Going Mobile with a Palm T3
When I bought my Palm Tungsten T3 last year I had a plan for mobile connectivity. I already had a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone (Nokia 6310i) that also supported GPRS. The next step was to upgrade my aging Palm Vx to a Bluetooth enabled version so that it could connect to my mobile and initiate a GPRS connection. The goal was to be able to get my email, and surf the web, from anywhere with mobile coverage. I purchased the Tungsten T3 and a 512 Mbyte SD card and hoped it would work. It did.
The Tungsten T3 came equipped with a nice little email client called VersaMail and a web browser called WebPro. VersaMail supports multiple IMAP accounts so I got it working with my old email servers without any hassles, and I used it occasionally while out and about. It did the job, although it did take a while to establish a connection to the IMAP server (more likely an issue with my aging IMAP server than a problem in VersaMail).
VersaMail didn’t support SSL connections so after my recent shift to FastMail I went looking for a new Palm email client that supported IMAP and SSL. SnapperMail Enterprise was the only product I found that did what I wanted without a fuss, so after a short evaluation I purchased a licence. (It was quite expensive for a Palm software product but it has performed flawlessly.)
I hadn’t used WebPro until our recent family holiday.
The last time we drove from Wollongong to the north coast of New South Wales on Boxing Day (26th December) the traffic was horrid. What should have been a relaxed 6.5 hour drive took well over 9 hours. Not good with young children in the car who like asking "Dad, how long until we get to Nanna’s?"
One of my clients is the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) who have a traffic reports section on their website where unplanned and planned incidents are listed. During this trip I decided that I would check their website every time we stopped for a break and if heavy delays were noted I’d look for a back road that might get us around the traffic jam.
This all sounded good in theory, but we decided to travel on the afternoon of Christmas day to see if we could avoid some of the traffic. We had a good run in traffic that was flowing well. I only checked the RTA website once and found no incidents reported.
However, the Palm came into it’s own when we arrived at my mother’s place. The modem on my laptop refused to connect to my ISP. A quick check of Mum’s phone line revealed what sounded suspiciously like 50Hz hum on the line (a.k.a. earth one leg, if memory serves). Voice was OK, but data just wasn’t going to happen.
For the next week I used my T3 to check my email and browse the web. I was getting ABC news via email, and I regularly used WebPro to get further updates on the aftermath of the tsunami. I was amazed at how well WebPro worked on a wide range of websites. It handled pages built with tables by stacking blocks of content vertically. Images also appeared to be scaled to a suitable size. I had to scroll horizontally a few times but it was a lot less often than I had expected. Nice!
The added bonus of a wireless connection was that I could connect from wherever I wanted, but I’m dreading my next mobile phone bill. GPRS in Australia is charged on a per kilobyte basis, and although I didn’t use it a lot some of the web pages were quite large.
All-in-all going mobile with the T3 was a positive experience. If we could get some decent bandwidth at a decent rate it would be even better.
PS: Please don’t think that this post trivialises the impact of the tsunami. Everyone in my family was floored by the event. After talking to the kids last night we made a family donation to CARE Australia and I’m still looking at other ways of to help out.