The Death of the PQA - PDAPhoneHome.com

The Death of the PQA

Published by johnbartley
08-11-2004

The Death of the PQA

PalmOne is turning off the Palm.Net service (used by the Palm VII, VIIx and i705 PDAs in the U. S. only) carried on Cingular's Mobitext two-way paging service, as of the end of this month.

However, that's not the worst of it; those of us using wirelessed PalmOS PDAs will also suffer the loss of Web Clipping Applications, AKA the 'PQA', as per this article in RCR Wireless News:

Quote:

Along with Palm.Net, the PalmOne PQA Web clipping service and PalmOne’s WAP browser are being discontinued. PalmOne said owners of Palm.Net handhelds can reconfigure their WAP browsers by connecting to a third-party gateway Internet Protocol address and offered instructions on how to do so.

Oddly enough, this announcement has not made it to the home page of www.palm.net, PalmOne's site for PQA downloads, user web e-mail access and support. However, digging around found this statement confirming the RCR Wireless finding.
The instructions on reconfiguring your WAP browser for Treos and dub-yas are found here.

The VII and VIIx were tremendously useful for Ground Zero workers, who found that the Mobitext (and other paging networks) kept working despite the cellular blackout in lower Manhattan. Paging networks, by their nature, are simple and robust, with easy recovery if a site goes down. With this departure from low-bandwidth, low-risk infrastructure, PalmOne cedes the ultra-reliablity market to RIM and the Blackberry.
Please, someone, tell me how this is a good thing?

__________________
John Bartley K7AAY | http://celdata.cjb.net | http://kiloseven.blogspot.com

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#1 (permalink)

By DMevis on 08-11-2004, 06:10 PM

Re: The Death of the PQA

"Please, someone, tell me how this is a good thing?"

It will provide a temporary improvement to Palms financials. This will allow Palm to survive a few additional quarters until their stupidity makes them sucumb to Microsoft.

#2 (permalink)

By johnbartley on 08-19-2004, 03:27 PM

And, a reporter at the Seattle P-I thought PQAs nifty. See his story here.

Last edited by johnbartley : 11-21-2004 at 01:44 PM.

#3 (permalink)

By All-Purpose Guru on 08-24-2004, 04:25 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by johnbartley
And, a reporter at the Steattle P-I thought PQAs nifty. See his story here.

Heh. I wonder if he knows that the Palm VII was *invented* in Seattle, specifically Bellevue?

#4 (permalink)

By All-Purpose Guru on 08-24-2004, 04:34 PM

Note that Palm has said that you can configure your WAP browser (it's not actually a WAP browser, it's a program called "Clipper" that really renders HTML) to use a different gateway-- but what they haven't told you is that that gateway has to be running a piece of software that provided the back-end to the Clipper application. I don't know if substitutes exist-- but it's noteworthy that Palm doesn't mention any sites that run this software.

So, looks like PQAs, and Clipper, are dead. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to find analogs for all the PQAs I currently use.

#5 (permalink)

By amirmckelvey on 08-25-2004, 10:40 PM

Palm is looking for profit, yes they were useful at ground Zero but they are not a community service organization, if it's that useful in times of dire need perhaps the government should subsidize it like they do farmers... Just a thought...

#6 (permalink)

By Copasetic on 09-21-2004, 09:11 AM

This brings back memories of my old 256K Amiga, that could use Floppy Disk loaded with the complete GUI and a few applications. Heck, that's nothing. I recall being dumbfounded when I went to a computer show and saw this guy with a Commodore64 running a complete Word Processing package (in the same ridiculous 64K of Ram!!!) But of course, as usual, function followed form, and the kludgy computers that needed more and more memory and storage just to get booted up started to take over. It didn't sell if it was efficient, people want power, flash, shock value, bragging rights. Back then processors were small, modem connections were small. Now everything is so power hungry, even Palm is having to follow this silly "fatter is better" mentality. What a lot of excess just to convince the ignorant public that you just can't have anything decent unless it consumes a lot of power....It's a shame that progress sacrifices efficiency for the sake of power too often, but cést la guerre....