my phone out of 4" of sucking mud and it was OK - probably not as likely with a Treo). The Palm is basically a workweek-only device. And the Palm interface for changing things on the fly is less useful for me than making use of the Palm Desktop part at both ends of the commute.

@cahlers: hmm. Maybe Google might do a lot of what I need. Problem is that a lot of what the Palm is for is the 6 or 7 To-Do lists I have to keep track of and keep re-prioritizing. And I don't see a way to do that on Google. And I have an (un)reasonable vague anxiety about storing my "life" on Google's servers.

@spyke23: Hey, BitPal looks lightweight but might do what I need, with its To-do lists - I'll try it tonight. (It seems to work on Either platform, but I'll have to test to see if it works on Both.) Thanks!

And I've already used TCPMP on the Palm to watch a few videos and it worked pretty well. {For Mac/Palm users, I recommend Handbrake to recode torrented videos or DVD rips.} But I tried it last night with several files I got from Democracy, and there was always a missing/unavailable/illegal codec problem - either video but no sound, or sound but no video. And the project seems to be defunct now - I wonder if codec/DRM issues caused them to quit the biz. I'll try some re/transcoding and see if I can get things working.

@bonehead: I know someone with a Pearl who loves it; but they also have their whole lives running on iGoogle and they have the extra dough for an unlimited data plan to access it all through the BB. If I can get Google to work the way I want it to, and I get a raise to pay for an unlimited data plan, the Pearl might be my next phone.

Hey Palm experts out there - I'm thinking maybe the solution is to save (or backup) my Palm data to a flash drive instead of the Palm. I'd do my XP Palm Desktop thing at work, then I'd take it home and open (or restore) that same file with OSX Palm Desktop. Lather, rinse, repeat back and forth. Anyone know if that's possible? and if so, how to re-point the Desktop app to get its data to/from a USB flash drive instead of a Palm device?
posted by bartleby at 2:20 PM on June 14, 2007

It's true, to really get the worth out of a BB/Smartphone type device, you need to pay for a semi-decent data plan, IMO. They ain't cheap.

What the BB really did for me was let me go from two devices, phone (not smart) + palm, down to one. This made travelling much less of a hassle. The BB also just uses a mini-usb cable, so if I forget mine at home, replacing it isn't a huge deal.

Here's an alternative that I tried but never really did much with: Use the Palm's SD cards as a thumb drive. Buy some of those SD cards that fold into USB connectors (Sandisk makes 'em) and you can have the best of both worlds. Keep all your Palm stuff on the card, no need to backup. They'll even fit in your wallet.
posted by bonehead at 2:51 PM on June 14, 2007

This is the kind of card I'm thinking about.
posted by bonehead at 5:54 PM on June 14, 2007

This is a bit convoluted, but I struggled with this for a long time and like this system. I have a cheap hosted exchange server account and use Outlook on the PC at work (I'm a consultant, so , GroupCal to keep iCal in synch with exchange server on the mac, and a windows mobile device for mobile exchange (I have a blackjack, which has plenty of problems, but its really slim) - so I don't need to synch anymore. The web exchange is not as slick as google, but I find I never use it - outlook on the pc, ical on the mac, calendar on the phone, and no synching. The blackjack is nice, too, because I can check all my email accounts on there (work, yahoo, gmail)
posted by drobot at 7:01 PM on June 14, 2007

Oh, didn't finish that thought - I'm a consultant, so my work PC is mine, but I need a PC (.Net dev, etc) and can't use my mac all the time.
posted by drobot at 7:02 PM on June 14, 2007

@bartleby: On google docs you can keep as many to-do lists as you like, and you can access them from any computer, download them as word docs, and email them. You can also upload word docs. I bet the BB or other smartphone could also access those docs, then you could download a version to the BB and update your lists that way. The google docs version would be the main one so still no syncing involved. If you dont want to spring for a data plan, just download the doc you want, then sync your palm wherever you are. If you make cahnges on the palm, upload it back to google docs before leaving your computer. This system would work for home or work.
posted by cahlers at 11:21 AM on June 16, 2007