Blackberry Curve

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Well, the Verizon contract was up last month so I went cell phone shopping. The wife has a Palm Treo, as does my daughter, and both are extremely happy with them. I strongly considered the Treo, but couldn’t bring myself to go with it due to the lack of full support for handsfree bluetooth voice dialing. With California’s recent handsfree law, I wanted a solution that was 100% handsfree.

Enter the Blackberry. The Curve is a really nice device. No too big and not too small, great screen, great sound and 100% handsfree bluetooth dialing. The only downside I could find was having to give up the Palm Desktop and eWallet.

I really really dislike Outlook. The simplicity of Palm’s Desktop software along with Thunderbird as a mail client have been working well for me for many years now. Changing would be painful.

I also find eWallet an indispensable tool that I can’t do without. Good news there is that IliumSoft is working on a Blackberry version of eWallet that they promise to release real soon now.

After much introspection and second guessing myself, I finally went ahead with the Blackberry Curve. Spent a weekend of pain jumping through hoops to get the data off the Palm moved to Outlook so it would sync with the new Blackberry (that is a story in itself, not easy but doable).

Now that I’m there, I’m delighted. RIM did a great job on the Curve, the setup was a snap and the Desktop Manager seems to work well. Other than the pain of working with Outlook, I couldn’t be happier.

Now, if IliumSoft would just release eWallet…. (more…)

Helphand’s Not So FAQs for the Palm

Sunday, November 17th, 2002

The original Not So FAQs for the Palm can be located here. They contain useful information related to the various PDA’s based on the PalmOS.

  • Palm Pilot
  • Palm
  • Handspring Visor
  • Tungsten
  • Zire
  • Treo

Palm Desktop File Formats

Saturday, November 16th, 2002

The file formats for the Palm Desktop files below can be found here .

  • datebook.dat and datebook.dba
  • memopad.dat and memopad.mpa
  • address.dat and address.aba
  • todo.dat and todo.tda
  • users.dat

These formats apply to the Windows version of the PalmOS Desktop software, not to the native versions of these files.