Ipsa scientia potestas est

Having run the full gamut of PDA devices I have found myself back with a Treo, this time the 700p. Previously I was using the highly useful Blackberry for corporate and personal use and I enjoyed the Gmail access. The problem with the Blackberry is that all of the software came at a rather high cost undoubtedly due to the demographic of business-class users. I digress.

I decided that I needed to “pimp out my treo” as I had in the past, and I came across an interesting situation. Apparently, as of the time of this post, Google does not officially support the Treo 700p for Gmail. Wtf is going on with that decision? PalmOS 5 has existed in consumer accessible space since mid 2002. We’re looking at close to six years right now and it has a mostly consistent IP stack, so what is the big deal?

The big deal is that Gmail, the portable application sitting on mobile devices is a JAR, delivered by a JAD midlet. If you hit up http://google.com/app from your mobile device, you’ll see that Google checks your User-Agent setting embedded in your URL request, and directs your request towards the support page designed for your device. Easy as that. Is it?

Luckily Palm struck a deal with IBM back in 2003 to make available the WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment, which is a Java 2 Micro Edition run-time environment. Otherwise you would have to purchase it for approximately $6.00USD from such merchants like http://palmgear.com. Oddly enough, J2ME does not ship with any of the vendor branded, and unbranded Treos which I have used and supported. This list includes Verizon, Cingular(AT&T) and Sprint. So availability since ~2003, and yet it isn’t paraded; sounds to me like Palm wanted a game-plan in case J2ME was the next coming.

So now what?

1. Go get the WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment and load it up on your Treo.
2. Open up a shell on a system that you have wget and inet access and wget the MIDlet.
   1. wget -O gmail.jad “http://gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Palm&model=Treo%20700p&ver=v1.5.0″
3. Put it on a site somewhere that serves http. http://el8.org/gmail.jad for example.
4. Run the WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment, labeled “IBM Java VM” on the Treo, and click “Install”.
5. In the URL: field, enter the URL to the gmail.jad which you downloaded and placed on the web server and click the “Ok” button in the bottom left corner of the screen. The install takes a minute or so.
6. Once installed, the J2ME creates an icon in your launcher. Click it to get to your Gmail. Bling.

One detail about the Gmail application is that the UI lags a little. Not terrible, but do not be impatient the first time you use it. You will find yourself stacking up commands that you didn’t intend.