Not Perfect But Good Enough
Written: Oct 28 '03 (Updated Oct 29 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nice high-definition screen; Stretchy screen's super; Quality external loudspeaker; 64MB MEMORY, BABY!; Bluetooth works.
Cons: Horrendous battery life; Older software may not work; Rubbish casing.
The Bottom Line: Only buy it if you can comfortably afford it, like to show off a little and will use it for more than just a glorified date book.
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| dzof's Full Review: Palm Tungsten™ T3 Handheld |
"Pick any one you want," my mum said. Relatives are always good to turn to when you need a nice birthday present and I needed a new Palm Pilot to replace the one I had fried courtesy of Russian Railway electrical supply (longish story, don't ask).
For the first time, I wasn't strictly limited to budget when selecting a hand-held computing device. I am a life-long Palm user, all the way from the Palm Professional, through to the Palm III, the Palm V and the unlucky Palm m505 that had got toasted somewhere in Siberia. All but the first were second-hand devices and I've always been a little behind on the technology curve.
But all this was going to change. Barely a week after it came out in Malaysia, I got my little grubby mitts on the Tungsten T3. It really didn't take me very long to decide on it, since I needed something that (a) ran the Palm OS; and (b) could accept my MMC memory card (which survived the otherwise fatal toasting). That money wasn't really an issue helped a lot, and the Bluetooth support was a bonus.
Let's start with how it looks like out of the box. I certainly had a lot of time to admire it since you're meant to let the battery charge for four hours before first using it. I'm sure there's no problem using it straight out of the box on the cradle, but, hey, I had the whole weekend.
Outside
For a start, it looks good. At 4.3" by 3.0", it's compact and cute (the japanese might say 'kawai' if it was also pink and had Hello Kitty stickers all over it). What's really cool is that you can extend the screen by another inch by sliding the bottom out. It has a nice hefty weight when in the hand - it could double as something to throw at somebody you don't like (and you could still get it fixed if it's within the one-year warranty).
There is a standard Palm cover but let's be fair here - it's absolutely rubbish. OK, so it's a flip top cover that hides the screen but that's about it. Word of advice: Get a proper casing or at least cover the back with some sort of protective film - my serial number is worn away after two weeks and if I hadn't had the foresight to write it down as soon as I got it, I would now not know what it is. And for goodness sakes, a screen protector is mandatory these days I reckon. Why doesn't Palm give one free with every unit? The glass as it is is not dust nor greaseproof and you risk serious permanent damage if you don't invest in something like WriteRight.
Another gripe: The record button is way too accessible on the side, meaning that if it your palm is jostling in your pocket, it may get turned on by accident. I inadvertently recorded a few minutes of inane conversation this way. Fortunately you can reassign the record button to another application, but that rather defeats the purpose of putting it there in the first place.
Next, the installation. Here's a lesson for all you pre-existing Palm users out there. Sometimes installing a new version of Palm Desktop over an older one messes up the Hot-Synching function. You need to delete registry items, reinstall software (see http://www.computing.net/pda/wwwboard/forum/715.html) and not lose all that data you have on your machine. This is not something that's likely to be within the reach of most non-techie people. However, apart from that little glitch it seems pretty painless.
Inside
The inside specs seem very impressive: 400MHz chip, 64MB internal memory, Bluetooth, Infra-Red, and in-built speaker and microphone.
I have serious doubts that the 400MHz chip works at that speed. I ran benchmarking utilities and it seems to run at less than that. (NB: I later found out that it really was slower than expected. See http://t3optimizer.mobilevoodoo.com/ for details.)
I remember when my Palm Pro had 2MB and I thought that was plenty. How times change. In five years time we'll all be carrying 1GB in our pockets, but in the meantime 64MB is plenty enough for applications. However, data storage is another problem. If you want to keep videos, the 64MB will run out fast.
The speaker on the Palm is actually usable and you can listen to stuff in a group. Just don't expect top-level hi-fidelity if you don't use the headphones.
All this comes at a cost, it seems. The battery life is horrendous. With Bluetooth on don't expect the Palm to last for more than two days without recharging. This is a far cry from the original Palm Professional that could run on a pair of AAA's for a whole month. Of course, if you're going to be near civilization and a plug point, then there's no problem. However, I have travelled to parts of the world where reliable electricity is not a taken and it's such a pain to have to always look for an outlet.
