Thread: Basic Questions Before I Buy
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sevo is offline sevo
2007-11-20 , 23:05
Posts: 190 | Thanked: 21 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#3
Originally Posted by lny98 View Post
1. Battery Life: I know with batt life, your mileage may vary so to speak, but are there easy ways to get longer life? Can you easily swap batteries? Will the cell phone booster things work?
Swapping batteries requires a shutdown and reboot - besides that (which might be undesirable while watching a movie or tracking a GPS route), it is trivial. External battery packs work - Nokia even have some as officially supported accessories.


Originally Posted by lny98 View Post
2. Linux/Unix: I've read all sorts of great applications that work on it, but what doesn't work, and more importantly, why doesn't it work? For example, I read Open Office doesn't work on it. Is it because of limitations in the Java VM? Is it because of RAM memory? (PS: It's not that I want to run OO on it, by the way). I guess I'm wondering why thousands of apps aren't ready to use (disregarding screen size of course).

3. PDF reader: A main app for me would be as an e-book reader. Will the PDF reader render pretty much any PDF of any size?

I'm hoping the Palm VM works well. That's what made me make the decision to buy. Say what you want about other platforms, there is a lot of great, incredibly useful, stuff that I have on my Treo that I would love to run.
OO does not run even in its Java-free variant because of its huge memory footprint, waste of screen estate and issues with input methods in a highly moving target, where enormous porting efforts would have to be repeated every few months. Which pretty much sums up the reason why many other applications haven't been ported either - stuff that uses other library suites or its own library system will mostly fail on space, display or input issues, making them practically useless.

Java, BTW, does run - but only in a variety of somewhat less useful environments, a JSE runtime engine is still missing, presumably due to licensing concerns with the Sun JSE and portability issues with the free alternatives.

PDF and evince together can handle any useful unencrypted PDF file - what does not work are PDFs with embedded scripting, and worse abuses of the format like bulk text made up entirely from drawing primitives or PDFs merely wrapping huge scanned images.

Sevo