Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup » pda

What does HP’s purchase of Palm mean?

steve — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:03:49 +0000

This week, HP bought Palm.

What does that mean?

It means HP wants to be a contender in the smartphone market.
It means HP doesn’t want to be a slave to Microsoft.
It means HP isn’t smitten by Windows Mobile 7.
It means HP doesn’t think that the iPhone and Android phones have that market sewn up.

It means options for the consumer.

~Steve

Smart Phone Apps from a Smart Company

steve — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:06:35 +0000

Several years ago I bought PocketBreeze from sbsh. It sold for about $20. I used it for so long that I began to think it was part of the operating system on my iPAQ HX-4700. Moving to a PDA phone (Samsung SCH-i760) I was reintroduced to the Microsoft Today Screen. Ugh. I had mistakenly thought that MS would do something to make that screen more useful, but — hey — they are MS.

Tonight, to my delight, I learned that sbsh has a policy that if you own any of their products (with registration code) you can download the latest version, provided it’s not a whole new edition. My version was 5.0.n and the newest version (three years later) was 5.4.n. So I downloaded, installed, input my email address and registration code, and it works great.

And guess what! Unlike MS, in the past three years sbsh has actually enhanced their product, increasing usability. Wow! What a smart company.

Thanks, sbsh!

Bluetooth Enable on Dell Inspiron 6400

steve — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:55:54 +0000

I bought a Dell bluetooth card for my Inspiron 6400 so I could sync my PDA with my Laptop. The card seemed to work well with Vista. However, my ipaq HX-4700 would not agree to perform a bluetooth sync, so I figured I wasted my money. When I upgraded the hard drive on the laptop, I noted the bluetooth did not work, but I really didn’t care — until I replaced my HX-4700 with a Samsung SCH-i760. Bluetooth sync was looking attractive again, but I couldn’t get that bluetooth card in my Inspiron to work. Although it was activated in the bios, it didn’t exist in the system configuration. And the blue light was out.

Googling led me to this site. The blogger there had the same problem I had, although it was for different reasons.

The driver needed is file R159805.EXE.

I downloaded the file he indicated and ran it. *ding* my bluetooth lit up. And the Samsung was able to sync without any difficulty.