And here we are with the second part of the “The new stuff chronicles” series. The thing I got now isn’t some old thing that other people didn’t want to have anymore, quite the contrary, allthough I do know some people who don’t want to have it.
Today’s subject is a brand new Palm T|X handheld which I got from coolblue. I got it together with a 2GB SD memory card and a light metal case to carry it around without risking to severely damage it and here are 2 pictures of it:
I received this little thing last tuesday and I must say that it’s really nice. The screen looks good, it’s responsive and it’s also reasonably fast. It offers some nice new features over my old Palm Tungsten E handheld which I got from my former boss like a bigger screen with a better resolution, built in bluetooth and wifi, newer versions of the installed software like Documents to Go and a completely new UI. The old UI is also still there, but the new one works easier and looks friendlier.
There are only 1 thing I don’t like about the T|X:
the sync cableThe sync cable is terrible, it works, but it’s terrible anyway. It fits perfectly into the connector on the Palm, but it’s still terrible. The bad thing about the sync cable is that it doesn’t have a decent system to remove it from the T|X. It has these little metal clamps with which it secures the connector to the Palm, but it doesn’t have something like a button or anything like that to remove the clamps to easily remove the cable from the Palm. Instead of that you simply have to pull it out and hope the guts of the Palm remain inside or you can try to remove one side (which goes quite easily) and then remove the other side, which is much easier to do than to simply pull it out, but it feels rather strange and it still feels like you’re going to rip out some internal parts in the proces.
But normally you don’t have to worry about the sync cable as you can also use the Hotsync application to synchronise using either Bluetooth or WiFi. I have tried Bluetooth yet, but synchronising through WiFi works really well.
The biggest advantage of the Palm T|X over most of it’s competition is it’s operating system. It uses Palm OS 5.4 Garnet as where most PDAs use Windows Mobile. I consider this a plus, because Palm OS is much faster and it’s much easier to use. Especially Garnet. Previous versions of Palm OS only offered the applications screen as a GUI on which you have a list of all installed executable programs grouped by catagory. On Garnet you have a second menu called favourites on which you can create a list of programs you use frequently and this is also the list that comes up when you press the home button on the device. When you tap the home icon on the graffity area you will still get the other list.
Most Windows Mobile devices also have a screen resolution of either 160×240 pixels or 240×320 pixels. This Palm has a screen resolution of 320×480 pixels and it looks beautiful. The colors are very good and it looks really clean. There are also Windows Mobile devices with the same resolution, but those are the expensive ones. You won’t get a decent Windows Mobile device with a big 320×480 screen at the same price as the T|X.
When it comes to software, then the Palm T|X is also doing very well. It comes with a variaty of software products pre-installed and I haven’t felled the urge to remove any of them (yet).
It has it’s simple applications like the Calender, the World Clock, Tasks, Contacts, Memos and Note Pad which are the basic applications to store appointments, tasks, quick memos and notes and to view the time on nearly all possible places on the planet, but the interesting software is third party software that comes with it as well:
- Dataviz Documents to Go
- Pocket Tunes
These 2 programs can come in very handy. Documents to Go is your mobile office suite. It can read and write native Microsoft Word and Excell files and it can read Microsoft Powerpoint files and it has it’s own document, spreadsheet and presentation formats as well to save space.
Pocket Tunes is not much more than a simple MP3 player, but it’s a good one and it’s easy to use.
Both Documents to Go and Pocket Tunes can read files from an SD memory card.
There is also some other handy software on it from Palm itself like Blazer, the web browser, and VersaMail, the e-mail client. Blazer isn’t ideal for full blown webbrowsing, but it can come in handy when you have to look something up quickly and VersaMail is simply an easy to use and straight forward e-mail client which works really well.
And for the people who like to play a little game every once in a while there is a pretty good Patience game present on the T|X and you can ofcourse also install a few other games if you like. 2 games that I like a lot are Minefield, which is a freeware minesweeper clone and Handland, which is a freeware lander game where you have to land your moon lander on the surface of the moon.
and the comments that do arrive are usually spam, which is the reason why I have everything helt for moderation before it actually appears on the site. So if you post a comment, don’t be shocked that it doesn’t arrive immediatly.
The only thing I don’t like is that it has these ugly stickers applied on it’s top and I can’t get them off (yet). Technically it’s exactly the same console, but this one has something that the Megadrive 2 doesn’t have:
