It’s an extremely difficult thing, trying to support this weird beast, the Palm. Or, more accurately, it’s an extremely difficult thing trying to support the numerous personalities and implementations of the Palm beast. I mean, KDE PIM as a start is about as unsexy as you could want. But genius me, I focus on the ugliest duckling of KDE PIM: KPilot. Don’t get me wrong… I’m a gadget geek, enjoy Palms immensely, and have been for… gosh… 8+ years now?? (Wow, just had to check what year the IIIe came out…). And, there’s a reason that I’m hacking on KPilot, and that’s because I honestly believe it’s the best PIM-synching Palm solution in FLOSS-land.

Anyway, back to my point… The Palm OS and its devices are a moving target, and it’s darned difficult to get it right for all of them. Until just yesterday, I had been using a Treo 650 with KPilot, and it’s been working splendidly for the last couple of years. All the while, mind you, I’ve been hearing grumblings that we don’t play all that nicely with the Treo 680 or 700p. Not having any of those (expensive) devices, I was left looking stupid saying “dunno, fellas… it works purty good fer me!” Well, HAH. As of yesterday, I am now the proud owner of a Treo 700p.

I’ll not go into the details, but suffice it to say that paying $6.95 for the last year’s worth of Sprint’s Total Equipment Protection plan has now proven to be fully worth it and I’m congratulating myself on my wisdom, 1+ years ago when I agreed to partake. The speaker (and thusly the thing that notifies one of an incoming phone call) on my Treo 650 decided to up and die on me and Sprint was extremely good about replacing my Treo because of it. And, not only did they replace it, but they replaced it with a shiny new 700p. The 700p, for those not yet gadget geeks, allows me to use Sprint’s EVDO data network, which is MUCH faster than the previous data access speed I had with my 650. Like 2400-baud compared to a T3, seemingly.

Anyway, as I have a 700p of my very own, I can now appreciate the aforementioned grumblings about KPilot not playing as nicely as it should. Apparently, Palm has done something slightly differently with the 700p than they have in other models that I have and KPilot is hanging onto the port longer than it should, even though nothing is happening on it. Hitting the “reset the device connection” button in KPilot’s GUI (and waiting 30 seconds or so… I’ll need to look at that) seems to help, but something is definitely not kosher in Denmark. I’ll try to look at it this weekend, if time allows, on the 3.5 branch.

Don’t even ask me about the KDE 4 branch…  I’m still suffering from deep depression about the state (or lack thereof) of KPilot in trunk.