Palm Tungsten C Notes

I ended up getting Palm Tungsten C after thinking about TheIdealPersonalDigitalAssistant.

Documentation

Official pages:

Suport:

Short Review

What I like about it:

very fast
lots of RAM
beautiful screen
Wi-Fi
keyboard: I was afraid I was going to miss Graffiti, but in the end, I like the keyboard a lot
vibrating alam
DateBk5 is gorgious on a color hi-resolution screen
VersaMail support IMAP over SSL
the Web Browser is nice (though it seems to be having with certain images... content negotiation issues?)

Things I dislike about it:

poor Wi-Fi range
lack of built-in microphone for voice memos
some old applications have issues with PalmOS 5; note that it's not a problem with the PDA itself, but a side-effect of having upgraded from my previous ones
the Palm Bluetooth Card doesn't work on it; again not a problem with the PDA itself

I will add that the 2.0 firmware upgrade patch seems to make the Wi-Fi behave much better. PalmOne's support is definitely better than Sony's.

Forums

Notes

PilotLinkNetworkHotsync explains how to do a network sync under Linux.

I have had issues with wireless connnections with WEP is done with a phrase rather than a numeric key (e.g. iwconfig wlan0 key s:mywepkey).

Wi-Fi channels on the French model

The problem described below has been fixed by PalmOne. For archival purposes:

The Wi-Fi channels that Palm allows you to use on a French Tungsten C is the 10-13 range, because it was the range allowed in France before 2002. See Palm's FAQ about not being able to use your Tungsten C abroad in French, and Information on connecting a Palm Tungsten C handheld (Wi-Fi) to different radio signals if roaming internationally in English.

However, ART has losened the law about frequency uses and now allows to use all the channels. I therefore wrote to Palm France to ask them to uncap the Tungsten C. If you suffer from the same problem, please do write to Palm about allowing access to all WiFi channels too. I am intending to get this fixed.

They replied to me in only a few hours¹, saying that they were aware of the issue and of the new French law, but that right now, it was impossible to adapt the system to let it use all the channels, i.e. the 1-13 range. Is there hope in their reply? At least, they are aware of the issue. The more people bug them about it, the better IMO.

Hmmm... maybe I should have written this in French to increase my audience... see AccesCompletAuxFrequencesWiFiAvecUnTungstenCe.

I would also appreciate any hints about this. In particular, I am wondering if flashing another firmware (say a Belgian one) would work, and if so, with what tool.

Note that my Tungsten crashed earlier today with a weird message: cannot get list of channels. So it seems that modifying what this function returns should do the trick. Though Palm's answer suggests that it's not that simple.

^[1] I was really impressed by Palm's customer support; when usually people ask you to reboot Windows for any problem you have, I got a quick, relevant and somewhat informative answer. I hope that they will follow-up on actually fixing the problem now, but it's nice to see that there are still efficient customer services.