The LifeDrive, the T|X, and modern Wi-Fi routers
February 16th, 2009The Palm LifeDrive and Palm T|X were introduced in 2005 — ancient history by device standards.
You’d think both devices be hopelessly out of date by now, but they’re still very useful and (with Kinoma Player 4 EX) still make great media players. The LifeDrive’s chubby chassis is pretty dated, but the ahead-of-its-time Palm T|X was clearly the pinnacle of Palm OS device design. The hardware still looks and feels like it could’ve been released this year.
They both have built-in Wi-Fi, which was still pretty unique back in 2005. Sadly, their Wi-Fi support is showing its age, and the LifeDrive and T|X are unable to connect with more and more modern Wi-Fi routers and access points in their out-of-the-box configurations.
The solution
For my D-Link DIR-825, the solution was to go to Setup > Wireless Settings > Manual Wireless Network Setup and choose “Mixed 802.11g and 802.11b” as the 802.11 Mode for the 2.4 GHz band. (You don’t have to worry about the 5 GHz band if your router supports it, since the devices don’t.)
Also, remember that the LifeDrive and T|X only support older WEP and WPA-PSK wireless security modes. I recommend temporarily turning off wireless security altogether, and then turning it back on once you’ve figured out how to get your device to connect to your Wi-Fi network.
Other routers
If you’d like to share specific instructions for configuring other routers, you can email us at content@ our domain and I’ll gladly add the details to this post.
