I'm back again.

I've got my hands on yet another (this makes my fourth) Palm Foleo. This one may be the best one yet. It came with the box and VGA cable and is in great condition. I've run it through its paces and it is performing as expected. The only problem I've encountered is I cannot get it to connect to my home WiFi network. I know the WiFi works because I can get on my neighbors and the free network at McDonald's. I've already put all the software I had previously compiled and it looks like the only one I am missing from my last Foleo is the Astraware Sudoku. I have the TealPoint Sudoku though so that is good.
The web browser is Version 1.1.0 while my last was 1.0.0.
Pocket Tunes is newer as well as this one is v4.1.0.2009 and my last was v4.1.0.2003.

I purchased this unit with a good intention of reselling it. I may do a repeat of my last ones.

I'm Back! Well sorta.

I've recently acquired two Foleos in 'As-Is/Untested' condition. After playing with them for awhile I've come to the conclusion that one battery is shot and the other is nearly there. One is stuck in a reset loop. It powers up and shows the black screen with a small orange palm logo. The logo is then joined by a small white 'loading bar' that, upon filling, disappears along with the Palm logo only for the Palm logo to return by itself. This loop continues. I did remember reading a reset hard button combo but can't seem to find it in all my old documentation. The other Foleo has a curious loading screen showing some type of boot info. "Welcome to MacGuffin !! MacGuffin EVT2 Board " is displayed along with many lines indicating a boot. The problem is it loops after trying to start the kernel. It does allow the list of commands upon interrupting the autoboot and the help command shows a list of other commands. None of the commands that it lists and that I've tried remedy the problem though. I'll play with them for a while. I still have all my old software saved including a copy of my CF card which my old Foleo would run from. If I could get one of these to boot from my CF card it might fix some issues. One of my issues I had while I used my old Foleo was the fear of not being able to fix any hardware problems that may have developed. If anything, I could help out a fellow Foleo owner or two with that.

For Sale

I've reached a financial situation and have put the Foleo on ebay.
I don't want to sell the thing but if I can get enough for it than that money will find a good use.

Part of me hopes I can keep it and continue to blog away with it. I'm going to stop thinking about it or I will talk myself into taking the auction down.

Video of the Foleo in action

After a few forum postings inquiring about the speed of which the Foleo turns on and off as well as quickness in switching between applications, I made a very rough video to demonstrate. The poor quality is due to my regular digital camera shooting craps. The fuzzy picture does obscure most of any personal information I might be weary of sharing.


Of note in the video is the slight delay when I opened the Web Browser. I was not connected to the internet and had previously chosen the User Manual which is viewed through the browser. It is a large file and does take a little bit to initially load up. I may soon post a video of just the browser surfing speed.

The mDayscape apps do hesitate before opening but all the others are near instantaneous. If you noticed the lack of reaction prior to the PDF viewer that was the Mobile VPN app. I'm not sure that application is working at all. It indicated it installed correctly but I have not been able to reach a screen allowing any settings as indicated in the readme file that came with the program.

All the Teal apps have nag screens as indicated by the progress bar. I didn't have any spreadsheets or powerpoint files ready to go as I should have in order to indicate the DataViz apps speed.

In a separate note, I found an external USB floppy disk drive and connected it to the Foleo. It does allow for read and write capability to those. I have an external CDRom but seemed to have misplaced the power cord.

Flashy games and widgets

My first Palm device was a m100 followed by a few Sony Clie SJ models. For the longest time my favorite was my UX-50. Like a mini-tablet PC with wifi and bluetooth. I had an application on the UX that allowed my to play flash (swf) files. It was more of a novelty due to the low processing power of the Clie. I did manage to rip or download quite a few flash files to try on the Clie. When I saw the Chumby appear, I downloaded various swf files from the Chumby website.
Flash forward to May 2010 and I have my Palm Foleo. With a limited number of applications and just a few programs I started to surf around for more options. Like a lot of people I have a Nintendo Wii that uses the Opera browser. In fact it, like the Foleo, uses the Opera 9 browser. I googled around and found various solutions to a few issues included a tabbed browsing and Stumbleupon workaround. I then discovered a whole slew of online flash games designed to use with the Wii. All the sites loaded rather quickly and about 85% of the games played with little to no problems.
Duck Hunt was one of those games.


I then thought back to all the flash games and widgets I had downloaded. I tried one (minigolf) and it worked flawlessly. I went to Chumby.com again and tried a few more. Some of the current Chumby widgets are for Flash 9 and higher so I was limited.
In the end, I have quite a few games and other widgets like news feeds to add to my collection of useful Foleo apps.

How do I play these files? Simple, Opera 9.02. Opera's Menu tab allows you to 'Open File...' but when you click around it does not recognize .swf files to open them in this manner. Rather, I had to manually enter the location of one file onto the address bar. Once I had one file up and running I bookmarked it into a new folder called Flash Games. I then changed the file name in the address bar, accessed a new flsh game and bookmarked it. Now, without an internet connection I can play countless games.
They have sound and run rather smooth. I even played PacMan while running pTunes in the background.

Foleo's Web Browser

As promised I will do a different post about each app on the Palm Foleo starting with the Web Browser. Its an Opera 9.02 and loads up just as fast as the other apps (instantaneous).

The top bar consists of the standard back, forth, stop, reload, home, and bookmark buttons followed by a secure icon then the address bar. The address bar acts like a Chrome browser in that you can also just type search queries into it and it will search Google for you. Date and time followed by wifi, bluetooth and battery status finish of the top.
Pressing the Menu key reveals six options which I will detail below.
File - Open Location (highlights the address bar)
Open File (opens a smaller File Browser window)
Save Page As (opens above window with option to rename file & save it wherever)

Edit - Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find on Web, Find on Page, Find Next

View - Show Bookmarks Toolbar, Show Downloads Toolbar (see screenshot)
Stop, Reload, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom 100%

Browse - Back, Forward, Home, History Strangely every Menu item listed has a shortcut key except Back, Forward and Home.

Bookmarks - Bookmark this Page, Edit Bookmarks It then lists all your bookmark folders and loose bookmarks.

Options - Preferenses, About Web Browser
Choosing Preferences opens a smaller window with a General and Advanced tab.
Under the General tab is the home screen settings, pop-up blocker and download images options.
The Advanced tab shows Memory Management with buttons to clear the cookies, history and cache. You can also set your maximum cache size. 16MB seems to be the max. Also under the Advanced tab is the Advanced Features with checkboxes for Enable Javascript, Accept Cookies and Use Proxy Server.

Upon starting the Web Browser it will try and load the last page you visited. If you wifi or bluetooth internet connection is off it a window will pop up asking you if you wish to establish a connection. My wifi connections take just a few seconds before it finds it and starts updating the page.

Obviously Flash issues and the lack of YouTube helped with all the trash-talking of the Foleo. I don't view YouTube too often but the lack of anything greater than Flash 7 is sometimes restrictive where interaction via flash is needed for uploading or interacting with options on web pages. An entire posting or two about Flash will be forthcoming in the future.

Thats all for now. Long winded and mainly boring UI blah. I will post about the general Web experience as well.

ixle

I made USAToday (well the website at least).
http://content.usatoday.com/topics/article/Culture/Computers+and+Internet/eBay+Inc/08i20B86bH3Yu/0
Lots of back and forth on PalmInfocenter. I'm not sayinig this is the
best device ever made but it does have its good points. With future
postings I will hopefully show some of them.

--
http://ixle.tripod.com/