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Hardware

Inside the Palm VII 40

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-my-screwdriver dept.
Griffone writes "The Gadgeteer has four quick photos of a dismantled Palm VII. Question though - you can see its rechargeable battery, but what are the OTHER two holders for? Batteries? "
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Inside the Palm VII More

Inside the Palm VII

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  • Unfortunately, no PalmPilot other than the Palm V use power supplied by the cradle. The Palm V has a NiCd rechargable battery inside it (no AAA's) which is part of the reason why it is so thin.
    --
  • Minor correction, the Palm V has Lithium Ion (Li-ion) batteries. These are better, no charge "memory" if you are recharging without running it all the way down. Also better power characteristics in a smaller space. Most laptops today use this battery technology.
  • You're a prat.. it's a pic of a Palm VII.. Palm III's weren't even around in '95.
  • Okay, the palm is neat and all, but what I want is the following:

    Small, folding form-factor, that could easily be shoved in a pocket (roughly palm sized when folded) with a screen and keyboard. Small (64K?) memory, ROM burned OS, terminal emulator maried to PCS phone technology. It would need almost no processor power, minimal long term storage (to keep config info) and with modern batteries could have a LONG battery life. If connected to the PCS net properly, it would have little bandwidth, and that could be made CHEAP.

    For sysadmins like myself, this thing would be heavenly. Imagine ALWAYS being at a terminal. Imagine all the down time you could pick up (waiting in line at stores, eating lunch) without the need for all that bulky crap that comes with a laptop, or the cutesy crap that is imbedded in most PDAs.

    But because I represent a VERY marginal section of the market, I doubt it would be made. (a pda with no OS? horrors!!)


    -Crutcher
  • hardware options already exist to connect Palm Pilot/Pro/III/IIIx/VII to wireless LAN's.

    URL?

    I'm looking for a way to hook a Palm to a wireless ethernet (IEEE 802.11) network. We're using Windows CE devices now, for lack of alternatives.

    We wanted to use Palm devices, but couldn't find any wireless network cards. Ricochet doesn't seem too interested in selling its base units, even though they don't provide service around here.
  • The yellow thing you see at the top of the device is not a rechargable battery. It is a capacitor. Wireless transmission (and simeotaneously running the computing functions, screen, serial port, etc.) from the Palm device requires more current than the batteries can provide on a constant basis. To preserve battery life and improve performance, this capacitor is charged during normal use, much like the capacitor that drives the high-current xenon strobes in point-and-shoot cameras. If the device is transmitting lots of data it will actually tell you that it needs to recharge the transmission circut and make you wait.

    As far as I know, the Palm VII does not support battery charging through the cradle as the Palm V does.

    On a side note, the communications frequencies used by the Palm VII are in the FCC licensed frequencies for cell phones and/or pagers. You won't see a way to connect the Palm VII to your local network with it's built in wireless without either illegal equipment or internal modification. Besides, hardware options already exist to connect Palm Pilot/Pro/III/IIIx/VII to wireless LAN's.

    ~GoRK
  • Nah; my Palm IIIx has the same "feature". When the unit experiences a slight impact from the spring side, the springs may allow the batteries to come unconnected from the unit for a moment; having both springs on the same side means there's one fewer side for a hit to cause this.
    The springs are on the side that would not break the battery connection if it slipped out of your left hand, the hand a righty would most likely drop it out of. Pretty smart.
  • >The yellow thing you see at the top of the device is not a rechargable battery. It is a capacitor

    You mean the tube with the "Ni-Cd" recycling symbol on it?

  • Well DUH... It's NOT for everyone, it's for all us admin types who companies feel should be on 24 hour availability.

    Ever tried lugging around a laptop and a cell phone and a beeper to go bar hopping for in case something crashes at work durring your not-so-free time? THAT's what it's for.

    Why do you need a moble "web browser"? If you're gonna browse, stay at home and browse or go to some coffee house with web access.
  • Sort of... you can use a Palm as a line-of-sight (IrDA) wireless terminal to a Corel Netwinder. I don't know if anyone's maintaining the package (and I never got it to work), but it's at www.netwinder.org/~ryansh ("Corel Palm Administrator").



  • According to O'Reilly's ultimate palm pilot guide the capacitor will actually give you about 11 min of charge while you are replacing the batteries. Nice to see that palm was really conservative about the specs on the capacitor though!

