Google Local for mobile on the Treo 650

Google Local for Mobile (GLM) is Google Local for your web-enabled cell phone. I have a Palm Treo 650, which isn’t officially supported:

At this time, Local for mobile doesn’t support BREW-enabled phones (e.g. Verizon, Alltel, U.S. Cellular), Nextel phones, Blackberry devices or Palm devices.

But a line preceding that one tells a different story:

Local for mobile works with most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones[…]

Well, you can download a Java 2 Micro Edition runtime for your Treo 650. Palm offers IBM’s “WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment” as a free download. I installed it when it first came out. Getting and installing it is a pain, but worth it to enable your bold J2ME-enabled future.

I successfully navigated to Other* -> Generic -> Advanced MIDP2 and “downloaded” the program. I put “download” in quotes since it was instantaneous. I think instead of actually downloading the program, it downloaded an address. This theory is borne out since I couldn’t find the newly “downloaded” software. I opened the “IBM Java VM” app to see if I could find any clues in there, and sure enough Google Local - 1.0.0 was listed. I hit the “Install” button and only then actually downloaded the program. Once finished, it gave me a direct-launch “Google Local” application in the “Applications” application.

It locked up the first time I launched it. I don’t know what happened there, but it worked after restarting the Treo and trying again. Hmm, aren’t these computer things supposed to be deterministic?

Update: Marc Pawliger was having trouble getting his Cingular model working. Turns out rebooting is key:

I had to reboot once after hot-sync’ing the IBM Java VM to the Treo to get it to show up and then reboot again after running it, then again after download the .jad file.

Hint: you’ll need to save the .jad to the “J9 Exchanger”. If you don’t have that option, you probably need to reboot the Treo for the IBM JVM to take hold and try again.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
12:00 AM