Carry your whole digital life with you
Run word processors, internet browsers, photo editors on any home or office computer using your Treo Smartphone

Imagine walking into your friend’s house, and he asks you a question. You know where to find the answer: just follow a bookmark stored in your home desktop Internet browser.

No problem. You carry all that with you. You pull out a compact USB cord, turn on your Treo, and plug into his computer. You tap on an icon on your Treo that turns your smartphone into a flash drive and then launches your personal Firefox browser. You click on your saved favorite bookmark, and show him the answer.

In the same way, you can check your email using any Windows desktop from any computer anywhere: just plug in your Treo.

Play Sudoku, edit sound files on a full computer, edit photo files anywhere: Just plug in your Treo. Work on the exact same files from home or office: just plug in your Treo.

This is not about working on the highly portable Treo itself; this is about using the Treo to work off of any modern Windows desktop or laptop computer in an amazingly portable way. Not only is it easy, it means you can plug your Treo in any computer and pick up where you left off. You launch the application on the full desktop or laptop computer from your Treo. Rather amazing stuff with lots of astounding consequences.

All it takes is two things: a “card reading application” and a “flash drive launcher.”

Of the two, the flash drive applications launchers are harder to understand, so let’s tackle them first.

Flash Drive Application Launchers

Flash drives, also called thumb drives, pen drives, and memory keys, are small devices that have steadily grown in file capacity. Though physically they all appear about the same size, their ability to store increasingly large amounts of data has reached a point where they hold enough as much as older computer hard drives. With larger capacity flash drives, you can actually store and launch real Windows applications.

A flash drive application launcher is a mini-operating system designed specifically for use on these flash drives. It works in tandem with your Windows Operating System to allow full programs to run off the thumb-sized flash drive. You have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC, and when you remove the flash drive, nothing is left behind on the slave computer.

It’s rather like carrying your hard drive around with you.

The Treo can easily serve as a flash drive using your Secure Digital card. Your SD card is, after all, just flash memory in a different shape. All you need is a second application that will read this SD Card like a flash drive, and there are a couple of them out there. They are pretty straight forward: just plug in your smartphone, launch the card reading application on your Treo, and you’re up and running just as if you plugged in a flash drive. This is the easy part and will be discussed later, so read on.

Pretend your Treo is already a flash drive for the moment

There are two flash drive application launchers that can work directly through your Treo. With these, you can plug into any computer box and resume where you left off, Windows applications included.

There is the pricey, but sophisticated Ceedo, and the open source and free PortableApps.

Ceedo - a Portable Working Environment

The first launcher to offer a way to run applications superbly from a flash drive was Ceedo. It gives you a second Widows-style application launcher that lists the portable Windows applications you already downloaded and installed on your Treo’s SD Card. It offers a month trial period, costs about $30 to buy and requires Windows 2000, XP, or 2003.

Of the two flash drive application launchers reviewed here, Ceedo is the more sophisticated and offers more applications and portable solutions.

One nice thing is that it hooks into any Microsoft Office product and Internet Explorer applications already residing on the computer box. It lists these in its launcher along with the other portable applications you’ve installed to your SD Card.

Why this matters is because it makes Internet Explorer and any MS Word, PowerPoint, or Excel application already installed on the computer you’re using available as a portable application. When you save a Favorite in Internet Explorer using Ceedo, for example, it saves it onto your flash drive and in a place any other IE browser will load it into Favorites automatically. This means the next computer you plug into shows that particular IE Favorite available in the rest of your lineup.

Considering the retail cost, many home users do not use MS Office products. This feature is more useful for those in a corporate setting who do have MS Office products at home or who have to use whatever computer workstation is unoccupied at an office. If a person got comfortable using this portable environment, they could actually leave their laptop at home when they had to travel. They could carry their digital life at hand with their Treo.

Among its 15 download categories, the Ceedo site offers the compatible AbiWord as an alternative to MS Word. It also has the superior Firefox Internet browser to replace IE.

