A Programmer's View of the Palm Zire
So, on the first day of release, I picked up one of the two Palm Zire devices at my local Target store. Since this device doesn't have a serial port, I was really interested to see if USB debugging was going to work on it. Alas, I'm a bit disappointed.
For a user, the device seems fairly reasonable. The screen has good contrast, the buttons have a good feel to them (even if they're only four of them), and the device doesn't seem to sluggish. I ran Afterburner on it at 30MHz, and it had problems with HotSync, but didn't crash. Sizewise, its a little thicker than my CLIE T615C, slightly wider, but a bit shorter, and it is very light. It also can be charged by either the included power adapter, or by the USB cable that connects it to your computer.
For a developer, it has a few major flaws. The biggest one is that there's no serial port, and the USB port seems incapable of accepting a debugger connection. I tried various combinations of Palm Debugger, CW for Palm OS 8.3, and the new CW for Palm OS V9 debugger with it, and they all timed out when trying to talk to the device. I could see some data in Palm Debugger, but it looks like the device lost sync. I also had problems with the device confusing Windows when it was reset with the USB connection active. This would occasionally cause WinXP to not recognize the device until I rebooted my computer.
I was able to upload a ROM image from it using the ROM Transfer app in POSE 3.5 and the PalmUSBD.sys 1.4 and USBPort.dll 4.4 included with its Palm Desktop 4.1 software. This went fine with no errors. POSE, of course, wasn't able to handle the device ROM.
I ran Hal Mueller's pixelCheckD app (http://www.mobilegeographics.com/dev/devices.html) to get the metrics and stats of the device:
Maker: Palm (1348562029)
Device: Cubs (1131766387)
MiscFlagID: calvin (20480)
Pitch: 0.2900
The HAL actually matches the HAL used for the m100/m105, but it looks like there have been changes, since the device doesn't report any available serial ports, and it does support USB and OS 4.1.
Hmmm... 'Cubs' -- was this designed in Chicago? Aren't they the team that always loses? <GRIN>
If this really is roughly the same hardware as the m100, maybe it won't be too hard to get POSE working with it. I don't know if POSE's skin format will handle not having some of the buttons available. BTW, I tried TealLaunch on it, and it worked fine, letting me map extended presses of the address and contacts buttons to NotePad and ToDo.
Anyway, there's nothing really that notable about the device. If you're designing an application, you might want to consider if you need to map all the hardware buttons or provide a Zire-friendly mode, but otherwise, its like a basic Palm III upgraded to OS 4.1.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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qwertYAK / frobnovich
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