  • other holders are for the AAA's (Score:3)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Tuesday June 29, 1999 @03:08PM (#1826084) Homepage Journal

    It uses two AAA's like a normal (non-V) Palm. The batt you see is the one for the wireless crud which gets charged from your AAA's automagically. Why? I donno, maybe it needs some odd voltage Palm couldn't get from the AAA's, or the wirelsss goop was from another compony and that was the way to tack it on with the fewest changes, and therefore the lowest time to market.

    It's a bit of a kludge.

  • Has anyone come up with any linux/open-source solutions to making your palm a wireless terminal within your own home?

    I don't care about the commercial wireless net access through the PalmVII, but I would be VERY interested in having the PalmVII act even as a vt100 terminal over the wireless. 20metre range would be perfect for in-house :)

    I guess what's needed is the frequencies the PalmVII talk on (and can possibly talk on), and appropriate software at each end... anyone have info on this kidna stuff?
  • i just need to say thank you
    ----
    "War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
  • I image they wanted to keep the Pilot's power supply and the wireless power supply seperate - as each has dreastically different power requirements. If the wireless drains the batteries at least you can still use the Pilot offline until you get some new AAA's.

    The question is, will is use the cradle's supply for wireless when docked? That would be nice.

    -josh
  • Andy van Dam:

    http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/avd [brown.edu]

    In my experience a pompous ass who works his undergrads like they were grad students,
    but provides no credit or job security.

    When I took his intro to CS programming course, he appeared in the same sweater you
    see in the picture, with Birkenstocks and red socks. Eek. Ah well. I now make more money
    than his professors salary. Without his damn class.

    Clearly I am bitter. : ).

  • That has never been a problem before. Older Palms use a capacitor to keep the memory alive whily you put in new batteries. In practice you get a good 30-40 seconds to get the fresh batteries in before the memory goes bad.
  • It's a Palm Hybrid. :) 70 miles to the gallon to boot.

  • Re:Battery holders (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That's right, it's for the radio. It's not uncommon for low-powered infrequently-transmitting wireless devices to use an extra "permanent" battery to drive the sporadic high current needs for xmit. Positive-ack and two-way beepers, for example, often have this structure - you get the least power out of a battery with bursty current, and the most with constant low current.

    The Palm VII is on the Mobitex network, running only custom-designed low-bandwidth protocols. As always, this palm design is quite good at doing what it is intended to do. It is not indented for interactive login; at one packet per character you probably wouldn't get too many characters before the battery went kaput. Beleive me; I run all sorts of things over a CDPD modem powered by regular alkaline batteries, and the Palm lasts forever in comparison.

    For the guy after a wireless LAN-esque palm, get a ruggedized wireless ethernet palm from Symbol or the like; several models are or will soon be available.

    Not an AC; rather, Slashdot is incompatible with my anti-spam measures.
    Grant Taylor (gtaylor+slashdot_ccbfh062999@picante.com).

  • You can do this with one of the palm clones. symbol technologies makes a palm with a wireless 10 mbitps ethernet connection. (www.symbol.com)
    the unit also has 8 mb of ram and rom.
    you basically need the symbol unit and a wireless ethernet bridge...
  • It would be much more interesting if Andy van Dam or Scott Myers were in that picture.:-)

    Bite em Bears! Or more appropriately Bite em Beers!
  • Have you checked out the Nokia 9000 and 9110? They're GSM based phones that have a keyboard, screen, modem, telnet, a terminal emulator which can be married to a RS232 cable, as well as _lots_ more, including a fax, IMAP based mail, web browser, and other goodies. And it's about the size of a 4 yr old traditional cellphone.

    My clearest reccolection of this machine being extremely usfull was when I had a machine in San Francisco blow up while I was sitting in a park in Singapore doing sight seeing. I got the call that there was a problem, logged in, found the issue and resolved it, and got back to my trip ... total time expended was less than 10 minutes.
  • I would suggest that you look at http://www.ricochet.net with your current Palm Pilot Althought you would have to buy two modems.
  • The rechargeable battery is just a reservior to smooth out the load. NiCads have a much lower internal resistance (and therefore higher current capability) than alkalines. The radio needs short bursts of relatively high currents on transmit.

    Think of it just like a very big capacitor. :)
  • The Palm is supposed to be on the old RAM (Ericsson) now Bell South Freqs. Native protocol is mobitex, don't know if IP is in the mix now.
    The upper battery is labeled "NI-CAD" which you would need for a few hundred mills of 900Mhz RF packet. The VII freqs are old SMR or Trunking freqs not available to the public. The RF modem is
    about at 8k baud slow................900 narrow band requires this. You need a base station the size of the fridge. This is not for the house or the dorm. Wait for a new setup using part 15 - free freqs.

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