6.0 - Life with the Palm TX
6.1 - Travails
6.1.1 - Do NOT buy your TX from Palm!
I bought my TX, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.
I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, uses almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.
Considering that I was so happy with the TX, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.
Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This TX was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.
So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem) then Palm will refund my card.
I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced — this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working TX... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.
So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely — I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.
So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...
So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted TX, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.
On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they have received the package. On November 7th, my credit card reflects the purchase price of the TX and ground shipping have been credited to my account. I'm not going to argue about it. No sir.
I turned right around and ordered a new TX from... not Palm, no sir... from buy.com. I ordered it overnight. At a $30 discount. It got here overnight, and it works fine. So now we have two working TX's, and a lifelong committment to never, ever, purchase anything direct from Palm again. Not hardware, not software, not anything. Don't say I didn't warn you. True and stone-accurate story, every word of it. October 18th to November 8th, 21 days, three full weeks, of purest annoyance, deceit and/or misinformation, and poor response.
For the record, the TX with the bad WiFi was serial number PN70U975V3M8 and had a MAC of 000B6C4C8E05. If you end up with this unit, and it has trouble connecting, then they've just foisted the thing off on you with the same problem I gave it back to them with, sans repairs. I wouldn't put it past them, though I admit I'm just being cynical and suspicious because I feel we were treated so poorly. They may have great hardware, but whoever designed the deal-with-the-public policies for the company should be dismissed with predjudice.
6.2 - Getting Mac Video to the TX
6.2.1 - How-to: DVD to TX-compatible format
First, to isolate the video I wanted (which was only one short chunk of the DVD), I used "Mac the Knife" to strip a short segment out of a DVD we had produced some time ago. That worked just fine.
I used a freeware application called "DiVA", version 1.0. DiVA can convert DVD content into various formats. For the record, you want to set cropping to 0 on all edges, resolution to 427 wide by 320 high (for 4:3 video), and video compression to "Apple Pixlet Video". I used "Best" frames per second and "Medium" quality. This also went flawlessly. The bad news: No audio is converted. The good news: I didn't need audio.
A little later, I bought the Apple MPEG2 extension for Quicktime, and also a neat application called SimpleMovieX so I could edit MPEG content. Without much ado, I was clipping segments from an MPEG and making videos out of them for my TX. If you're curious, the subjects here are short (about one minute) martial arts patterns. I wanted to have the videos as references. The project went well and now I have a hand-held copy of all the advanced patterns for visual reference. As Cartman would say, niiiiiiiiiiice! The only trick was getting the videos to the TX...
6.2.2 - That Darned Droplet
The PDF buried inside the TX documentation states that you can drag your quicktime videos onto the droplet that "was installed on your desktop" (but which actually wasn't.) Once you've located the droplet, which is inside the Applications / Palm folder, you can drag it to your desktop or the dock. Then you can indeed drag quicktime movies to it, and it will duly convert them into ".asf" files.
However, when you go to sync the TX, they won't be installed. The hotsync application will tell you that there is no application which uses a dot-asf file, and it won't move the file. You can see the error in the conduit log.
I called Palm technical support, and after being put on hold for about 15 minutes, I spoke to a polite young gentleman who listened to my description of the problem, then asked me to hold while he verified it. When he came back, he tried to get me to use a PD application called TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player) instead of the Palm media viewer. I allowed as to how I'd look into that, but for now, how did I fix my problem. After much hemming and hawing, he said he'd email me in a "few hours". Well, of course, no email ever arrived, and the fact is the droplet is simply broken for video.
All is not lost, however. Here is what I was able to do to get one of these to my Palm (I know the number of steps seems ridiculous, but please bear with me here... so far, this is all I've come up with.) After the conversion from .mov to .asf, I uploaded the .asf file to my web site. Then, I wifi'ed on-line with the TX, and entered the exact URL for the .asf file into the cute little web browser. It asked a few questions (mainly, did I want to download this thing and did I want it on my card or in the Palm device itself) and after answering them, down it came. When I opened up the multimedia viewing application, there it was. Works just fine, too — the TX has a great display and is fast enough to play at a reasonably high framerate.
I hope this tip is of use to someone, or, failing that, perhaps someone can tell me what to do to make the Mac Palm desktop understand what it is it is supposed to be doing with the converted .asf files. Presumably it is a setting in the droplet or a configuration file. I just don't know how to find it.
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