Palm Gets Java

By Martin Heller

October 13, 2003

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In June of 1999, I bought a Palm V at JavaOne. I bought it for several reasons: First and foremost, I bought it because it was going to be the reference platform for Sun's Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). Second, I bought it because I was tired of lugging a large paper diary/calendar around with me, and thought the Palm V might be a nice substitute. Third, it was cheap. As I recall, the show price was half of the retail price, so that if things didn't work out, I could always sell it.

The Java K VM that came on that Palm V turned out to be okay for little games, but not terribly useful for real applications. The development tools for the K VM amounted to stone axes and bear claws compared to the tools I had for developing PC applications—both Java desktop applications and native Windows applications. Beyond the tools, I found the class libraries in the K VM, especially in the user interface and connectivity areas, disappointing. I quickly lost interest in the Palm as a Java platform.

On the other hand, the Palm V worked well as a replacement for my appointment calendar and address book, and I used it cheerfully for several years until the synchronization cradle shorted the charging power into the serial connection and fried my development PC's motherboard. I took that philosophically, on the whole: Both the Palm V and the 400-MHz Pentium II were past their prime, and my local computer dealer was able to transfer all the data from the old PC's hard disk onto the new 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 machine he built to my specifications. In addition, I was slated to edit a book on Pocket PC programming, so it was high time I had a Pocket PC instead of a Palm.

I bought an iPaq H3970 and I've generally been happy with it, although I often wish it had WiFi instead of Bluetooth wireless connectivity—the iPaq model with WiFi didn't come out until about a week after I got mine. I really like the screen, the PIM features are generally fine, and I like being able to use it as a music player and recorder. I've been able to write .N

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