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Handhelds Hardware

SyncML May Make Handheld-to-PC Links Easier 60

Posted by Roblimo from the hooking-it-all-up dept.
diggem writes, "I don't personally have this problem (YET!), but I know people who do... too many PDA-like devices, all with their own desktop syncro software which isn't usually compatible with other sync software. A new proposal is trying to correct the problem. It's called SyncML, an XML-based spec for sharing data between portable devices, your computer and the Web. The initial draft has backing from Palm Computing, Nokia, Psion, Motorola, Starfish (Motorola subsidiary), IBM and Lotus (IBM subsidiary). So it looks to have fairly significant backing. Cool! "
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SyncML May Make Handheld-to-PC Links Easier More

SyncML May Make Handheld-to-PC Links Easier

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  • The (/.) article makes a big deal of non-interoperability of sync software, but I see (at least) two larger applications.

    First is the obvious: an open (?) spec mean all devices can sync with all OS's.
    with each other. This would be an absolute godsend!
    --
    Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.

  • the white paper on their site talks of "any-to-any" synchronisation, but the only listed options are

    • Synchronize networked data with any mobile device
    • Synchronize a mobile device with any networked data
    what happened to
    • Synchronize a mobile device with a mobile device
    it'd be nice to be able to synch the phone numbers in my mobile with the addressbook in my Palk without having to go through a desktop system...
  • Wow! Lets hope this gets off the ground ... of course, judging by the list of companies supporting it, I dont see why it shouldnt. I have the problem with a Palm device and a Psion 5mx. jevans over at ugeek.com wants to sync his Psion Series 7 with his Psion Revo. And this is just the beginning. With PDAs getting more widely used and more powerful, this problem will be BIG soon unless it is fixed RSN.
  • One year ago, I bought a Psion IIImx. It was a cool PDA, with a 28-Mhz processor, backlight, it didn't eat batteries to quickly.

    It was a very cool toy. But the lack of this kind of synch-tool killed it. I've resold it.

    It let me a bitter taste in the mouth. The utility given with the package "PsiWin 2.2", not only was Windows(or MacOS)-only, but was buggy as hell !

    I never was able to make a real synch. Some tests were, but a real-life synch was nearly impossible.

    And, worse, there was no synch utility for Linux at that time ! Just some less-than-alpha-file-tranfer utilities.

    So, now, my appointments are back, as before, in the safest location I could imagine : my memory ! ;)

    Stéphane
  • ...when people only know what Lotus is if you refer to it as an IBM subsidiary. :)

    Anyway, call me crazy, but this is the kind of thing that does not take the backing of seven industry leaders to be worked out. We all remember the aberrations that have resulted from design by committee (*cough*COBOL*cough*). And needless to say, much cooler things in terms of markup languages have come out of individual or small-group efforts (TeX, anyone? LaTeX? MusiXTeX?). So I think that instead of having the industry leaders battle about language features for a decade, ending up with no result to speak of (as has happened many times with this kind of thing), they should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever, and then take whatever has come of it and implement it as-is in their own devices.

    Yeah, that looks about right. Feel free to flame. :)
  • I really don't understand the need for people to jump through hoops (registration, etc) in order to have a look at the spec. We're in dire need of something like this, but if they're serious about it being an open specification, why not start open?

    Please fill in the application form and you will receive more detailed instructions of the membership application process.

    Has anyone went through this and had a look at the specification? What exactly is the membership application process? I personally would've liked to have a look at what's been done already without registering and all.
  • If there is anything the portable electronics industry needs, it's the ability to get these devices to communicate with each other. I've planned on picking up the new Palm Pilot just because I can get a camera and keyboard attachment.

    What I cannot figure out from the web site, however, is if the new standards include physical connections as well as data. I would not mind in the least if all the devices came with some varient of a USB port, which would mean I could connect all of them with the same cable, especially as I can see using something like a flash drive with all of them. (Store MP3s for my rio, photos from my camera, numbers for my cell phone, software for my mindstorms, and backup my palm pilot.)