Ceedo is a superb application for its portability and flexibility. It touts a much larger number of portable applications that can be installed. It claims you can install about any application–not just the ones on their download page–and carry it with you. It does cost another $30 after the trial period to buy the add-on that lets you do this, though. I suspect it is aimed at the corporate world, where this level of portability is highly desirable.

PortableApps - Your Digital Life, Anywhere

PortableApps is a free and open sourced application launcher. Unlike Ceedo, MS Office products installed on whatever computer box are not available automatically. Sure, you can open MS Word, create a document and save it to your SD card, but you will have to navigate to where you want to save it. It becomes problematic if you plug in to a box that doesn’t have MS Office and you want to open a semi-proprietary .doc file.

Instead, PortableApps offers alternative applications to handle these ordinary tasks as seamlessly.

For example, it offers the compatible and rich Sun Microsystem’s Open Office Suite instead of MS Office products. Open Office Suite is interoperable with Microsoft Office, much to Microsoft’s dismay. It has alternative versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

One of PortableApps download site’s first options is to install its Standard Package, which includes the PortableApps Operating System, OpenOffice Suite, Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, a calendar/scheduler program, an instant messaging client, an antivirus application, a Sudoku game, and a file backup utility. This is certainly enough to get anyone up and running in the portable world.

If you don’t need all of that and want to pick and choose what you carry with you, you can download its Base Edition and install just the applications you want instead.

It does offer the famed Firefox Internet browser from its download page in a portable format. If you are not a Firefox user, give it consideration as it is superior to even the recently released Internet Explorer 7. IE 7 finally added tabbed browsing, which is something many of us have been using for years. Firefox remains a superior browser to anyone with any Internet or computer sophistication.

The applications offered at PortableApps.com that I tried worked fine running from my SD card on several computer boxes. According to its site, PortableApps is compatible with any Windows computer.

Card reader applications – Quickly turn your Treo into a flash drive

There are a couple of ways to run either Ceedo or PortableApps from your Treo. A separate card reading application reads your Treo’s SD card directly from your sync cable. Once installed, you simply launch the card reading software from your Treo and tap the Enable button, and you’re operating just like a flash drive. Your Treo’s SD card appears the same as any logical drive in Window’s Explorer.

Depending on your home computer’s configuration, just plugging in your Treo and enabling the card reading software may automatically launch PortableApps or Ceedo, or allow you to select it from a list to run. If not, you just navigate to your SD card using your Windows Explorer file utility and launch, say, PortableApps.exe from the root directory. This means it’s on the card itself and not inside a folder.

There are three applications that I know of that will access your Treo’s SD card: The free Palm File Browser, CardExport II, and Card Reader.

Palm File Browser is no good for me as you have to install it on your Treo and also onto each computer box you want to use. This creates an obstacle as I didn’t want to have to carry an install disk or have to download it if I wanted to use my portable applications on an unfamiliar box. As such, I didn’t test it. I wanted complete portability, just “Plug and Play” if you will. (If you do test this out with Palm File Browser, please write about your results in the Forum. I’m sure many people would be interested).

The other two options below, though not free, offer the solution I sought.

Card Export II, Version 2.25

I already had Softick’s CardExport II application, and have used it satisfactorily for years. At first it seemed way too slow to be of any real use, but then checked and found I was running an older version and upgraded to version 2.25 from the mytreo.net download site. Once this was done, CardExport II worked just fine. This application sells for $14.95, if not purchased using the mytreo.net Discount Club.

CardExport II works with Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/ME, and Windows 98 with the USB driver installed. It should also work from most any Palm device running OS 4 or better, but only lists the Treo 600, and the Treo 650 on its site. It specifically states that it does not work with the old Treo 90. It installs about 95KB file into internal Treo memory.

