I’ve been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out – this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and uploaded it to the new (and not fully set-up yet, so forgive the lack of avatars, descriptions, banner images, and so on – it’s late in my time zone) OSNews PeerTube account, embedded below for your convenience.
Navigation still works. You can pan around in both map and satellite view. And, as the video shows, you can zoom in quite far and get some incredible detail on that old Palm TX display (you can zoom in further). That’s some impressive API backwards compatibility.
That’s really cool. I heard Google Maps had a really good stable API. 🙂
I’m a little grumbly though about some of the limited features in the app if you aren’t logged in with a Google account. I use /e/OS, with Mozilla location services and no Google account. Apparently this prevents the app from doing “complex” things, like allow me to set my home address, or save more than the last 10 searches. *rollseyes*
drcouzelis,
That’s not my experience. I built some web apps using google maps and they broke it after an update on their side. This was long ago. I’m actually surprised to hear that the palm OS map app still works. I’m not sure if they freeze the API for older platforms?
At least they’re only gatekeeping their own webservice in that case. The worst is when products that you own force you to sign in. I have a wireless multimeter that I’m forced to login to a service to use, which means they could remotely block me from using my device at any time. This has already happened with my smart thermostat. The app used to be able to communicate with the thermostat locally over WIFI, but it no longer works because I can no longer sign into the app as the servers have been shut down.
I always avoided google cloud printing, but relatives who relied on google cloud printing had to buy a new printer when google shutdown the service. Chrome OS couldn’t print directly to the printer, though funnily enough android could.
It’s just objectively bad engineering when local functionality is lost after a remote service shuts down. Unfortunately many manufacturers do this on purpose to lock customers into their service.
I’m not a fan of windows forcing users to create microsoft accounts these days either. While locally cached credentials should continue working even if the authentication servers go down, It concerns me that microsoft have admin access over the accounts that we use to login to the local computer..
/rant
And PocketTunes still plays podcasts and mp3 files over the internet just fine. And video streams works fine with smartmovie I still use my upgraded LifeDrive from time to time. I replaced the 4gb fujitsu microdrive with a 32gb compatc flash card, that makes much snappier and quieter as well as prolongs battery time.