Revisiting the Palm Tungsten C
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
Several years ago I was struck with a desire for palm-top computing so strong it rivaled typhoid. The holy grail of palm pilots of the time was Palm’s Tungsten Line. In addition to Wi-Fi (That’s right 802.11b) it allowed for Cisco LEAP Authentication through a 50$ third party app (AEGIS Meetinghouse), perfect for the campus’ overly strict wireless access policy at the time. Add to that color screen, mono out (who needs Left AND right channels), expansion slots, and QWERTY keyboard. This thing should have been the choice communication device. But, when put to use, the Tungsten crashed and burned like oh so many incandescent filaments. It was horrible, AEGIS’ Meetinghouse combined with the Palm brand web-browser caused seize up after sieze up. And after losing all data not stored in flash memory for the 100th time, the honeymoon was over.
After a 2-year trial separation, I decided it was time to kiss and make-up. And was delighted to find that there had been a few advancements, that turned Tungsten into Gold, or at least a usable wireless device.
The 2 big deals are:
IBM Java WebSphere - Basically a mobile JVM. This badboy opens up a world of mobile development to the Java Folk. Which leads to…
Opera Mini - A real usable web browser. Does RSS feed support, a half decent job on page renders, intuitive navigation, good caching. The only down side really is Yahoo! search instead of Google. With continued support this is only going to get better.
So yeah if you have one of these and were dissappointed with it’s Internet Capabilities in the past, I recommend trying throwing on these two gems.