Card Reader Version 1.05

I then tried Mobile Stream’s Card Reader, another application that taps into your SD card through your sync cable. I found the transfer rate to be a little faster than CardExport II. It works with the 600, 650, 680 and 700p, and costs $11.95 retail, before any Club discount. I found it runs PortableApps fast enough for it to be a portable solution as well.

It also claims that you can browse the Internet or take a call while it is transferring your MP3s, something that CardExport does not claim. However, they do clarify that this is experimental. Card Reader claims a transfer rate of up to 1200KB/s for reading and up to 1100KB/s for writing, and has a smaller install footprint of about 50KB.

Nowhere could I find exactly which Window operating systems are supported, though I gleaned it includes XP at least, it offers a Windows 98 driver and also support Mac OSX. That likely means it will run on Windows 2000, though all software reviewed here offers trial versions.

CardExport II and Card Reader transfer speeds

Even though this is a cool concept, you will experience a slower load for most portable applications than you do from a hard drive. Part of this limitation is from the read and write limits of your SD card, but also from the limitations of card reading applications.

I conducted an informal test of the read and write speeds of both card-reading applications. I took an 18.5 MB file and transferred it from my SD card to my computer and timed it using a stopwatch.

The read speed for both applications was comparable. Card Reader transferred the file in 29.02 seconds and CardExport II did it in 31.01 seconds. The read speed is the rate at which the card reading applications can read from your SD card. This determines how fast a portable application, like Firefox, can load onto your computer box from your SD card.

There was a significant difference in the write speed of both applications. Card Reader was almost twice as fast, clocking at 22.02 seconds to CardExport II’s 40.09 seconds. This is the speed at which information is written to the card. It would matter some in saving a document or other file, and in the time it takes to shut down Ceedo or PortableApps.

In other words, applications will launch about the same from both applications, but will take a little longer to save files and shut down using CardExport II.

Other portable options

There is another way to accomplish all this without installing a card reading application for your Treo: Just get a USB card reader. A card reader is a USB plug-in device that will accept your SD card, which can then be read from your home or office computer.

The advantage to this over carrying a separate flash drive is that you usually have your Treo–and your SD card–right at hand. This is also the method you could use with a Windows Mobile Treo and a mini SD card. Most new computers accept SD cards directly without a card reader. A card reader device that accepts just an SD card is not much larger than a flash drive anyway (as opposed to the sometimes boxy USB devices that accept several different flash card sizes).

Whether you use the Treo directly with a plug-in cord or pop out the SD card and use a card reading device, you will have to carry something with you to use portable applications on an unfamiliar computer box. The highly portable JavoSyc is about the same size as many SD card readers, though there are very compact mini-readers out there that can fit in a watch pocket. SanDisk offers a small enough reader that accepts 5 different card sizes, including SD, available through the store. It is more compact than usual for a multiple card reader, but requires a cable connect, instead of direct plug in.

One elegant solution would be to use the clever SanDisk Ultra II Plus SD card in your Treo. With this special card, you can use it while plugged in to your Treo’s sync cable or pop it out and plug it directly into any available USB slot. No card reader needed. It’s pure genius.

The Portable Solution

The option to carry your digital life portably on your Treo smartphone is an elegant solution to a harried modern life. The ability to plug in to a computer at your friend’s home, at work, library, or internet café and continue with the same work or play where you left off is brilliant.

Card Reader 1.05 is a little faster and a little cheaper than CardExport II, and PortableApps is free and open sourced. This is a good place to start to see if this type of portability is for you. Both Card Reader and CardExport II offer trial periods before you have to purchase. If you want more options and more sophistication in a portable application launcher, try out Ceedo by downloading its trialware.

Check them out first. Even as cool as it sounds, if the slower application loading times annoy you, you will not likely use this concept.

Related Links

Ceedo.com

PortableApps.com

Softick’s CardExport II

Mobile Stream’s Card Reader

JavoSyc portable sync cable

SanDisk USB card reader

Filed under: Software reviews