The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Two ideas here: one, that it's really interesting the timing of Skype's new promotion of free nationwide phone calls given the NSA tracking brouhaha. Skype, for people who don't use it, is an Internet-based (VoIP) phone client, which, from a piece of client software on your computer, will let you call the regular phone of (nearly) anyone in the world (as well as people with the piece of client software running on their computer). They used to charge about 2-3 cents per minute to make calls to these phones (it was free to call computer-to-computer) but now, though the end of the year, it will only cost to call abroad.

Talk about a good way to build up clientele. Not just because it's now a free way to make phone calls, but because it positions Skype as an alternative to the regular Bell Companies. You know, the ones that gave your call records to the NSA without a court order (except Qwest, which held out). So that if that behavior alarms you as much as it should, suddenly you have a choice about whom you can do your telephony business with. A pretty cheap choice right now. (The promotion isn't permanent, but I think the idea is to get you so used to using Skype that you won't be able to go back to a Bell once they do start charging again.)

Which brings me to my grumble about Palm. I think Palm has eroded its base by not coming out with the right devices with the right features soon enough. I'm very happy with my Palm Desktop software. To the extent that anything keeps me organized, it does, and I have no love for the Windows solution. So I would like to get a new PalmOS PDA that can keep me similarly organized. But I also want one that supports Wi-Fi, since I already have a Wi-Fi subscription, yet few do. And of those that do, they don't have a microphone, thus rendering Skype calls impossible. But then, that's ok, because Skype hasn't bothered to develop a client for PalmOS since no one with a Palm device would be able to use it anyway. (Skype has, however, developed one for the Pocket PC, so there are PDAs out there perfectly capable of making Skype calls.) Now, in theory I may have bet on the wrong horse going with Skype for my VoIP needs because it is a closed-source system - whereas with an open source system some geek might be sitting around somewhere porting a PalmOS version of a VoIP client. But then again, Mozilla's Firefox web browser, which is also open source, doesn't seem to have a PalmOS version - and if any open source software going to be available for Palm, you'd think it'd be that one. But I guess no one sees it as being worth the effort, as Palm devices are now riddled with inconvenient feature sets and/or proprietary services (I don't want to pay EvDO for Internet connectivity when I'm already paying T-Mobile for it. And I don't want to cancel T-Mobile because I still need it for my laptop, which EvDO is not useful for.)

So I'm in a position where I can either get a standalone device that will keep me organized but do nothing else (and force me to keep shlepping the laptop with me everywhere for Internet), or migrate to a PocketPC-based PDA that supports Wi-Fi and has a microphone, but not the organization software. It's really pretty sad, because Palm shouldn't have had to make me choose like that, but they did. And thus they will likely lose a customer.

(There is, however, one more possibility: the Treo. But I'm having trouble getting answers about it. The Treo 650 won't do Wi-Fi, ever, so that's out. But the 700w apparently has an expansion slot so for $100 (grumble…) I could get Wi-Fi capability (it seems). The technical question then would be whether the phone microphone would work as input for Skype calls. Assuming yes, however, then there's still the tradeoff between running Skype and running the Palm Desktop. Especially since it appears that there will soon be a Palm 700p, which supposedly is the same device but with the PalmOS instead of Windows PocketPC. So better organizing software, but no Skype. At this point, though, I'm thinking that it's getting time to say good-bye to the Palm organizing system. It just seems to come with too many tradeoffs.)