    Hopefully Lego joins the group.... :)

    Hmmm. It's be nice if Sony did something with the Aibo along these lines. Attach the cable so it looked like the leash, throw a huge flash drive in that monster, and let it follow you around, especially if you could store all the equipment in saddlebags on the Aibo...

    -----

  • I don't know about the others, but Palm has three different, mutually incompatible, docking stations with which to synchronize different Pilot models with PCs. Which becomes a problem when you've got people using different Pilot models and sharing a PC.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • Dude, it's a markup language specification. Even more, it's a XML DTD: it's text-based. There is no way they can make it "closed source"!
  • So I think that instead of having the industry leaders battle about language features for a decade, ending up with no result to speak of (as has happened many times with this kind of thing), they should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever, and then take whatever has come of it and implement it as-is in their own devices.

    Not really viable. The personal/portable market is moving quite quickly, to put it mildly. If Nokia, IBM et al. hand it off to IEEE then sit and twiddle their thumbs waiting for a spec., they'll find that, say, Microsoft and Ericsson have developed their own proprietary standard which dominates the entire market. pIf you want something done quickly, do it yourself. If you want it done well, do it openly (check the website... they invite anyone to participate... well, any company...). I think they're on to a winner here :-).

  • I bought a Sharp Zaurus about 1 1/2 - 2 years ago, It's sync software has always seemed ok. Also you could buy better from Rupp (who no longer exists) if you liked. It's crap by today's standards, but it's never failed me. A whopping 2 megs memory, 1 reserved for flash backup, a small built in modem, expansion capabilitys (if you buy attachments made for it), I've kept it all this time, and have been using it all this time. The covers just about to fall off (super glue is it's best friend), but still, it's usefull. It has a keyboard with most of the keys, like a typewriter, the letters & such, no F keyes or a key pad. Now that I've switched to Linux though, I've had to keep a 1/4 gig windoz partition just so I could exchange info with it! Wine doesn't seem to wanna run the software, so I'm screwed. After this standard's been out a while, mabey I'll go buy a new 1 that'll work in Linux, or if I'm luckey as h*ll somewhere there wil be something for my beloved Zaurus to meet Linux directly.
  • I know, Apple stopped producing it years ago, but there are still a lot of people who still own them, including yours truly. Someone should start making some more software for it, and set up some tech support (mine was a paperweight for two years before I got it to work again!). It is by far the best of all of the portables, and could have gone further had it not been cancelled by Apple.

  • a conspicuous absence (Score:3)

    by mmoin ( 153246 ) on Sunday February 27, 2000 @04:32AM (#1243636)
    Gee, I wonder why Microsoft or any of their CE device manufacturers aren't part of the initiative. Perhaps because this movement is exactly the development that threatens any sort of monopoly on wireless applications. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Personally, I'd place my bets on the non-Windows CE camp.

    -Andrew
  • if you want something done quickly, do it yourself. If you want it done well, do it openly

    I suppose... then again, this whole thing really reeks of COBOL to me.
  • I love the trend these days to finding a global spec for everything. Seems like most companies are getting the picture finally, realizing that instead of trying to OUTDUE each other they try to HELP each other. Sure, I know some are going to profit more then others, but if I went out and decided to make the Judg3-o-pedia I'd feel a little better about knowing that maybe I'll get a few more buyers for it knowing that they will probably be able to synch up with something else they own. The best thing about this I can see IMHO is Palm jumping on, usually when you have the big dogs (or a pack of em) rooting for something it seems to grease the wheels of other companies to join in or get let behind.

    ----------------------------------
  • Newton was great, but its lack luster handwriting recognition performance was what killed it off. If only they could of gotten down a little better the newton would be king today...

    ----------------------------------
  • Oooh! What does this button do!?

    Push to Test.

