Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Communications

In this chapter, we discuss the types of communication available on the Palm OS. We go into detail about two of these types and show you how to write code for each type.

Palm OS supports three kinds of communication:

Serial

Serial communication occurs between the handheld and other devices using the cradle port. This is the most common form of communication on the Palm OS. For an example, we’ll develop a special serial application that communicates (indirectly) with satellites.

TCP/IP

Currently, this communication standard is available only via a serial or modem connection. The future has no boundaries, however, so you may see built-in Ethernet or devices using wireless TCP/IP appear some day. To show you how to use TCP/IP, we’ll create a small application that sends email to a server.

IrDA

This is an industry-standard hardware and software protocol for communicating over infrared. We won’t discuss the details of communicating using IrDA in this chapter. We will, however, show you how to use the Exchange Manager to implement beaming (see Section 12.2). Beaming is a data-exchange method built on top of IrDA.