Last December, I wanted to buy a Canon or Sony digital camera in Singapore before going back home from a training for my new job. But when I saw an ad for a slightly used, white Palm Centro on eBay, my plan changed. I managed to get the Centro for only 300 SGD (around P9,000). At that time, a brand-new Centro was being sold for around 400 to 500 SGD.

I immediately transferred the data from my battered Treo 650 to my new phone. As was always the case with Palm OS devices, the data transfer was completed without causing me a headache. With the Centro, it was still like having my old Treo 650, only with a lighter pocket and more space to install new apps. I missed Treo’s keyboard, though.

After Palm announced the Pre last month, I gathered reactions from prominent tech blogs and Pinoy techies, particularly Apple fans. I never got to complete it.

Still, here are some comments that I managed to dump on a WordPress draft, as well as those I recently saved while browsing old blog entries:

After several attempts, I was finally able to successfully convert using VisualHub for Mac a video file for viewing on a Sony Ericsson phone.

Here’s the config:

(Convert) To: MP4
320 Pixel Wide : Checked
Quality: Standard
RTSP Streaming: Do not check
H.264 Streaming: Do not check

In the Advanced settings, check Force and select QuickTime Decoding. Ignore all the other settings.

Thanks to this article for giving me some ideas on the correct settings.

I love posting short updates on the Web using my Palm Centro. I caught this habit in 2001 when PinoyExchange.com (PEx) introduced its Wireless Journal feature.  For only  P2.50, I was able to send through SMS short thoughts, notes, mini-poetry, and quotes to my own WJ page.  But PEx eventually stopped this feature.

Years later, a new site called Twitter emerged and began offering a similar service.  It even went a step further as, for some time,  it allowed members to receive their friends’ updates as text messages.  Posting SMS updates to Twitter was expensive then, though, as users had to send messages to an international number.  But phTwitters.com later solved this, allowing users to send updates to a local SMS gateway. When Plurk became popular, phPlurk also became available.

Palm finally launched on Friday (Thursday, January 8 in the US) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas its new operating system, Palm webOS — codenamed Palm Nova — and Palm Pre, the first smartphone running on this OS.

It was a highly anticipated launch. Critics expected it to be Palm’s last attempt at fighting what they thought was an inevitable final slide to oblivion. On the other hand, Palm addicts — including Filipino makapalms who fought sleep to watch live streams of the presentation — must have prayed too hard that it would pave the way for Palm’s grand comeback.