As I’ve posted before, I used to be a big Palm enthusiast but switched to Windows Mobile about five years ago. Palm seemed to be falling apart, and Microsoft seemed about poised to do great things. I was wrong — at least about Microsoft. Windows Mobile is powerful, but it’s not enjoyable. I think that user experience has been prioritized somewhere below an integrated nose-hair trimmer, and I credit Windows mobile with turning me from an engaged mobile enthusiast into a passive mobile user because of its stagnation.

It’s refreshing to be a Palm user again, with the Palm Pre bringing back the elegance and simplicity of those earlier devices combined with the modernness appropriate for the years that have elapsed since then. Palm’s webOS, the underlying Pre operating system, is beautiful. It also gets updated, unlike Windows Mobile. If something doesn’t seem quite right with webOS, there’s at least hope that it will get fixed with a simple, over-the-air and in-place upgrade.

The Pre itself is also an example of first-class industrial design. It feels good and looks good. Contrast that with the Motorola Droid, which is truly ugly. Maybe they thought the boxy form factor would go with the robot branding or something. The Cylon monotoning, “Droid” when you turn the thing on is pure cheese. The Nexus One looks more promising, though.

Aside from things I’ve already mentioned, here a few other things that make me happy about the Pre and webOS:

• Synergy – I’m pretty careful with keeping contacts and email organized, but Synergy changes the game. It does the consolidation for you so you don’t have to be so, um, anal.
• Multitasking – Of course, Windows Mobile can do that just fine, but webOS’s card view makes it so simple to work with.
• Touchstone – The Touchstone charger is great — no cable to plug in, not even a dock. You just set your phone on it and pick it up fully charged later.
• Ares – The online IDE that is in beta right now is pretty impressive. I’ve been doing a little development, and dropped Eclipse like a rock when Ares showed up. Ares, like webOS, is simple and elegant. Maybe a little too simple right now.

And a few things that need improvement:

• Missing apps – I need a reader for LDS scriptures, a decent place to put my passwords, and a way to sync my “to do” list to a desktop machine (preferably to Google tasks, though I’m not sure if they have an API yet).
• Smoothness – The iPhone is soooo smoooooth in its operation. The Pre lags a bit sometimes.
• Bedroom manners – Although the Touchstone charger is great, it sometimes doesn’t behave nicely on your nightstand. The screen turns on or the “charging” tone rings during the night.
• Dev confusion – While I think Ares is a nice step forward, it has been hard to really learn WebOS development. I’m a software engineer, doing causal exploration of the SDK, and sometimes things just seem disjoint. I think I read somewhere that Palm changed the development model late in the game, and sometimes the documentation seems fragmented and the examples possibly obsolete. The one webOS book’s reviewers say it is all about the old model, so it is almost unusable.

So… Why didn’t I just get an iPhone? I could probably come up with some good rational reasons, but the biggest ones are more emotional.

1. As I said, having had such a great experience with Palm in the past, the Pre makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
2. iTunes… no thanks.
3. I’m an anti-herd kind of guy. If everybody is doing something (namely, buying iPhones) it makes me want to do something different. Yes, totally irrational.

OK, pretty much any inkjet printer is devil-spawn, with the well-cited fact that printer ink is the most expensive liquid on the planet. Canon has taken the Pixma to a new level, though, because while it is a combination printer/scanner/fax, you can’t do anything useful if you’re out of ink. Notably, in spite of the fact that no bits need converting to atoms when scanning an image to your PC, you just can’t do it if you’re out of ink. All you get is a message on the display stating, “The following ink has run out. Replace the ink tank.”

Yeah, the printer/scanner is pretty good when you’re willing to open a vein to fill the ink, but disabling non-ink functions by fiat is just infuriating.

OK, to be completely honest I have a phone from T-Mobile in my name, but for all practical purposes, it’s my wife’s phone. We got it a couple of years ago when we were about to drive from Utah to Tennessee, and it seemed like a good emergency precaution. We managed to somehow get a plan that only cost $20 a month (which is no longer offered). It doesn’t have many minutes, but c’mon — twenty bucks! That was item #1 that put me off of cell phones.

