Pocket PC -> Palm

[Oleander]

Im a happy owner of an iPAQ who suddenly needs info on Palms so where else to go than here.. :lol:

You see, Im working as sysadmin/tech support/bread crum remover at a place with lots of people who are not very computer litterate. We have a large group who use Palms and are perfectly happy with it. They use their calendar and mail, and some of them AvantGo. We even have one (almost a superuser) who use Documents2Go. I actually dont think they have even opened much of the other programs installed on their palms.

Since i was an employee of Compaq in my last job, the choice btw. Palm and PPC's was a fairly obvious one, when i had to choose what kind of PDA i wanted. :)

Having used PPC's for some years now i think i have a fairly good idea of the pitfalls of the PocketPC platform and on that basis i wouldnt recommend any of our users to go for PPC.

Well, that policy kind of backfired last week, when the person here who does support and installs Palms for all our users, went on maternity leave and left me in charge. She was ment to give me a crash course but went one month early, so........ 8O

Is there anywhere to go to get a crash course in palms for a PPC user?

[AppleMac]

Tap "Calendar" to start Calendar
Tap "Tasks" to start Tasks
Graffiti makes you write unnaturally in capitals, read the manual for how to input every character
Don't try to Multitask. It won't work.
Pushing the Hotsync button on the cradle generally means it syncs

Seriously though, it's easy enough to figure out a Palm for light usage, there are few menus and the like. Only thing that might be difficult is Graffiti, but there's a manual for that...

[mr_yellow]

PalmOS is actually very straight forward and very intuitive.

I know it'll be difficult, but try to forget about everything with the PPC User Interface and just pick a palm up and use it for a day. you'll realize it's pretty easy.

Think of palm memory management as a giant bucket. If you syncronized/installed it via hotsync, it's basically dumping it into the bucket. Unless you're dealing with expansion cards, you don't have to worry about a filesystem. everything is in the root directory.

The user interface stems from the "launcher". PalmOS has a default Launcher (shows when you tap the "home" silk screen key) which can be easily replaced. The launcher's main job is to show available programs you can run, and organize it.

Once you tap on a program it'll run. You can go back to the launcher anytime. The program will save it's state or start over or run in background depending on how it's written.

The Calendar is very intuitive, same with the address book, todo list and memo pad.

You can open up a menu bar by with the menu silkscreen or by tapping the title bar in the upper left corner. Explore those options like any other program.

Learn to understand the hotsync process and how conduits work. it's pretty simple/straightforward.

And learn grafitti. It's exceptionally powerful. Much more powerful than jot, transcriber, keyboard on PPC. I know i'm going to take a lot of flack on that comment but it's true.

1) the letters are a bit weird to write at first, but that's the one downside
2) the writing system has different states, letter, capital, symbol, command and shortcut states.

Command and Shortcut states are VERY useful and one thing i miss on my PCC. Command state is diagonal stroke from lower left to upper right. the Shortcut state is a backwards cursive 'L'. this allows you to trigger actions and menu options.

BTW, if you ever do get grafitti stuck, <command>G, usually brings up a grafitti help panel.

Chance are, most people's problems can be solved by stuff found in the menu bar or by reinstalling the application with hotsync, or by a soft reset.

[mr_yellow]

Oh yeah, a common problem is say a palm resets but doesn't load up and freezes

ie. there's an app that installs a "startup" program that is crashing...

To bypass all startup processes, hold the page up key when pressing the reset button. and keep it held down until the launcher is back up. Then try to figure out what caused the problem.

powerbutton + reset button will be a hard reset of course.

[yslee]

And learn grafitti. It's exceptionally powerful. Much more powerful than jot, transcriber, keyboard on PPC. I know i'm going to take a lot of flack on that comment but it's true.


Yes you are! =P I hate grafitti. Jot was so much better. Of course, I still prefer a thumbpad, but if I ever need to use the stylus for text input, I'd pick Jot anyday!