1SRC Podcast Twentyone

[Jeff Kirvin]

Free stuff! Palm Fiction and Core Player. New RealPlayer, but does anyone care? Gates demos mini-tablet at WinHEC; what does PalmSource have to do to stay ahead of Windows for mobile computing? BackupMan is updated, still doesn't work on T5 or Treo 650. [details (http://www.1src.com/?m=show&id=1014)]

[LexLuther]

Jeff, great podcast, keep them up!

I just wanted to let you know that there are some of us out here that use realone mp3 player. I downloaded the upgrade and while I don't buy music online (yet) I do have about ten albums on my SD card and real one is enough for me. It does support playlists, maybe not very elegently but it does nevertheless. So, who cares? I suppose I do a bit. Thanks Real! :)

[tungsten t5]

when I had my T5 I used realplayer. It looks nice. Also picard will be combining betaplayer and coer player and have one site and one name called TCPMP (the core pocket media player) go to www.tcpmp.com (It's not completed yet)

[ballistic]

Jeff,

In the podcast you mentioned that you must be missing something because you don't get why someone with a NVFS device would need to backup, citing non-volatile memory and data backed up to a PC during a hotsync.

What happens when you're on the road away from your PC (and sans laptop) and your PDA either crashes and hard resets, wiping out your data, or you have to hard reset to resolve a certain issues and you need to backup your data?

From your T5 review on Writing on Your Palm:

And yes, if you have to do a hard reset it will wipe out both the system "RAM" and the internal card. If you think about it for more than a half-second, this makes sense. The point of a hard reset (which should be a rare occurance) is to start fresh because something on your device has been misbehaving. What's the point of doing this if you potentially leave the troublemaker behind to start again? If you don't want to lose your data in the internal memory, I have two suggestions. One, back it up regularly to your PC, which is very easy with the File Transfer program on your PC (see above). I'll admit this step shouldn't be necessary, as HotSync should have the option to back this up for you. Maybe in an update. The second suggestion for avoiding data loss is: don't do a hard reset! A soft reset fixes almost all problems with no data loss at all, and most of the ones it can't solve can be solved by a "firm" reset.

Like I said, if your device crashes and hard resets on its own (it's been known to happen, you know how Murphy is), you'd be SOL in the scenario I mentioned above (away from a PC) without a backup. If you have mission-critical data on your PDA, then a reliable backup utility is absolutely essential IMHO.

And since when is being tied to a PC a good thing ;)?


Brian

[Cyker]

I thought that point about backing up was a bit ludicrous. Just because the T|5 and Treo 650 have NVFS, this does NOT make them immune to loosing their data. Okay, so they won't loose their data from battery drain, but a rogue app or hard reset caused by NVFS incompatibility could just as easily kill the data.

Backing up on them is just as important as it is on all Palms!

Being able to backup away from your compy just adds that extra piece of mind, and being able to maintain multiple generations of backup; e.g. so if later you've found some app has been slowly and unnoticably mangling all your data and you only just noticed, you can go back to the last clean backup set.

[jjesusfreak01]

I thought that point about backing up was a bit ludicrous. Just because the T|5 and Treo 650 have NVFS, this does NOT make them immune to loosing their data. Okay, so they won't loose their data from battery drain, but a rogue app or hard reset caused by NVFS incompatibility could just as easily kill the data.

Backing up on them is just as important as it is on all Palms!

Being able to backup away from your compy just adds that extra piece of mind, and being able to maintain multiple generations of backup; e.g. so if later you've found some app has been slowly and unnoticably mangling all your data and you only just noticed, you can go back to the last clean backup set.
Especially since these devices are more prone to crashing.

[Jeff Kirvin]

Okay, point taken, folks. I guess I'm more tied to my PC than I realized...

[jjesusfreak01]

Okay, point taken, folks. I guess I'm more tied to my PC than I realized...
I barely even touch my PC anymore. The only time I use it when I need to install a program that only has an executable download. Other than that, I dont need it.

[ballistic]

By the way Jeff, I forgot to mention it in my original post: I enjoy the weekly podcast, keep up the great work. My Thursday AM commutes are my "technology" listening sessions between the 1src podcast and Walt Mossberg's weekly Personal Technology column (http://ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html) in the Morning Edition of the Wall Street Journal on Audible.com ;).

Brian

[Cyker]

Man, that PalmFiction thing really rocks!

I deffo agree about the iSilo comparison ;)

My only gripe is that it's not as intuitive as I'd like, and it's not very finger-friendly, but dang is it neat :D

One thing Jeff: What was that tip on getting it to load Word documents? All I get are a load of dagger symbols when I load 'em. I tried to find that Windows encoding thing you mentioned, but the only one I could find was for opening documents in ZIP files...?!


I have to go see that new Windows mobile thing you're talking about. The idea of Windows running on something like my TH55 just doesn't compute... I just can't see it working as a PDA system :/
From what I've gathered, they won't be any competition for a PDA because they are on a totally different track. The question is whether PDA's track is about to hit a buffer :p

It doesn't sound particularly new either - We already have devices like the Sony U-series and those ultra-thin|small sub-sub-sub-notebooks which run Windows XP and are small enough to carry in a handbag (Or a 'man-bag' :p) without requiring bionic arms, so the idea of a really small Windows machine is not new.
I just can't get my head round it 'tho - These devices would have to have physically small screens, but they'd have to have incredible resolution - Imagine 1024x768 on a TH55-sized, or worse a UX-sized screen?! But that's the minimum screen res such a device would need: Windows *SUCKS* at low resolution. They've over-bulked the interface, esp. in WinXP, and it would be unusable at any lower resolution!

I'd love to see something like a StarTrek PADD - They are independent devices like PDAs, but can link up to become a seamless terminal of a bigger system.
My compy is the main data store for everything, with my TH55 being sortof a satellite. Needed info is synced onto the TH55 as needed (Sometimes across network :)) so in a way I've already got a crude parallel going... then I might just be geeking out again... :p

[Jeff Kirvin]

One thing Jeff: What was that tip on getting it to load Word documents? All I get are a load of dagger symbols when I load 'em. I tried to find that Windows encoding thing you mentioned, but the only one I could find was for opening documents in ZIP files...?!
It's in the Text tab in the profile. Change Charset to Windows and you can read Word Docs and RTF.

[Cyker]

Woohoo! It works! Thanks!! :D

[ptc]

Another great podcast Jeff - keep 'em coming!

[jwm]

Once again, another good podcast. Informative & interesting. Thanks Jeff.

[tomklaus]

Thanks for the podcasts. Really enjoy them. I downloaded Core Player. It works really well. Until now I have use MMPlayer, but when playing videos encoded at 500 kbps, 24 fps, 464x272 full screen on my T3, audio is slightly out of sync with video. With Core Player it just works. Even though is an unstable release, I find it stable. Thanks for the info!

[jjesusfreak01]

Thanks for the podcasts. Really enjoy them. I downloaded Core Player. It works really well. Until now I have use MMPlayer, but when playing videos encoded at 500 kbps, 24 fps, 464x272 full screen on my T3, audio is slightly out of sync with video. With Core Player it just works. Even though is an unstable release, I find it stable. Thanks for the info!
Yah, they say unstable, because Picard isnt sure that all of the memory bugs are gone, and slower devices like the T|T sometimes have problems, but 90% of the users have had no problems with it. Its more of a, "in case you didnt see the '.' before the '65', this is a beta release version".