    Release to Detonate.

  • Dude, it's a markup language specification. Even more, it's a XML DTD: it's text-based. There is no way they can make it "closed source"!

    Hex dump of Word document is a text, too, yet it is still proprietary. XML solves a non-issue with parsing of data, but parsers are dime a dozen with tools like lex. Real problem is that handling the data models that include relationships between objects (including semantics) is still hidden in proprietary as hell code.

  • I don't know about the others, but Palm has three different, mutually incompatible, docking stations with which to synchronize different Pilot models with PCs.

    What the HECK are you talking about? There are three cases, so holders in cradles for different models are different, but protocols are the same.

  • hey should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever

    IETF is dead (since the last sane person there Jon Postel died), IEEE was born dead (never ever issued a sane and open standard) and ITU is an undead monster (a stronghold of proprietary bullshit in telephony industry).

  • Now, I wouldn't know if that is a good or bad. We all know MS love for propriertary stuff, but OTOH, they are the king of personal desktop OS. Personally, I wouldn't care less, if this stuff will be supported on my Palm, there would probably be one less reason to boot into Windows... :)

    J.
  • what happened to

    Synchronize a mobile device with a mobile device

    We'd need a way for the mobile devices to talk to each other first. Either through a hardware standard(ugh!) or wireless protocol (such as Blutooth [bluetooth.com]). Once that is done then we can concern ourselves with a uniform data transfer standard. Working at a mobile device to mobile device data transfer standard now would be putting the cart waaaay before the horse.

  • Has anyone noticed how the geeks at slashdot are becoming more and more settled into ungeek-like ways?
    It used to be that new items would be added to slashdot at all hours of the day and night (very geeky). Not anymore. Items are now rarely posted before 900am (Is that when you get to work, guys?) And post times don't go very late into the night (very ungeeky).
    What happened to your geeky ways?
    Did success make you dizzy?

    The reason I've noticed is that I'm 10 timezones away and slashdot is quite boring during the day here...

  • You have to know that this is not going to solve all of your problems. Sure, a common low-level standard toward the storage of information on PDA devices is definitely the first step toward the complete solution, but this step is, hmm, tiny.

    Take the large PCs we all use today for example. Sure, we have common standards for information transportation --- floppy disks with FAT filesystems is readable almost everywhere, and TCP/IP protocol is an universal language. However, we still have problems exchanging information with other people, especially one uses open source software and the other does not. Like I always said, if someone dare to mail me Word or Excel files, I will type my reply in LaTeX, and send the bzip2ed DVI file back. High, application level standard will be the key to the problem.

    Undoubtedly that will not be easy. Perhaps this is the time for us to push open source sofware on those platforms.

  • Microsoft should be on this (Score:3)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) on Sunday February 27, 2000 @06:33AM (#1243654) Homepage Journal
    This is a bit annoying; I want to see Microsoft on this, but (who's surprised at this) they're not. I own a Palm III and a Philips Velo 1 (one of the early CE machines) and I REALLY dislike the synchronization software that comes with the CE device.

    For those who don't know how CE synchronizes, it essentially establishes a PPP connection between your desktop and your palm sized device through some semi-special software on your Windows machine. On Windows NT, it forces you to install RAS if you don't alreay have it installed (read: must reapply service packs afterwards) and then whenever the machines are hooked together, I've found the networking of the boxen stumbles for the 30 seconds or so that they chat with each other. I guess there is enough bitching to do about the CE synchronization method, but I can state that it does work though I don't care for it. The Palm pilot, on the other hand, works very nicely and transparently from the rest of the computing world.

