New Phone: one step back
========================

There was  an opportunity  to get a  new (newer used  and still  in its
original packaging) Palm Pixi Plus phone  [1]. I was not able to resist
so I got it.

Of course, it is not the phone which  I has been searching for. It is a
smartphone with the  WebOS [2] (an OS  which is actually as  alive as a
zombie). It probably can be used as a basic phone but with battery life
of  a smartphone.  But,  you  understand, it's  one  of  the last  Palm
products so I have had to get it.

The  phone was  new  thus  it required  activation  via (long  defunct)
Palm/HP servers. There are tools to  bypass the activation (one needs a
"devicetool.jar" and the  "novacom drivers"). The drivers  can be found
in a  *.deb package for Linux  (in a binary  form as a i386  and x86_64
packages  only, unfortunately  - I  had to  revive my  partially defunct
Lenovo x61s for that - fortunately it survived the complete procedure).

After that I tried to install the PreWare software catalog. In has more
than 1000 items but some of them are (of course) compatible with the HP
TouchPad [3] only and others are not working.

One of the problems was that at the  moment I am not able to update SSL
certificates (there is a package for that but it calls the "curl" which
I don't have and don't know where to find it). Thus I have no access to
any https:// stuff. And of course  many of the apps are defunct because
of their  age - for example  the Flickr and the  Geocaching clients use
old APIs so they are useless.

Not it is not bad device at all and the OS is actually fine.

It is very  small and comfortable to  carry. For my hands  a bit larger
device would be better. The keyboard  has backlight and the keys are of
high quality, albeit they are small.

It has a remove battery and a  full-size SIM slot! I can understand why
batteries of much bigger devices are not removable but don't understand
why people use nanoSIM slots in 7" smartphones.

The screen (albeit  small: 320x400, 2.63") is bright and  easy to read.
There is even a 2 MPix camera (it makes pictures of acceptable quality)
a GPS chip (no navigation software came pre-installed, though) and WiFi
and Bluetooth chips.

At the moment  I only tried to  use and to install  some software (with
mixed results).  The Calendar syncs with  Google only (I have  found no
CalDAV),  the ToDo  application is  less  user-friendly as  was in  the
actual Palm OS. There are alternative apps in the PreWare which claim to
be  more close  to the  Palm OS  build-in apps  but they  are not  much
better. There is even a passwords  storage program called Keyring but I
have not found a way to import passwords from the Palm OS Keyring.

The WWW browser is actually usable (please note that I was only to test
older and simpler sites which still use the old plain http:// protocol).

The next step is  to use an activated SIM card to test  if it can be used
as a phone...


References:

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Palm%20Pixi
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/WebOS
[3] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/HP%20TouchPad