[ Another Palm

We went from raining every single day, to sunny skies ahead for the foreseeable
future. The weather reports on the morning news show little sunshine marks for
at least the next week. Typhoons #28 and #29 are south-west of the main island
right now, but it doesn't look like they'll make landfall which is just fine by
me.

One Palm I have a soft spot for is the Z22 (Zire), because I bought one new in
2005 or 2006. It's an underdog, I think: small, lackluster screen with only 256
colors, not high resolution, no expansion slot, no headphone jack and only two
buttons on the front (not great for games). It was USD $99 upon release, and at
the tail end of the PDA era, if I remember my history correctly.

I got one this summer and used it in the US; a color-coded schedule was nice to
have, and I could use Memos to keep track of steps walked and hours slept. It
also makes for a pretty good ebook reader as it's nice and light. As soon as I
got home to Japan though, the digitzer died. I sourced a replacement and
surprised myself by successfully transplanting it to the old screen. Then I
broke a critical part which sealed the PDA's fate. I couldn't find help
anywhere, so in the fine tradition of throwing good money after bad, I bought
another one.

This one is (or was, before I opened it) new in box, and I guess it was fate,
but of course it had a bad digitzer too. Transplanting the screen and digitizer
from the other one was very easy (though getting the case open was a bit of a
pain.) What has suprised me, is that the original, 20 year old battery is still
working. I charged it for 3 hours just like the setup poster said, and I waited
for it to explode and/or spew out toxic clouds of gas, but it didn't. I beamed
programs over from another Palm and synced three times, and even after one
night the battery is still at 100%. What gives? I have no idea, but I'm not
going to look this gift horse in the mouth.

I had trouble syncing it with jpilot at first, too. A Palm device has to have a
user ID on it to sync, and I couldn't get jpilot to sync one over. I tried
using Palm Desktop on Win2000 through VirtualBox, but that didn't work either
(some error that USB couldn't be used which I couldn't be bothered to trouble-
shoot.) What worked was using Palm Desktop on an actual Win10 machine; it was
able to sync over (VERY slowly) a user ID and then programs I had installed.
Once a user ID was on the Z22, syncing and backing-up with jpilot worked just
fine.

Since it was new in box it came with the software installation CD, a setup
poster which has a big photo of the Z22 on the back, an AC adapter, a USB cable
(it smells nice) and some paper work. I never use the grafitti stickers (you
can just swipe down from the top of the screen and it'll show a help menu) or
those screen protectors. Also, there's a small pamphlet "Organization Made
Easy" and an accessories catalog. I really like the orange theme they used back
then.

In case you're interested, there's an archived Z22 data sheet here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081206082914/http://www.palm.com/us/support/
handbooks/z22/en/z22_datasheet.pdf