    So how does this apply to the proposed synchronization method/standard? On my machine, I have five pieces of software installed for the purpose of keeping my personal organizers in sync:

    • HotSync (palm low-level software for the serial port)
    • ActiveSync (CE low-level software)
    • RAS (for ActiveSync to work)
    • Outlook (CE doesn't come with its own lightweight software like the Palm does [read: Palm Desktop])
    • Desktop to Go (for syncing the Palm with Outlook)
    Now with this new software, I could get rid of ActiveSync, RAS, Desktop to Go and HotSync and POSSIBLY Outlook if they provide a lightweight storage and manipulation program. Now granted, I would have to install a new piece of software for the new synchronization program, but hopefully the one piece of software would be able to differentiate between the CE device and the Palm device and I wouldn't have to have additional programs installed.

    So it would be nice to have less software on my machine to keep my machines in sync. Now if only this thing (read: whatever software comes about based on this standard) could also work with Bluetooth, I'd be set :)

    My two cents; no refunds.

    --

  • Wouldn't it be nice if these PDA's had an Cat-5 adapter on them, and you could just set up a network with it, and your computer would just think its a regular computer its sending and recieving file from

  • Slashdot and PDAs (Score:5)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <[ajs] [at] [ajs.com]> on Sunday February 27, 2000 @06:36AM (#1243657) Homepage Journal
    An only slightly off-topic rant:

    I have a PDA (a Handspring Visor) and use AvantGo to view Web pages on my way to work after syncing up first thing in the morning. My commute is 1+1/2 hours on public transportation, so I have plenty of time to read.

    Ideally I would like to read Slashdot, but all of the AvantGo-channel-ready Slashdot hacks out there only show the articles, not the talkback. I tried setting up my own page through some CGI that parsed the rdf, and created links to the Slashdot-FAQ-suggested version of the pages, but even with threshold=4, plain=1 and boxes=0, the HTML is way to long in many cases, and it's certainly too ugly on the PDA screen.

    Well, I'm a coder, I got around it, but I don't like the fact that I had to parse the feedback page in order to do it. Slashdot should have support for such browsing. I would even happily download the banner-ad, if it meant getting a VERY simple HTML version of the page.

    If you want my solution, grab sd [ajs.com] and sdforum [ajs.com]. Put them in your cgi-bin directory and rename them so that they have a .cgi extension (sd finds sdforum only if it's in the same directory and called sdforum.cgi). You will need Perl, and you will need the CPAN modules libwww-perl [perl.com] and XML::RSS [perl.com]. Now open your Web-browser and visit sd.cgi. You should see a bullet-list of articles. You can then click on any one to see a VERY cut-down version of the feedback page. If that works, you're on to the next step.

    If you use AvantGo, they give you a nifty little javascript-button that will set the current page in your list. Use that on sd and you're done. If you use Pendragon Browser, use their user interface to add the URL to sd. For other off-line browsing applications your milage may vary.

    Please, even if you manage to find where I keep sd on my system, don't use it from there. I don't have great bandwidth, and I don't want to be in the business of being a Slashdot-for-PDA mirror (I'm not even sure of the legalities). If I have to move it to stop people from using it, I will.
  • No, the handwriting recognition was greatly improved by the time the Messagepad 120 and 130 were released.

    If anything, it was the high price overhead, the failure to provide on-the-fly synchronization like the PalmPilot and the sluggishness of its OS (which wasn't improved until the Messagepad 2000, 2100 and eMate, which by then was way too late).

    Steve Jobs also had a hand in essentially tossing the project out with the trash; rather than approve of designs which tried to make the devices more affordable, he announced division wasn't worthwhile to Apple's future (which included the iBook, which was basically the eMate on steroids). Go figure.
  • That's coming soon, an Ethernet cradle
  • It won't be backwards compatible
    It will offered only as an expensive service
    It will offered only in the largest markets
    It will not work well under most circumstances
    It will be very expensive
    Your servers won't support it
    It will only support Active X
    It will have a closed authentication scheme
    It will have a closed encryption scheme
    It will never come to fruition
    It will require special versions of host apps
    It will be buggy slow and poorly crafted
    Everyone will write about how great it is
    No one will buy it
    When the sun is a burnt out husk the FCC will head in the direction of setting the ground rules for service providers to offer wireless TCP at Ethernet speed rendering all of this special gunk useless.

