Today’s meeting was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone who came out. We started off with a presentation covering the new Zire 72. I’ll see if there’s a way to put the presentation on the web later. We had lots of interesting discussion on the best value in PalmOne PDAs right now, I think it’s the Tungsten E but Chris thinks it is the Zire 72.

After the PDA review we covered Bluetooth technology such as how profiles work between different devices. We tried to sync my Tungsten T to my laptop using its Bluetooth adapter and much to my surprise it worked. There was some general bluetooth discussion covering mice and keyboards (get Logitech) and the Treo all-in-one versus the Bluetooth Trio of a handheld, phone, and headset.

Finally we covered handheld PCs running Windows CE, 4 year old technology that is still pretty hot. The website Chris evangilized was Used Handhelds.com.

The other programs we talked about briefly during the meeting:

• Firefox
• Open Office
• Salesforce.com

Stephanie Fowler wrote in to ask if we could post this job listing:

Lead Handheld Software Engineer

Position in Plano, TX. Our client is the leading developer of innovative business and productivity software solutions for handheld mobile computing
users.

This position will be responsible for development and maintenance of software Products. The ideal candidate will have the following qualifications:

Minimum of 3 years’ experience developing software commercially.
Must have one year of experience developing for Palm OS using C or C++.
C++ skills are required with at least two recent years of experience.
Requires a good understanding of object oriented methodology.
Experience with other handheld platforms such as Symbian or Pocket PC is notrequired, but would be a plus.

All interested individuals can send resumes to: sfowler@duffygroupinc.com.

If you or someone you know would be appropiate for the job be sure to get in touch with her!

Sorry for the downtime guys, the hpug.org domain had expired and I forgot to renew it. Don’t worry, we’re good now until April of 2005. Now I just need to catch up with posting about the last few meetings.

Mike Hammack writes in:

Any idea where I can go to download the right hotsync manager for my Samsung SPHi300 pda/phone? Thanks. Mike

I spent some time on the Samsung site but I when I navigated to the i300 support page it said there were no files available. Anyone have any ideas for this?

Got this email from someone at PalmOne today:

Dear Palm User Group Member,

We are contacting you to get your help in updating links. As you know palmOne spun off from Palm and acquired Handspring. Now the main site for Palm powered handhelds and Handspring Treo smartphones is palmone.com. If you have any links on your site linking to http://www.palm.com, could you please update them to http://www.palmone.com . You can still leave references in your text to palm and palm handhelds, however we would appreciate it if you could update the linking url. Thank you for your help. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Rachel Bakker
palmOne
Online Marketing

I suppose I can try tracking down old links. The whole split is still a little weird to me. At least they’re not asking us to put the weird 1 in the middle of the name.

There is an interesting article at The Register that suggest that Palm is considering other OS choices, such as Nokia’s and even Microsoft’s offering. For those of you unfamiliar with the recent split, the company we all knew as Palm split into two divisions, PalmOne which makes the actual handheld devices (and recently bought Handspring) and PalmSource which produces the Palm operating system.

From Mark Madeley:

It’s been awhile since I attended a meeting, but I wanted to let you know that I have two items that I would like to give away since I moved to a different Palm.

The first is a memory backup module for the Palm m100, Pilot, PilotPro, PalmIII series or PalmVII series. It is a 2mb module from Northstar Mobile called Memory Safe. Comes with disk for installation. I liked it a lot when I had my older Palm.

The second is a Palm Modem (33.6kbps) that will fit the Pilot, PilotPro, PalmIII series or PalmVII series. Great for dialing into your ISP. If you load AvantGo, you can browse at home or pull your data down. Also comes with some email software and other apps. Battery or AC power supply (included). Since the PalmVII series is already wireless, the modem is great for dialing into your local ISP when at home or near a landline and avoiding using up your wireless service plan.

These are free to the first person who contacts me to get them. Otherwise they hit the recycle bin.

How very nice of Mark! Get in touch with him if you can use either of these.

Thanks to all who came out and brought food. Our meeting which was shared with the Web Technology SIG actually had a bit more content than I expected. We covered the Christmas PDA rankings, had a discussion on the best cell phone service and PDA/phone combinations available, and finally a bit of information from Christopher Hurtado about his thoughts on Graffiti 2. If you took any pictures at the meeting please send them in and I’ll attach them to this entry. I hope everyone has a great holiday!