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Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

Experienced coders get experienced by repeating two things: looking at the code of others and by coding, themselves. There is a lot of good sample code available in Open Source products, however, getting concepts presented in a structured and commented fashion can be very comfortable.

Ted Faison’s does just that - it is a book that looks at event based programming. For all those new to the matter, event based programming is an object-oriented form of system design (you need classes) that is geared at maximum reusability and easy maintenance by removing direct calls between objects. Instead, objects call one another via function pointers initialized by builders and binders.

The book starts off by looking at coupling - what coupling is, what kinds of coupling there are and how coupling affects the system. The treatment is a bit mathematical sometimes, but very interesting nonetheless.

After that, the book moves on to event mechanics: How do I deliver events, what kinds of payloads can I use, how do I send and receive events best? The treatment is very interesting and helpful. The last chapter of this part of the book contains a look at various commercial systems - good reference material, though the reading value is rather low.

The remaining two parts about event diagramming and functional roles and patterns were excellent. Nothing to say here except very well done.

Three working examples accompany the book, though I skipped over them as my C#and VB.NET skills are not good enough to decipher them.

The example code in the chapters was understandable for me (C#), my prior VB 6 experience also was helpful for deciphering the VB.NET stuff. However, you don’t need to understand all the example code to benefit from this book - every concept is also explained textually and graphically!

is easy to read - it makes a good book for reading in-flight or in bed.

Overall, this book was a great read. While the concepts learned here can’t be directly applied to my C programs (as in cut and paste), the process of going over them mentally has made me a better programmer and system designer. Last, but not least, I enjoyed thinking through the various “edges” - if you like interesting system architectures, get this book by all means.

is a great source for reviews, exclusive screenshots, and updates on all the new, 21st Century mobile technology as soon as it’s news to us!

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Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

There are a lot of leather cases from several distributors on the market. Today, I looked at Proporta’s Alu-Leather case on my Palm TX. It is said to work with the Tungsten T5, too!

The case is padded all around, and the flipping part is strengthened with an aluminum piece, and it has a belt clip on the back.

If the case is open, you see the rail, the dual SD card holder, and the headphone cutout. In the flipping part, there are two pockets for credit cards, money, etc.

Inserting the TX into the case is a bit hard, but it’s no big problem. When you look at the top, you see a cutout for the headphone jack.

On the bottom, the multiconnector is covered by the case lock.

This case looks quite noble. No matter what you want to do with your Palm, you have to open the case - including when you charge or sync it. Opening it is easy and handy with the magnetic lock. It has no cutout for the speaker, and this affects the sound quality a lot! The part that protects the display is strengthened with aluminum so that it bears the daily pressure easily. Overall I like this case.

is a great source for reviews, exclusive screenshots, and updates on all the new, 21st Century mobile technology as soon as it’s news to us!

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Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

The Treo 600 does not ship with a cradle. While I’ve written about the weakness of the cradle concept more than once, being the animal of habit that I am, I wanted a cradle for my Treo 600 - and Brando complied. Brando shipped a really good Palm Z22 cradle and I also got a cool one for the Palm Tungsten E2 - let’s see what it produced for the Treo 600!

Brando’s products ship from Hong Kong in rather small envelopes via standard mail. Customs seems to leave them alone, and has always arrived in good condition.

The cradle itself comes in a small white box.

After unpacking, I noted that one of the ‘feet’ was missing - no real problem, as the other ones fell off fast, too.

It looks like some kind of AC power supply can be attached to the back of the cradle to charge the Treo 600 faster - but as of now, I cant find such a thing on Brando’s Web site.

Inserting the Treo usually works well - once you have figured out how to dock the Treo into the connector. This is a bit more difficult than it was with the multiconnector, as the peripheral needs to ’slide’ into the Treo quite a bit.

A bright blue LED lights up when power is available. When the Treo is docked, it starts to flicker uncontrollably sometimes - dont ask me what that means; none of my USB ports have been fried so far. The Treo stands upright in the cradle. It charges even when powered on - since Treos always charge slowly, the USB connection doesnt seem to have a major impact.

Overall, Brando has not disappointed me - It delivered a solid cradle with no serious weaknesses for $22. If you want a docking station for your Treo 600, look at this cradle by all means.

is a great source for reviews, exclusive screenshots, and updates on all the new, 21st Century mobile technology as soon as it’s news to us!

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Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

A few days ago I got a mail from the developer who ported an emulator that lets you use real PC apps on a Palm. It’s the Palm OS port of the well-known DOS emulator DOSBox. It doesn’t only emulate an x86 CPU but also a DOS environment, so you can’t install another x86 operating system. But you can run many DOS apps / games in this DOS environment - even Windows until 3.11 and maybe even Windows 95 / 98.

This version is the first alpha release and very buggy, of course. But I can confirm that it’s no fake, and some things already work relatively well:

• CPU emulation works without many problems (though it’s relative slow)
• 80 columns x 25 (43) rows color screen
• VFS access
• Mouse is controlled by touch screen, but very uncalibrated
• My Tungsten C and my onscreen Graffiti 2 inputs aren’t recognized

The port contains all necessary program parts in one PRC file which is about 400 KB. In the app you can set the size of RAM and some CPU settings. Other settings can be stored in a file dosbox.conf in the root directory of your card, for example, autoexec commands.

As this version doesn’t support entering text - at least on my Tungsten C - I have to set the app I want to start in the auto execution list of dosbox.conf.

I’ve been waiting very long for such news. A DOS emulator is, of course, NOT meant to be a replacement for Palm OS. But it makes you able to run your old DOS games on a Palm, to write small scripts in QBasic, or to run apps that aren’t out yet for Palm OS.

I don’t want to upload this here yet because I don’t know if the developer agrees and I want to ask him first. But - now. And perhaps you have some feature requests I could send to the developer. So please comment.

is a great source for reviews, exclusive screenshots, and updates on all the new, 21st Century mobile technology as soon as it’s news to us!

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Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

Palm OO Garnet isnt dead yet - at least not for GSPDA. Recently, it announced the new M70 smartphone on its Web site.

The machine is advertised to be supporting push email - one of the reasons the Austrian carrier T-Mobile refused to carry the Treo 600 (met the product manager in the tram once). Further important stats are:

• Tri band: GSM 900/ 1800/ 1900MHz
• Palm OS (r) 5.4 Garnet
• Display: 260K Color, 2.2″ TFT 176 x 220 pixels, touch screen
• Push Email
• One touch Email function
• Bluetooth communication and synchronization
• SMS Alarm
• Video Caller Display
• Full screen Chinese and English handwriting input
• 1.3 mega pixels CMOS camera, with digital zoom function
• Video recording and playback (support MPEG 4 and 3GPP format)
• MP3 ringtone and playback
• 40 poly ringtone, support MIDI and MP3 format
• Email support (POP3, SMTP) with viewing and editing attachment
  function (in conjunction with application software)
• Support GPRS Class 10/ xHTML/ WAP 2.0/ MMS/ SMS
• External SD card expansion slot
• Bluetooth, Infrared and USB connectivity
• Exciting Palm games

Looks as if we have a Treo 680 alternative now. The Palm OS blogger Theo Poon guessed that the price of the machine would be below $400 by far… he goes on to say $359, but this will obviously change should retailers kick in.

The official Web site is .

A big thank you goes to Theo Poon for the hint and the price guess.

is a great source for reviews, exclusive screenshots, and updates on all the new, 21st Century mobile technology as soon as it’s news to us!

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