Palm Pixi Limits
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The Palm Pixi  is a nice device.  It's tiny (it is probably  even a bit
smaller  than the  tiny Palm  Centro  phone) and  thus cute.  It has  a
hardware keyboard and other nice features.

And it  runs the WebOS. Yes,  it is a HTML5/JavaScripy  mess running at
the top  of the  Linux kernel. It  has its features  (no special  IDE is
needed  for software  development, for  example)  but it  also has  its
limitations. And some of them are very strict. For example, the barcode
reader is not able to use some native stuff so it was implemented as an
on-line application.  Yes, it  does not  process barcodes  off-line. It
actually does  not process anything at  the server which it  used is no
longer available.

The device  has relatively slow  hardware (for HTML5 and  JavaScript as
600 MHz  CPU is  really not slow  and 256  MB RAM is  a huge  amount of
memory, I  think). So loading of  e-books in the ePub  format is slower
than on my Ben  NanoNote (with its 336 MHz MIPS CPU and  32 MB RAM) and
for bigger e-books if  fails with an information that it  too big for a
memory available for the JavaScript interpreter...


So the applications:

The dictionary (the  HoshiDict) does not work at all.  It seems that it
requires a newer Web OS than the poor Pixi has.

The e-book reader  work well for smaller ePub books  (<3.0 MB). It does
not understand Plucker  files (it should work with DOC  format which is
used by the CSpotRun).

I has  not able  to use any  of synchronization tool.  I cannot  set up
account for Google, I see no  WebCal support and SyncML client seems to
ignore me.

Also I  was not able  to find  a mail service  which can work  with the
e-mail application.

An old Palm stuff cannot be used  here. There used to be a classic Palm
OS emulator but it is no longer available.

But some things work: the WWW browser  can be used for some pages (even
for some https://  one), the DopeWars work and there  are the ToDo, the
DateBook and  the Memos clones that  work at least locally).  The Music
application is simple but works.

By the way,  if the headphones are  used then the sound  is much better
than sound that can be produces by the semi-modern Gemini PDA.