Some people are content with using a Palm as just an organizer. I'm definately not one of those people! Although the Palm was originally developed as an organizer it has evolved well past that point into something very useful for the nerd inside all of us. I had a Palm Tungsten T3, a Sony-Ericsson T610 World Phone and a $30 a month data plan from T-Mobile. This setup allowed me to check my email and do some very limited web browsing.
This was fun for about 3 months until a.) My Palm's screen broke, b.) I lost my cell phone and c.) Paying 30 bucks a month for a possible 56k download, got old real fast. Of course to top it off T-Mobile wanted $250 to replace the phone (eBay was no better) or a steep cancellation fee. What did I do? I paid my account faithfully and just cancelled it last night! Ha, you bastards! Well, I still want my internet access and with the increase in popularity of Wi-Fi, I will be getting the Palm Wi-Fi card and jumping on to open wireless networks while on the road. Leaving the gray area of legality/morality of hopping uninvited onto someone's network ignored, how would one go about finding one to begin with? That brings me to the first item on the list; NetChaser.
NetChaser allows you to find WiFi HotSpots with your Palm and Wi-Fi card. Very handy indeed. If anyone is familiar with NetStumbler this does the same for the Palm. As of this writing it doesn't officially supprt the Tungsten T5 and I'm waiting on an email back from the developers as to when it will. Not to sound like a sales pitch, here's what it does (Copy/Pasted form PalmGear);
Main Screen:
- Signal Strength Display
- Access Point SSID
- WEP Status
- Loss-of-Signal Time display
- Current Battery Voltage and Time
Access Point Info:
- AP MAC Address
- AP SSID
- Signal Strength
- Channel
- Loss-of-Signal Time and Date display
- Latitude and Longitude of strongest signal
Full Logging Support:
- Log all access point data to a file for post-processing
- CSV standard file suitable for import into any database or spreadsheet
How good is the web browsing on a palm? Is it really worth it? If I had that my career productivty would grind to a halt. On the other hand I would probably blog eighteen times a day.
ReplyDeleteWith the setup that I had, email was pretty painless and web browsing was a chore. The Palm web browser did a decent job formatting the web pages and with the high rez screen in landscape (480x320) it was an OK secondary way to get on the web. Still the speed sucked, time will tell if the Wi-Fi makes any improvement.
ReplyDelete