Kevin’s Blog » Treo
Finally, someone has worked out how to get an SDIO Wifi card to work with the Treo. Shadowmite at TreoCentral posted this evening that he was successfully connecting to his wireless network from his Treo 650. Not quite ready for corporate use, but now that the driver has gotten to this stage the rest of the work should be relatively easy.
This will be excellent for those of us who use the Treo for email, reading blogs, and streaming audio. We’re still waiting for the Treo 650 to be available from our wireless provider at InfoWorld, but this is yet another reason (along with Bluetooth support) to upgrade from the 600’s.
No word yet as to when this will be working on the 600, but the author posted that he thinks he will be able to do it on that model as well.
More info:
Sitting here playing with my new Treo 600 made me realize what a complete PDA geek I’ve been over the years. I’ve made it a point to keep most of the PDAs I’ve had as I outgrew each one, thinking some day it’d make an interesting collection. At least they don’t take up much space, and as far as I know they all still work. =)
PalmPilot 5000 (512k RAM, 1996)
PalmPilot Professional (1MB RAM, PalmOS 2.0, 1997)
Palm III (2MB RAM, dropped the “Pilot” name after a lawsuit by the Pilot Pen corp, OS 2.0, 1999)
Palm Vx (There was no Palm IV strangely enough… the Vx was an upgraded version of the Palm V slim PDA with the metal body, 2001)
Palm VII (Funky PDA a little thicker than the Palm III and about an inch longer, with a built in wireless data modem which required special Palm VII apps to use the data services. A flop in the long run, but was pretty cool for its time, 2001)
Palm IIIc (was my wife’s… color version of the Palm III)
I also had an Apple Newton review unit for a year or so when those were hot. I also have a couple of Psion Series 5 units which are very cool with a decent keyboard and lots of accessories that go with em. I reviewed the very first Blackberry model, that was a pager-sized device but had all of the cool email features that made the newer PDA-sized Blackberrys such a huge hit a few years ago. The strangest device I have tho is a weird NEC MobilePro 700 which is about 1/3 the size of a small laptop, that never really worked well but had a decent keyboard for taking notes in meetings and such.
Up to this point my favorite device has been the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. It’s a fully blown Linux machine that pretends to be a PDA. Great for doing systems admin work via SSH. The hidden thumb keyboard is the best I’ve used, and it has both CF and SD slots for adding memory and accessories. Just a bit too large to carry around all the time though. With the wifi CF card it’s great for doing wireless network surveys.
Ugh what a collection. Or pile of junk, not sure which at this point. Hopefully the Treo 600 will finally be the best of PDA functionality, wireless Internet, small form factor, and good cell phone abilities.
My Treo 600 Smartphone arrived today. I was skeptical at first whether I’d like it, since it’s quite a bit larger than my SonyEricsson T616. Fortunately, they’re both GSM so I can just swap the SIM card back and forth between the two.
PocketTunes totally rocks. I just wish they had 30GB SD cards so I could put all of my tunes on there. Of course the interface still can’t come close to the iPod’s, but being able to carry one device instead of two would be worth it. Still searching for the perfect IMAP client, but SnapperMail 2.0 (due to be released in early May) looks like it’ll be awesome. Full support for mail storage on SD, IMAP, SSL, large message capabilities, full HTML support, etc. Hoping to get in on the beta as soon as it’s released….
My big hangup with the Treo right now is the lack of built in Bluetooth. I’ve really learned to love the Bluetooth sync capabilities that I have between my PowerBook G4 and the T616. Hopefully a Treo 600 compatible Bluetooth SD card will come out soon… seems a shame to have to plug in a sync cable all the time. Bleh….