1. All cell phone plans cost a minimum of $40 per month.

Somehow T-Mobile let their guard down long enough for us to snatch up that $20 plan, but as a general rule, everything is at least forty bucks. Do I really want to pay $40 more for phone service when I’ve already got a phone at home, and one a work, the two places that I spend most of my time? No I really don’t.

2. Hang up and drive.

When I watch traffic for a little while, I’m always astounded at how many people are driving with a phone to their ear. Someone’s going ten miles an hour under the speed limit? Hey, what do you know, they’re on the phone. Twenty miles an hour over? Yup, phone too. That person that turned wide onto the road, crossed over into my lane and almost picked me off? Well, you know its hard to crank that steering wheel around with just one hand. And of course, you’re exempt from using turn signals if you’re on the phone.

3. Hang up and live.

Of course I would never do this if I were to become a cell phone owner, since as of this coming Friday I will be a certified old person (40), but it really ticks me off when you’re ordering lunch somewhere and the person taking your order is surreptitiously texting. I’m sure most businesses have policies against that, but somehow people are so addicted to texting that they’ll risk their job to do it anyway.

A friend was commenting that his teenaged son was complaining about being tired — people kept texting him late into the night. “Why didn’t you just turn your phone off?” asked my friend. “Because I might miss something going on,” his son answered. Whatever. Isn’t there any sense that you might be involved in something more worthwhile or demanding of your attention than “OMG d00d! LOL!”?

Being a cell phone adoption straggler hasn’t been too bad. Consider this made-for-cell-phone situation: I ran out of gas on my motorcycle one day a couple of miles from home. As I was pushing my bike off the road, a guy stopped and asked if I needed help.

“Do you have a phone I could borrow?”

“Sure, here you go.”

“Thanks.”

My wife came to rescue me with some fuel a few minutes later.

Come to think of it, though, I did get in trouble with my wife when I was on a business trip in California for lack of a phone. She was expecting a call from me around the kids’ bedtime, but I hadn’t made it back to my hotel room yet (and she wouldn’t loan me her cell phone before I left). Actually, I was out buying her a present while she was debating whether to call in a missing person report. But aside from her being worried for an hour or two, it worked out OK.

I guess it comes down to a couple of things pushing me toward phone ownership:

1. I like PDAs, but the market for stand-alone PDAs seems to be drying up. If you want the new technology, a phone is pretty much a given.
2. My geek cred is somewhat diminished by not even knowing how to work a cell phone, let alone understanding what the heck 3G, HSDPA, GPRS and EDGE mean.

And to be honest, it might actually be convenient to make a phone call every now and then. I still swear, though, that it would take a while to reach the elevated level of consciousness of my cell-aware colleagues such that I would think to call a coworker from the break room to invite him for a game of Foosball.

1. Put a screw in all the motherboard mounting screw holes.

I actually learned this one several years back. I was doing a similar motherboard swap and was perplexed to discover that my case didn’t have motherboard screw posts in all the places that the motherboard had screw holes. Oh well, I thought, I can fit in about six of the nine holes… that ought to hold it. It didn’t work out so good. When I turned on the machine, it kept rebooting over and over. After some baffled frustration I discovered that I could move the case’s mounting posts around so there were exactly the right number in exactly the right places. After that, the machine was much happier. Probably one of the out-of-place posts had been causing a short. 

2. Make sure the port faceplate has all the metal tabs arranged so they don’t block the ports.

I’ve made this mistake a couple of times. The metal face-plate that goes over all the motherboard ports (PS/2 connectors, network, speaker jacks, parallel port, etc.) frequently has metal tabs that, if you’re not careful to bend them inwards when installing the motherboard, will actually cover some of the ports. Or worse, leave a little piece of metal sticking inside the port. Sometimes it is hard to notice that this has happened until you’ve got your machine all put together and are just hooking up the cables. When you discover this problem, you might want to go out for some fresh air for a bit, because you’re going to have to undo a lot of work to get the motherboard back out enough to bend the tabs in.

