Palm TX - first impressions

Posted on May 29, 2007 in Palm and Hardware. - No comments

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I’ve owned a Palm in one form or another for the best part of the last decade. I planned my wedding, my relocation to the other side of the country and finding a new job (all at the same time) on my trusty Palm III.

Recently I was bought a Palm TX and upgraded from my Palm Tungsten E which had served me well for a few years although it had started to suffer. The audio was crackled – both on headphones and the inbuilt speaker.

Palm OS

The biggest disappointment must be the OS. I guess the good thing is that I know where I am with Palm OS, but where are the updates, where is the innovation? It’s all looking a touch on the dated side and you can’t help but feel depressed thinking about how badly managed the whole Palm software debacle was. However, as a total biased individual, when it comes to a choice involving a Microsoft product I’m always going to chose the “something else” even if I know in my heart-of-hearts that I’m probably cutting off my own nose to spite my face.

The Screen

Again, it feels a bit half-hearted. Don’t get me wrong – the large bright screen with its ability to put it into wide-screen mode is all good. What isn’t so good is the support for it. Even the built in applications feel a bit weak in this regard. Every now and then the Graffiti input area will slide back onto the screen when a dialogue box is displayed. Overall, it’s an improvement, and the ability to put the screen into landscape is essential when trying to navigate some sites with the built-in web browser “Blazer”.

Wi-Fi

This was the one feature that made the TX so attractive. Being able to hot-sync over the network without the need to fumble around for cables is a real pleasure. Having seen the pain a work colleague experienced (and still experiences) connecting to wireless networks and changing his network setting on his Windows based PDA its nice to know that the Palm suffers from no more faffing about than connecting to a wireless network than it should. Being able to check my email both at work and home has been very satisfying.

Screen Protector.

Arrrgh! As the palm looked so nice and new, I thought it was only good and proper that I should put the screen protector on it. This was fiddler than I expected as the one supplied required the skills of a craftsman to cut out the correct size. I did that ok, and despite the shaky hands managed to get it applied to the screen without any bubbles, trapped dust etc. All good, or so I thought.

The more I started using the TX, the more worried I became about the inability to complete a word in Graffiti 2 without spending five minutes trying to correct the damn thing. The digitised didn’t seem to understand that my stylus was moving half the time, or would break a character into two indecipherable ones. Nervously pressing harder seemed to help, as did writing slower – but this was frustrating.

I’ve now come to the conclusion that this is probably the fault of the screen protector. Ok, it might protect your valuable palm but it also renders it close to useless! If you’re so frustrated that you can’t bring yourself to use it then of course the screen is going to stay in pristine condition.

So what colour is it?

Not sure about the colour, what were they thinking? Midnight Blue? It’s almost as if they’d decided to change the colour in blue, but worried that people might not want a blue Palm, they’d do it in a shade that’s so dark you could almost (but not quite) call black.

Over all, despite everything, I like it and with the availability of Wi-Fi I’m finding myself using it more and more and as I find more applications that exploit the functionality provided by the TX, I’m sure I’ll be using it all the more.

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