    You have been warned.
  • There's a product called The Bridge (available for Palm III [midwestpcbdesigns.com] and Palm V [midwestpcbdesigns.com]) that allows you to use a newer device in an older cradle. The basic synchronization protocols are the same for all units, so it's only the physical shape that this device helps to unify.

  • I used to work for a software company [iambic.com] that made software for Palm Pilots, Windows CE, and Newtons. I agree that the big companies are fairly likely to be able to get together, and create a internetworking standard for their common applications.

    I don't see that happening, however, with the add-on softwares.

    There's a few dozen 'Time and Expense Tracker" programs out there, each with their own features, for example. But because many of the smaller companies are set in the idea that interoperability with other products would mean that they lose sales, I doubt that it would ever change.

    Anyone care to disagree?

  • You're just handing things from one committee to another. A process which guarantees what you're trying to achieve, is to write up the requirements then hold a competition for the best design, and implementation.

    This isnt a fanciful notion. Exactly this technique is being used by NIST to descide on the AES standard.

    Bruce Scheiner's analysis of IPSec here: http://www.counterpane.com/ipsec.html is not only a good exposition of the differences between the two approaches to getting a standard (in encryption), but also a counterexample if you think that IETF are always getting things right.

    OTOH 'rough consensus and running code' (the IETF motto) moves you forward faster than the ISO standardize-everything-up-front technique. You also have a fighting chance that a single mind will have come up with the design, in the process of creating the running code.

    -Baz

  • if i remember correctly, the simpsons poked fun at the handwriting recognition in one of their episodes.
  • Yeah, that and the java banners annoyed me enough to use ad blocking software.

    www.junkbusters.com

    free, comes with source. and is GPL if you are a licence bigot.

    enjoy.

  • Ideally I would like to read Slashdot, but all of the AvantGo-channel-ready Slashdot hacks out there only show the articles, not the talkback. I tried setting up my own page through some CGI that parsed the


    I'm annoyed every day by the format of Slashdot. I read it because of it's interesting articles and discussions, but actually the interface sucks. Slashdot, and many other discussion sites, just should use NNTP/Usenet. That was made for discussions, you can have the same program to access lots of such discussion forums, with the same keybindings, scoring mechanisms etc.


    It is really a pity that Usenet is falling apart, and is fragmented into so many clumsy-to-access discussion forums.

  • Any idea how SyncML will stack against Mobile Application Link [avantgo.com] from AvantGo and Puma?

  • when you've got people using different Pilot models and sharing a PC.

    Get the portable sync cable. It fits all Palms with no problem.

  • Starfish's software has software that can do that. It is called True Sycnc Plus It can sync to Outlook 97/98/2000, Palm Desktop, Windows CE, Rex, Yahoo Calender and a bevy of other Organizer.

    *I do have a Bias here I work for Xircom who now own the Rex*

    You can pay for it or you can sign up for Yahoo calender and get it for free. (The free version is missing modules just download the update utility and you can get the rest)
  • Linux runs on Palm Pilots and other PDA's. Hasn't anybody written ethernet drivers under Linux for them ? If not, what is stopping them ?
  • The Palm sync port is actually just an RS232 serial.
  • they should simply hand the project to, say, IEEE or IETF or whatever

    I cite FpML [fpml.org] as an example of w functioning, efficient industry led initiative to develop an XML based standard.

    (I'm on an FpML working group, so maybe I'm biased :0) )

  • The Doonesbury comic strip did this long before the Simpsons. :)

  • Considering that both AvantGo and Puma are listed as supporters (along with such companies as Symbian and Paragon Software and many more), I'd place my money on SyncML. :)

    disclaimer: I work for CS&T [www.cst.ca].
    My opinions are my own, not necessarily my employer's.

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