Comments on: The Palm Pre War?

By: slappy

slappy — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:41:30 +0000

It’s a major reason I stopped using Palm devices. They basically abandoned Mac users for several years with shoddy, half hazzard updates of their HotSync software for the Mac. Why should I support Palm again that basically treated Mac users as 3rd rate low class customers? No thanks.

By: Eric Schwarz

Eric Schwarz — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:25:33 +0000

@robinson, I completely agree that HotSync’s flexibility did work much better for allowing third-party applications to play. I’ve noticed that with an iPhone or iPod Touch, if you’re using a Wi-Fi network in an office setting, the computer and handheld device may be assigned to different subnets, and you lost any sort of synchronization capabilities.

That being said, I seem to remember hitting the HotSync button and staring at my computer waiting for something to happen on more than one occasion—maybe it was because I had a serial-based Palm device and it was running through the Palm USB adapter.

There were a number of public fixes since it did seem that the software didn’t play nicely with certain updates for some users: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031112200739942

By: robinson

robinson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:15:48 +0000

Nice post, but I take great exception to the sweeping line that Hot Sync did not work under OS X. I used it under Tiger and Leopard for years without any glitches. In fact, Palm’s synching system is still much better than Apple’s with its i-devices. With the iPhone or iPod Touches, 3rd parties do not have their own conduits, but have to set up cumbersome wi-fi or local networks; there is no easy way of accessing particular documents or apps that are backed up, etc.

Now, Palm Desktop on the Mac was a mess…multiple categories, mis-classifications, etc. the simpler version on Windows worked the way the PIMs did on the Palms.