Going wireless with the Palm V

For the past few weeks, I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with OmniSky’s new wire­less ser­vice for the Palm V and I have to admit that it has affected my wire­less usage. Run­ning over AT&T’s CDPD net­work, the ser­vice allows Palm V users to get full access to the net at speeds of up to 19.2kbps.

Priced at $300 for the modem and a $40 monthly rate for unlim­ited access, the ser­vice is still not cheap but it is start­ing to approach the rea­son­able area once you real­ize how much you can do with it.

The basic soft­ware pack­age comes with some of the same clips that are avail­able on the Palm VII and a few extra pro­grams like a full mail pack­age which allows you to con­nect to your POP3 server. How­ever, I decided to get rid of that piece of soft­ware once I dis­cov­ered Ptel­net, a small tel­net client for the palm. This allows me to access a Unix server on which I not only have an email client but also a Usenet client, as well as a web browser (lynx) and an FTP client.

As a result, this tel­net client works as the per­fect on the road kit.

For more graph­i­cally ori­ented pages, I use Prox­i­web, a full web browser that allows me to surf web pages directly from my pilot. The prox­inet server con­verts the pages in a for­mat that is eas­ily read­able by the pilot.

Of course, one of the main attrac­tion of a wire­less pilot is quick access to rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. Using Palm computing’s pro­pri­etary tools, sev­eral com­pa­nies have devel­oped PQAs that allow users to quickly check cer­tain pages. Amazon.com, for exam­ple, allows you to order directly from your pilot, Ebay allows you to track your auc­tions in progress, and Etrade allows you to trade stocks. How­ever, those are not the appli­ca­tions I found myself using the most.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that the most inter­est­ing ones tend to be the infor­ma­tion PQAs. For exam­ple, I can now check flight delays at the air­port (per­fect for trav­el­ers), track FedEx pack­ages, get direc­tions using mapquest, or grab head­lines from a vari­ety of sources includ­ing the New York Times, the Wall Street Jour­nal, and USA Today.

On the more techno-centric end, one can also grab head­lines from Slash­dot, news.com, and ZDNN. I find myself read­ing from my con­nected Palm when I am wait­ing for a meet­ing, in tran­sit in a cab, or wait­ing for a plane at the air­port. It’s the per­fect way to stay pro­duc­tive wher­ever I am.

Palm com­put­ing knows that in order to keep its lead, it needs to offer tools for devel­op­ers. As a result, they have intro­duced a small pro­gram that allows devel­op­ers to cre­ate PQAs. The process is rel­a­tively quick (put together a few small HTML pages, trim a few images, check your links to make sure that they show up prop­erly on the Palm.) How­ever, one tricky part is cre­at­ing web server pages that will dis­play prop­erly on the Palm.

I’d like to urge devel­op­ers to do as much as pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion when they cre­ate pages. In the case of TNL.net, the site is tem­pla­tize accord­ing to one’s browser. So if some­one comes in with a Palm (the user agent tag includes the word Elaine so you can clearly get it fil­tered), I serve up a less graphic inten­sive template.

This has allowed me to develop a lit­tle appli­ca­tion allow­ing peo­ple to read this newslet­ter from their wire­less Palm.

As an increas­ing amount of wire­less device start to pop up, sep­a­rat­ing con­tent and pre­sen­ta­tion will be increas­ingly impor­tant. The sites that do so already will gain an essen­tial edge in this next sec­tion of the mar­ket while oth­ers will remain far far behind, stuck in legacy HTML code. If you don’t do that sep­a­ra­tion right now, you will find your­self in tougher and tougher a sit­u­a­tion as the amount of con­tent on your site keeps increasing.

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