jwz - Treo 700p: old and busted. Centro: new hotness. [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
jwz

  www.jwz.org
  userinfo
  archive
  rss

Links
[»| DNA (Log) (iCal) WebCollage (LJ) Mixtapes ]

Treo 700p: old and busted. Centro: new hotness. [Mon, 21-Jan-2008 4:49 AM]
Previous Entry Add to Memories Tell a Friend Next Entry
[Tags|, ]
[music |Minuit -- Soviet Airhostess]

My Treo met an untimely death when I kicked a cup of tea into it, so I upgraded. This passing made me sad, because I had just painted the Treo's case to divest myself of the cognitive polution of the logos and text that plaster it like a NASCAR racer (Krylon Fusion FTW), but it turns out that the Centro is better in every way. Well, in one way. It has almost exactly the same specs (except for somewhat worse battery life) but it's a lot smaller. Did I mention a lot smaller?

They also switched from SD to MicroSD. Have you seen these things? They're ridiculous! Nothing removable needs to be that small. It's like a joke: like the "Noisy Cricket" gun from Men in Black.

Unfortunately, even though that's an 8GB card, the Centro seems to only see 4GB of that. What year is this? What kind of pinheads are still writing device drivers that make those kinds of assumptions?

linkReply

Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]suppressingfire
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 12:51 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Noisy Cricket, perhaps?

I find the nesting SD adapters (Micro->Mini->SD) oddly comforting.
[User Picture]From: [info]autopope
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 12:55 PM (UTC)

(Link)

For added yucks you can get CF->SD adapters, and then put the CF adapter in a PCMCIA card.
[User Picture]From: [info]detritus
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 2:30 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I think the memory stick micro for my phone is smaller than that. I'd take it out for a photo, but i'm afraid i would lose it.
[User Picture]From: [info]ciphergoth
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 1:01 PM (UTC)

(Link)

How annoying is the keyboard at that size?

Is PalmOS still the best the world has to offer as a phone OS? I despair a little...
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 1:06 PM (UTC)

(Link)

The keyboard itself is only slightly smaller than on the 700; it's fine.

And: yes. It is.
[User Picture]From: [info]thargol
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 1:12 PM (UTC)

(Link)

How annoying is the keyboard at that size?

It doesn't matter. You're not in the USA, so forget about the Centro. A Nokia E90 is the only sane option, and the keyboard on that is fine (the only downside is that it doesn't play nicely with US networks for anything other than voice calls). Mine was 20 quid on O2.
[User Picture]From: [info]zonereyrie
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 1:18 PM (UTC)

(Link)

It is more than a driver issue - it is a Palm OS issue. Palm OS has a 32-bit addressing limit == 4GB.
[User Picture]From: [info]laurent_atl
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 2:22 PM (UTC)

(Link)

A SD card is not a RAM chip though. From a software point of view it is a storage device, similar to a hard drive. 32 bits operating systems are not limited to 4G storage. So this is a driver/filesystem issue.
[User Picture]From: [info]yesthattom
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 2:18 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I could swear I saw something about a Centro-only software update that lets you use a >4G card. I ignored it because I don't have a Centro, and now I can't find it.
From: [info]dmose
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 3:21 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Why did you choose a Centro instead of a 755p?
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 8:21 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Because it's smaller.
[User Picture]From: [info]webmaven
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 3:52 PM (UTC)

(Link)

"It's like a joke: like the "Noisy Cricket" gun from Men in Black."

These actually remind me of the 'microsofts' that people stuck in their head in Gibson's Neuromancer oevre.
[User Picture]From: [info]ultranurd
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 4:40 PM (UTC)

(Link)

If I remember correctly, the original ad campaign for Sony's Memory Stick format (from several years ago now) featured photos of shaved heads with memory slots at the base of their neck and volume controls behind their ears.
[User Picture]From: [info]melanina
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 4:55 PM (UTC)

(Link)

It is the new hotness. The new teensy awesome hotness.
[User Picture]From: [info]dr_memory
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 5:32 PM (UTC)

(Link)

MicroSD is coming way too close to the Event Horizon of shrinking storage mediums: the limit beyond which it is possible to accidentally inhale your last three months' worth of photography.

(And man do I wish the Centro were available on Verizon. Oh well, my old 700p seems to be mostly soldiering on...)
[User Picture]From: [info]albino_minako
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 5:44 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Someone needs a manicure.
[User Picture]From: [info]badc0ffee
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 5:55 PM (UTC)

(Link)

There must be something screwy/ambiguous about the SD standard. So many phones/PDAs seem to have a hard coded limit of 1GB, 2GB or 4GB.

I bought a 2GB miniSD card about a year ago that had a formatted capacity of only 1GB. I thought I had a knockoff card, but it turned out the card was "partitioned" in the factory to a single 1GB volume so it would work with all the buggy phones out there. SDFix2G fixed the card and my phone saw all 2GB of it. There might be a similar utility for the 8GB cards.
[User Picture]From: [info]cetan
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 6:06 PM (UTC)

(Link)

I remember reading (and, of course, I don't remember where) that MicroSD cards are not meant to be removable. They're sort of a user-decides-how-much-storage-they-want-but-don't-really-take-it-out sort of idea. Transfers from card to computer were supposed to be via USB or Bluetooth or WiFi or some other magic/nonsense.

[User Picture]From: [info]lohphat
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 8:03 PM (UTC)

Phoneaholics Anonymous

(Link)

"Hello, my name is LohPhat and I have a problem."

I dumped Treos 2 years ago because the damned OS still has no MMU features to keep a buggy app from trashing memory. That and poor QA + suicidal firmware updates.

I toked on the big corporate weenie and got a crackberry. Mmm java OS. Useable. No more stylus.

My new 8320 from t-mobile has UMA (http://www.umatechnology.org/overview/) -- basically voip and data over wifi. Since I travel a lot out of the country it has dropped my phone bills dramatically -- no more $1.30 (or $5 in Russia) per minute roaming fees. On wifi the phone thinks it's in the US and all US calls are local and free (don't count towards my minute plan). All t-mobile hotspots auto-connect, again free calling; so many airports and Starbucks to choose from.

[User Picture]From: [info]omni_ferret
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 9:40 PM (UTC)

Palm emulators

(Link)

The Nokia tablets already have a VM or two to choose from to emulate Palms. Upgrading might be slicker outside Palm soon.
[User Picture]From: [info]grumpy_sysadmin
Mon, 21-Jan-2008 11:16 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Not sure whether you care, but Matt Siber moved the URL for the Untitled Project (and appears to have some other newer stuff along the same lines, not all of which I'm sure was there four years ago).
[User Picture]From: [info]unwiredben
Tue, 22-Jan-2008 1:16 AM (UTC)

(Link)

Have you verified that you can only see 4GB of files on the card. IIRC, the drivers in the Centro can access the full 8GB of storage on the card, but the VFSVolumeSize API in Palm OS Garnet only can return unsigned 32-bit values for the total space and space used.
[User Picture]From: [info]down8
Tue, 22-Jan-2008 3:16 AM (UTC)

(Link)

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/centro/gallery.html

Did you get the delicious pink flavor?

-bZj
[User Picture]From: [info]violentbloom
Tue, 22-Jan-2008 7:16 AM (UTC)

(Link)

the same specs as the treo you say...
didn't you have problems with your sd not working on your treo?
[User Picture]From: [info]mhagler
Tue, 22-Jan-2008 4:57 PM (UTC)

(Link)

if those are your fingers holding the microsd card in the photo please for the love of god either trim or paint your long fingernails!!