PalmOrb: So Close to Making Me Spend Money Needlessly

I finally played around with PalmOrb, the Palm app that lets you use your Plam Pliot as an external LCD screen (I was inspired by this bit on MAKE today about how to use a Pocket PC to do a similar, albeit swankier thing).

With an original Zire (model m150) and Windows XP, it worked a charm. The problem is, PalmOrb only supports a 4 line by 20 character display in the stable versions, which isn't a lot of room to display data. There are experimental versions that aim to fix that, but even so, LCDSmartie (the software that actually dumps the data out to the Palm via the conduit of PalmOrb) only supports 4 x 40 char screens at most.

It's like there's this great set of open source software that can almost do what I want, but then peters out right before greatness. Since PalmOrb is no longer being maintained, we'll not likely see an improvement on its abilities. Too bad. Palm PDAs are already cheap to pick up on eBay (and I'd definitely want one with a backlight in a permanent installation) right now; Just imagine how cheap they'll be when Palm goes bankrupt.

It's not like I need an LCD screen on the front of my case, anyway. I don't run Folding@home anymore, use FoxyTunes to control my music, and am perfectly happy using Motherboard Monitor's system tray output to keep an eye on my operating temps.