3. Neatness counts with power cables.

While my CoolerMaster Wave Master case is beautiful and sleek, I’m not the kind of guy who puts a window in the side of his computer. So when I originally built my current box, I didn’t worry too much about power cable placement. I strung wires everywhere, threw on whatever extra connectors seemed convenient, and crammed the whole tangle behind a shiny black side panel. Not long ago, I had a problem where my system would periodically lock up (accompanied by a nice little squeak from the PC speaker). Then the hard drives would hiccup. Eventually I ended up with a BSoD. I opened the case, and after some rearranging some of the power cables (mostly an act of desperation), the problem disappeared. I’m thinking this was probably another motherboard short — this time by a stray power plug.

While installing my new motherboard, I did things much more carefully and discovered that there were a handful of extra power cables that I could just disconnect and pull out, which helped the rat’s nest considerably.

4. Hook up all the case fans.

On my first build in this case, I had some fairly severe heat problems. Playing games in the winter months was kind of nice — no need for a space heater! After some spelunking with a flashlight, I discovered two fans in the front of the case that weren’t hooked up. I hadn’t even realized that they were there. After hooking them up, I could keep the side panel on without overheating!

5. Prefer the motherboard fan power connectors over the power supply’s connectors.

The motherboard is generally smarter than the power supply, and it can regulate fan speeds based on the current temperature. That means your machine sounds less like a 747 taking off when you turn it on. I think my power supply actually purports to be able to adjust fan speeds as well, but I relieved it of such duties for poor performance. Maybe it is just too far removed from the main cooling action to be effective.

6. A 20 pin power supply connector works just fine in a 24 pin motherboard socket.

I had my machine all assembled and was ready to attach power to the motherboard as one of the final steps when, WTF?!My power supply cable is the wrong size for this motherboard! After some Googling I discovered that there is a new power supply standard that has 24 pin motherboard connectors, so naturally my new motherboard had such a connector. Google also revealed some sites selling adapter cables to convert from 20 pin to 24. I was ready to adapt some Howard Jones: You can have shiny new hardware but you just can’t plug it in. 

The day after this disappointment, I set about trying to find someplace local that might have an adapter cable. I discovered that a fair number of local businesses indicating that they sell computer hardware have not been able to pay their phone bills. I hesitantly called Totally Awesome Computers. Hesitantly because their owner, based on his TV spots, is an energetic individual most likely from some other dimension. But fortunately the owner doesn’t answer the phones, and the guy I talked to understood my plight immediately. He said that if memory served, I could just plug in my 20 pin connector to the first 20 pins on the motherboard, and given that I connected the motherboard’s other 4 pin supplemental power supply (which I had already done), I should be good to go. It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, 20 + 4 = 24 and everything. So I gave it a try and the system powered up just fine (and continues to work normally). Thanks guys!

7. Most modern video cards need extra power.

My new video card is a PCI-Express GeForce 6800 MS from EVGA. When I opened the box, I had a vague impression that the package had been assembled somewhat hastily. For example, the driver CD was not inside the sleeve — they were just both loose inside the box. There was also a conspicuous lack of printed documentation. The CD had a manual of sorts, but it was rather vague about certain things. It said something like this: “If your video adapter requires a supplemental power supply connection, we strongly suggest that you connect it.” Hmm… Why don’t you tell me if my video adapter needs extra power?

Being new to PCI-Express, I wondered if they had boosted the power capabilities of the bus such that supplemental power connectors would be a thing of the past. But there was a six pin connector on the edge of the board that looked suspiciously like a power connection, so I wasn’t sure how to proceed. My previous video card had taken a fan power connector, but I didn’t have anything hanging off my power supply with that six pin configuration. 

After some time formulating queries on EVGA’s forum, I found a posting where someone had received a similarly packaged product, and so learned that there was supposed to be a six pin power adapter in the box. A company representative had posted a message that anyone missing their adapter should give support a call and they’d expedite it out. “Expedite” somehow connotes to me something faster than “UPS Ground”, but I’m still waiting. Fortunately the card works without the supplemental power — just in a hobbled mode. So while I can write this article, I don’t expect to attempt Battlefield 2 until my part arrives.  

