>I have a TCP/IP program that works on PalmIII and PalmV via their modems, but
>when I try it on the PalmVII wireless modem the socket will not connect.
The wireless radio in a Palm VII can't be used as a generic tcp/ip
connection - there are severe battery life and latency concerns that make
it unreasonable to do so. And even if you had money and time to burn, the
infrastructure isn't set up that way.
As an example: I believe I remember that making a socket connection over
tcp/ip requires 5 or 6 back-and-forth packets between the client and
server. Latency is high in wireless nets like the one that the Palm VII
device uses right now, and so just making a connection would take, oh, 30
or 45 seconds? Bad user experience. And with that chatty protocol, the
users bill will be much higher too. The web clipping architecture does
lots of tricks (including using UDP instead of TCP/IP) to make it fast,
cheap, and power-conserving.
You might want to do a bit more research into the tradeoffs and options
before just writing the code :-)
FWIW, there are other radios which do function as more of a conventional
tcp/ip stack and connection. This just isn't the right tool for that job;
it is designed for something different.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
