Anything typed on a computer built in the last twenty years is UTF-8. Palm OS expects its own Latin encoding. So a note written today arrives on the handheld with its punctuation turned into nonsense: "don't" becomes "don’t", and "Café" becomes "Café".

This is not a missing font. Palm OS's character set is essentially CP1252, so the curly quotes, the em dash, the ellipsis and the bullet are all really on the device -- the bytes just arrive described the wrong way. Tune-Up repairs them in place, so the text comes out exactly right rather than approximated into plain dashes and straight quotes.

What it does

• Tap Check my Palm and it reports, in plain language, what it found
• Repairs garbled characters in Memo Pad, To Do and Address Book
• Reports how many years this handheld has left before it stops tracking dates, which is a real limit and not one any application can lift

Repairing safely

• It offers to take you straight to HotSync first, so you can back up before anything is rewritten
• Converted text is never longer than the original, so a record is never grown and a repair cannot fail for want of memory on a full device
• Address records that do not match the expected layout are left completely alone and reported as "not understood", rather than rewritten on a guess. A contact list is not something you can reconstruct

About the 2031 date limit

Palm OS stores a year as a 7-bit offset from 1904, so 2031 is the last year it can hold. Tune-Up reports this and does not pretend to fix it -- the limit lives inside every dated record on the device, not behind an API a patch could intercept.

It is also gentler than it sounds, which is worth saying plainly. Measured on a device rather than inferred: the system clamps. Date arithmetic will not step past 31 December 2031, and setting the clock there simply stops it. No crash, and no wrap back to 1904.

Free and open source, MIT licensed.

Compatibility

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