25 out of 27 people found this review helpful.
A Good PDA at Heart
Date of Review: Nov 25, 2005
The Bottom Line: If I could do this over again, I would probably pay extra and go with a Pocket PC, but I am not disappointed with this purchase at all.
When my Toshiba Pocket PC broke, I immediately went into the market for a new PDA. I was looking for one with WiFi and Bluetooth, and as it turned out, my Pocket PC had broken on the same day that Palm released the T|X. I took this as a sign that I should buy the Palm T|X.
Initial impressions
When I first opened this box, I was impressed by how small the T|X was for the features it held. The sleek black casing makes it look smaller than it actually is, and it is actually about as thin as my old Pocket PC (which was a slim one in itself). It's quite a bit less chunkier than my friend's Axim X50v.
The stylus is nice and heavy, and not plasticky-flimsy like the Dell's or my old Toshiba's. It's chrome with a plastic tip and an unscrewable plastic end which can be used to reset the T|X. However, the T|X's reset button is also usable with just the tip of the stylus.
No cradle is included with the T|X, but this isn't much of a problem - I do my synchronization through Bluetooth anyway!
Display
When I turned on the T|X, the display greatly impressed me. The display is a HVGA (half-VGA, 480x320), which while not quite as detailed as the the full VGA screen on the Axim X50v, doesn't spare much in terms of visual splendor. the display works excellently indoors and outdoors, and has excellent contrast. The brightness control is a bit unintuitive to find, though - you get to it by tapping the time at the bottom of the screen and not by using the Prefs application.
The landscape rotation at the tap of one button is very nice as well.
Wireless
Wireless. Ah, such a wonderful invention! The Wifi and Bluetooth on this PDA are wonderful. While my Pocket PC didn't have either, and my friend's X50v is controlled by a complex maze of menus and dialog boxes, I found the wireless on the T|X very easy to set up. Three stylus taps had me connected to the university's wireless network. The T|X supports WPA-PSK, which I use for my wireless network.
Pairing with Bluetooth was also easy. I was able to easily set up Bluetooth Hotsync (a bit of tweaking on the PC side was required, but no hassle on the Palm T|X side), connect the T|X to my phone (my contacts list can now dial the contact directly on my phone), and set up Bluetooth networking to surf the internet over a Bluetooth connection was.
The wireless on the T|X is very weak, however. While feature-packed, the T|X lacks an antenna, which decreases its wireless performance significantly. While not much worse than the Dell X50v, the wireless reception was significantly weaker than my laptop. This doesn't pose a problem, considering most of my internet activity comes from within 50 feet of my wireless router, this is definitely not a PDA you can wardrive with or "borrow" your neighbor's internet with.
The T|X has a useful power saving feature on the wifi, which decreases the transmission power of the wifi, turns off the Wifi after a set timeout period. While this is handy, it would also help to be able to disable the timeout, because the university's wireless network requires re-registration every time it loses the connection.
Internet
Might as well talk about Internet right after wireless, right? The internet on this sucker has come in handy multiple times. For example, I can do online homework during class. I can also get on AIM with this. You can download AIM for palm for free from AOL UK - check http://www.aol.co.uk/aim/palm.
Blazer, the included browser, is pretty fast, and offers lots of rendering options. It's not quite as feature-packed as Pocket Internet Explorer for the Pocket PC. It's still a good browser - I can check all my normal mobile sites, and it renders most pages without any major legibility problems.
Music & Multimedia
Music and movies are two loves of my life. When my Pocket PC died, so did my MP3 player and mobile movie player. That was why it was imperative to get a replacement PDA, and fast.
Palm bundles the T|X with NormSoft's Pocket Tunes, an excellent program that plays MP3's and Ogg Vorbis files. My collection from my Pocket PC was in Ogg because it's a more space-efficient format for the quality it delivers. It was nice being able to play music right out of the box without having to convert back to MP3. I love listening to internet radio, though, and now that my PDA has wireless, I expected to be able to listen to Internet radio - but it turns out that I needed to buy the Pocket Tunes Deluxe for $25 to able to do that. I'll shell out that money in a bit - I'm still recovering from my $300 Palm T|X purchase.
I can also watch DivX movies using a free player called TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player), available at http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/. TCPMP can also play MP3 and Ogg formats, but Pocket Tunes has a much nicer interface.
Memory
With 128 MB of memory, I can't imagine how I'd run out of space. Palm OS programs are smaller than Pocket PC programs, and I had enough room on my 64 MB Pocket PC. The memory on the Palm is non-volatile, though, so if the battery completely dies, my programs and files do not.
I had a 2 GB SD memory card, which worked fine with my Palm. My 2 GB MMCPlus card, did not, however. I was disappointed to see that Palm did not support MMCPlus, and 2 GB of my flash memory stash is no longer usable by my PDA.
Transferring files to and from the memory card is also much more annoying than before. With my Pocket PC, I could drag and drop files to my Pocket PC or its memory card. However, with the Palm T|X, everything is through HotSync. You try HotSyncing 50 MP3's scattered across your hard drive, and you'll go nuts. The Tungsten T5 had a Drive Mode program which turned your memory card into a USB Mass Storage Device, but the T|X does not have that. So all that's left is to:
1) HotSync everything. You have to add files pretty much individually, you can't create directory structures/hotsync directories, and it's generally just not practical at all.
2) Get a memory card reader, but all the inserting/removing causes undue mechanical stress on the Palm T|X.
3) Find someone with a Tungsten T5 or a Lifedrive and copy over the DriveMode app (Or google for "Drivemode.zip"!)
4) Purchase a third party program such as Softick Card Export II.
Even if you choose #3 or #4 as I did, you can't use your PDA when it's in drive mode, like I could with my Pocket PC. Also, drive mode doesn't let you put stuff in main memory.
Battery
Palm doesn't make the battery of the T|X removable. While it's not a problem for me, some people may dislike this. The internal battery provides plenty of juice, though. I can watch two full-length movies in TCPMP before the battery goes out, which means I'll be using this when I'm doing my Christmas travelling. The battery lasts for almost 3 hours when I'm listening to internet radio and eating up the power by getting that Wifi.
While some true road warriors might find the battery limiting, as a student, I am always near a power outlet, and it's not a problem at all.
OS
It's a pity that Palm packed the T|X with the outdated Palm OS 5 ("Garnet"). Garnet has been hacked up so much that it's often called FrankenGarnet among Palm enthusiasts. Indeed, it seems that Palm either used lots of spaghetti code to make Garnet work, or it was very hastily thrown together. Many applications don't fully work with the full high-res screen, the "haze" (the blue haze that surrounds the selected on screen element), and the color theme.
Graffiti 2 also has a steep learning curve. Pocket PC had a input method similar to Graffiti 1 and also an excellent on-screen keyboard, but the OSK for Graffiti 2 sucks. I also had to get used to the input technique for several letters and symbols.
Palm should really get around to debugging OS 6 ("Cobalt") to where it can be released. Palm is about 3 years behind when it comes to OS technology, so Cobalt is a long overdue upgrade. Hopefully they'll make the Cobalt upgrade available for the T|X.
Bottom line
I guess the bottom line(s) is that this PDA was a good purchase for me, but there is a steep learning curve from the Pocket PC operating system, and it's definitely not a perfect PDA.
I'm giving it three stars because while I was not disappointed with the purchase, I was also not highly impressed. In fact, if I could do it all over again, I'd shell out the extra few bucks for a Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 5 and a proper memory interface.
