Thursday, November 3, 2005

Five Days with the Palm TX -- 9:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Now that I've had my Palm TX for five days, I thought I'd post my impressions of the device. I'll start with a piece of advice. If you are upgrading from a previous device, move the directory where the Palm Desktop had saved your old settings (or, in my case, I renamed .jpilot to .jpilottungstene). System settings from older devices will cause the Palm TX to freak out, guaranteed. Second, make sure you check for updates to apps that appear to be wonky. I spent a day or two thinking I was having problems with pilot-link when the real problem was I needed a new binary. Third, install apps one at a time and verify that they don't blow anything up before proceeding.

Anyway, there are a lot of things to recommend this PDA. The battery life is great. I charged it when I got it Saturday night and didn't have to charge it again until last night despite the fact that I was messing with it almost constantly. The 320x480 screen is very slick and makes reading longer documents much easier. Wifi on a PDA is the coolest thing since sliced bread. On Tuesday I visited a hotspot and giggled like a schoolgirl as I surfed the web on my PDA. I must've used it for a half-hour straight and it didn't put a serious dent in the battery meter. The bundled Media app and Pocket Tunes are much better than the Tungsten E's apps. It is very snappy and the speaker is much louder than my E.

At this point I only have one gripe, but it's a relatively significant one. The Palm TX (or PalmOS or the apps or some combination therein) doesn't seem to have very robust error handling. Most any problem will cause a soft reset. I've even had a soft reset loop which is a PITA. Now that I've gotten my apps upgraded, I haven't had a soft reset. Let's just say that it's touchier than my E ever dreamed of being.

Despite that significant caveat, I really like my TX. The extra speed, battery life, and especially Wifi more than make up for the initial wonkiness.

News for 11/03/2005

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