8. Have access to a working computer with an internet connection.

Fortunately I have a computer for my kids in my office. Otherwise it would be tricky to do things like check EVGA’s web site, read PDF manuals and create RAID driver floppy disks. Of course, it also makes backing up data easier if the spare machine has a decent amount of hard drive space.

9. Arrange your data for transferability.

For a long time I’ve had a C:\Data directory on my systems for everything that I couldn’t reacquire through an install or a download. This is all the precious, irreplaceable, I-actually-back-this-stuff-up data. When Windows started having “My Documents”, I fought it for a while and with Windows XP, it got a little worse and better. First worse because the user profile directory in C:\Documents and Settings, which held “My Documents” also had mountains of crap — er, non-critical settings and cached data — in it. I just didn’t feel clean keeping my data down there. But the shell is determined to have you put stuff in there since it is the default file location when it doesn’t know where else to put you. The good new is that you can move “My Documents” by right-clicking the Start Menu’s shortcut to it, and choosing properties. Now “My Documents” is in C:\Data\Eric's Documents, and I feel clean again.

I also change my email store and address book locations to be in my data directory. I haven’t figured out how to move my Internet Explorer favorites, but I put a shortcut to them in my data directory to remind me to copy them. I did that reminder strategy with my Fonts directory as well, since I have nice fonts that were installed with some otherwise worthless applications, and I’d rather not have to reinstall them to get the fonts again. 

It’s also a good idea to back up any DRM licenses you might have for music and such. I’m morally opposed to DRM for music, but I do have a few songs blighted by it. After copying my music to the backup computer and back, none of those songs would play. I figured that it was just another way that DRM was screwed up and that I had lost those songs. But I ran Windows Media Player’s license restore and they played again. Of course I had to have backed them up previously for this to work…

All this makes is much easier to reformat your hard drive without losing irreplaceable data.

10. Resetting the icon cache can be a handy trick.

After getting the clean OS installed, I logged into my wife’s account. Mysteriously, the Internet Explorer and Outlook Express icons on the start menu didn’t show up correctly. It just had some generic icons. Normally shortcut icons are easy to fix — you just go to the properties and change the icon. But those two shortcuts are magic ones, and there isn’t a way to get the shortcut properties in order to change the icon. I tried changing the applications to the MSN versions, and those icons worked fine, but switching back to IE and OE still gave me generic icons. I finally managed to fix them by invalidating the icon cache by changing the system setting for the icon size and then changing it back to the original size. You find that setting in “Display Properties > Appearance > Advanced” as one of the things in the “Item” drop-down.

I’ve been a long time Palm¹ user, having bought the original Palm Pilot within days of its release, and upgrading at the watershed devices: Palm V, Tungsten T. In the fall of 2004, my Tungsten T was getting pretty beat up, and I was expecting great things for the next palmOne release cycle. They put out the Tungsten T5, and it was a supreme disappointment for me. Where was the next generation OS? Where was the Wi-Fi support? They want how much for it? Then PalmSource instills chaos and confusion with Linux and its relationship to what had been Palm OS Cobalt. Is that crumbling I hear? I thought that Windows Mobile devices might be getting into that competitive-to-good range compared to Palm devices, so it was time to take a serious look. People were raving about the Dell Axim X50v, so I took the plunge and switched at Christmas time.

Let me be clear about something. I’m not the kind of person who trashes all things Microsoft. I don’t want to kick Bill Gates’ dog or set fire to Windows XP CDs. I even like some of Microsoft’s stuff, and their strategies are apparently pretty good business-wise. But my six months of experience with Windows Mobile 2003 SE on the Dell Axim X50v have been sort of disappointing.

First let me mention some of the things I’ve liked about my Pocket PC, though.