Software
There is a fair amount of free software included in the Palm. Some of the classic software now have new names: Calendar (formerly called Date Book), Contact (Address Book), and Tasks (To Do). The Memo, Calc and Expense stay the same (text notes, calculator and expense records respectively). There are also new ones: SMS and Dialer which take advantage of Bluetooth so you can dial numbers and send SMS to your mobile phone from the Palm; Photos for, well, photos; VersaMail, which is just an email program; and Voice Memo, which you can use to record vocal notes.
My number one complaint about these software is that even though they all come from one supplier (Palm), they are not as fully integrated as they could be. Admittedly there now is an Agenda view for the Calendar which brings together the events and the Tasks for that week in one screen (this is cool), but you still can't directly look up a contact's details from the Calendar event or a Task. There is the "Phone Lookup" function, but it only pastes the default number - not amazingly useful. Take a hint guys, there must be a reason why Agendus (http://www.iambic.com/agenduspro/palmos/) is so popular. And I'd like to be able to link photos with contacts. But it's like, talk to the Palm baby, 'cos nobody's listening.
The Palm Photos software really shows off the high-resolution screen, especially in "stretch" mode. The sample photos included with the Palm look absolutely amazing. I have to say though that the Palm Desktop portion of the Palm Photo program is not as clever as it could be. For example, although it's easy to drag-and-drop photos into the album, and it's possible to do minor editing on it from within Palm Desktop, there seems to be no way of resizing them to a lower resolution.
The rest of the bundled software ain't so shabby either. Top of the list for me is Documents to Go which enables you to synchronise, view and edit Microsoft Office documents - fine if you use MS Office, less so if you don't. Then there's Adobe reader, although how on earth can a WYSIWYG document designed mostly for A4 be expected to look good on a Palm completely eludes me.
Finally there are the two flashy multimedia apps - Kinoma and Real Player. The videos on Kinoma are passable but do not (or cannot?) take full advantage of the hi-res screen, but the mp3 music files sound great through Real Player. If only it could play MP3s from the on-board memory as well - bizarre, that my MMC card is smaller than my internal memory, yet I am forced to load songs to that to listen to them.
A word on the stretch-screen: the software needs to be written to support it. This means that all your old software won't be stretch-screen enabled (i.e. the work in 320x320 resolution as opposed to 320x480). Not even all the software supplied with the T3 supports this feature, although the ones that would benefit from it like Documents to Go, Kinoma and Photos do.
Worse, some of the older software, especially graphic-intensive games, just fail to work on the T3. They crash, they die. (But Rally 1000 [http://davemayes.hypermart.net/rally.html] still does, so I'm happy.)
The most commonly used text input system that you're expected to use is Grafitti2. You enter text by writing on the screen, much like you might do on a piece of paper. No cursive writing, though. For those of you who use the original Grafitti, you might find the transition painful - there are now these new-fangled two-stroke characters like "i" and "t". I keep mucking them up. Fortunately, with a bit of industry you can restore the original grafitti (see http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=5830).
Communicativity
The Palm will not live in isolation, and by and large, it seems to communicate well with third-party devices. I've only tried the PC (using the cradle and Hot-Synching) and using the Bluetooth to talk to my Sony-Ericsson T68. The Bluetooth works ok, but I've been having trouble trying to get onto the Internet using either a dialup or GPRS. I don't think the problem is with the Palm though - it's the phone that's producing error messages.
The glaring omission is WiFi. There is a version of the Palm that has WiFi, but it also has no Bluetooth! You can get expansion cards, but it's all a little pricey and iffy. I'd have to spend almost as much again to get one.
Summary
Overall Palms are still great things and I stil choose them over WinCE or PocketPC products because they tend to be simpler and more reliable devices although they are shifting towards clunkyness, especially with the T3. I really wish they would come out with simpler devices that have all the cutting-edgeness of Bluetooth and large memory but not drain battery life unnecessarily with high-res colour (although I am informed that colour screens do not drain much more power than high-res greyscale).
Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, it is on the whole an excellent device and worthwhile for those who use the Palm as more than just a glorified address book. Otherwise get a Zire instead.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 380
Recommended for: Business Executives - Powerful and Professional
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Epinions.com ID:
dzof
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 0 members
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