• Lots of bang-for-the-buck
• The screen is great (but too bright at its dimmest setting for viewing in the dark)
• I love having a Wi-Fi connection, and the ability to do high speed data exchange with my PC over it
• I like the prospects of being able to do .NET programming for it
• A removable battery is a nice touch
• The first time I browsed to a web site and played a Windows Media file, I laughed out loud
• I like being able to play a movie on my handheld through WMP
• YanCEyWare Reader is a great free application for my church-going needs
• I can use the original Graffiti that has disappeared from recent Palm devices

But I started noticing a disturbing trend. The built-in applications — PIM apps, Pocket Word, Pocket IE, etc. all seemed really lousy. There are painting glitches, weird behaviors, embarrassingly poor use of screen space, seemingly arbitrary limitations and various other things that I was unhappy about. When I’d post something about a problem on a Pocket PC forum, some people wouldn’t understand what I was talking about. Others would say something like, “Oh, yeah. Pocket Word sucks. I use TextMaker instead,” referring to a $50 third-party replacement application. It’s great to have options, but it’s sad when you feel like much of what came with the device needs to be replaced to get quality applications. And some of the applications that folks rave about, like Pocket Informant, might give you some neat features, but at the cost of baroque feature sets and massive resource consumption.

In fact, my device was running through quicksand with Pocket Informant installed. But then you pick up the helpful bit of advice about Windows Mobile’s not so wonderful memory management. Yeah, the idea to have inactive applications continue running in the background doesn’t work very well. So the X50v ships with an application to thwart that behavior and actually shut down applications when you’re done with them (though I prefer the freeware Magic Button, because a battery meter is kind of a nice thing to have in the top-level UI). The odd thing is, you’ll get Pocket PC enthusiasts tittering about how Palm devices can’t run multiple processes simultaneously.

When confronting general device sluggishness for the Axim X50v, advice is readily available about cranking up the processor’s clock speed. By default, the Axim throttles the clock speed according to what you’re doing, but you can configure it to run at full speed all the time. That does help with performance, but it slurps power from the battery so fast that it isn’t practical for me.

Then there’s ActiveSync. Even enthusiasts have posted comments like “All in all, ActiveSync must die.” I synchronize my Axim with two desktop machines, which is probably the less rigorously tested scenario, but I get a lot more errors and “unresolved items” than I did with Palm’s Hot Sync. I have a To Do item that has been like whack-a-mole. I’d mark it complete in one place, but the other two would keep bringing it back to life. It seems to be permanently unresolved on my work machine. The worst aspect, though, is the utterly useless messages ActiveSync emits when there’s a problem. Even though I happen to be pretty conversant in HRESULTs, “8004011B” isn’t the lucid explanation leading to resolution that I’d hope for. There was a sadly comical posting on a forum about how to get ActiveSync into a more severe error situation so that it would finally divulge enough information to fix a synchronization issue.

The Axim’s five-way navigator is another disappointment. Many applications, including built-in ones, don’t take good advantage of it, if at all. The one-handed operation on my old Tungsten T was pretty decent, and it’s clear that some thought went into making the navigator consistent and useful. Then you get something like Windows Media Player on the Pocket PC, where it actually has reasonable functions mapped to the navigator — but there’s some bug in the button settings so that only the navigator works. If you want to map one of the other hardware buttons to, say, turn off the screen while you listen to music you’re out of luck. You have to overwrite one of the navigator functions. Who ever wants to scan backward through their play list anyway?

This one is a bit of a nit, but the close/OK button that always appears in the upper right corner seems like a human factors experiment that got wadded up, missed the trash, and landed in engineering. At a very superficial level, it sounds great: Anytime you want close the current form, just go right here! But what if you have some truly bizarre interaction where you could dismiss a form with either an “OK” or a “Cancel”? Application designers are faced with having a Cancel button spatially divorced from the OK button, or creating a redundant OK button next to Cancel where you would expect it in the first place. 

So, what is one to do when neither Palm nor Microsoft satisfy? Maybe palmOne and PalmSource are actually getting their act together with newer offerings. Maybe Windows Mobile 5.0, to be released later this year, will get my Axim into that as yet unrealized competitive-to-good category. Maybe the right thing is to root for Palm, because at least as long as they’re around the product category won’t stagnate under a Microsoft monopoly.

Notes

1. You know, Palm, palmOne, PalmSource, etc.