Palm Releases New Tungsten T2
securitas writes "Palm has released its latest PDA, the Tungsten T2. The T2 features a Texas Instruments 144MHz OMAP 1510 ARM processor, 32MB SDRAM (29.5 available), 320 x 320 transflective TFT display, wireless communications including Bluetooth, email client, SMS, and web browser, Palm OS v5.2.1, and MP3, video playback, and photo software. It will set you back $399. You can read more about the Palm Tungsten T2 and get tech specs (PDF) at the Palm site. Press release here. More at CNet, PC World, Infosync, the Register and the Inquirer. I'm not sure how many people will buy this product instead of waiting for its newly acquired Handspring Treo 600."
I don't see anything new here at all - they just bundled a bunch of things. When is there going to be some fresh innovation in the PDA world?
Palm on Wednesday launched its newest Tungsten handheld targeted at businesses, the Tungsten T2.
As previously reported, the T2 comes with 32MB of memory, twice that of its predecessor, the Tungsten T. It also includes a new "transflective" display, which is the same size and resolution as that of the Tungsten T, at 320 pixels by 320 pixels, but Palm says it is more easily viewed both indoors and outdoors.
Updates aside, the T2 focuses on multimedia performance, including software for maintaining a digital photo album, playing audio files and viewing short video clips. The handheld also comes with the latest edition of Palm's operating system, version 5.2.1, and built-in Bluetooth wireless. It continues to use Texas Instruments' OMAP 1510 processor.
Tungsten T2, which is available now, will sell for $399, according to Palm. Originally priced at $499, the Tungsten T now lists for $349.
Along with the launch of the Tungsten T2, Palm confirmed price reductions on two of its consumer-oriented handhelds, in an effort to help stimulate sales.
The company dropped the price of its m515 handheld from $299 to $249, and cut its m130 from $199 to $179, the company said. Palm's last price cut was in February.
They finally include something that is really usefully...
Yeah, I expect the Treo to retail somewhere in the high $400s, about for an extra $100, it's a cell phone too, which this doesn't appear to be.
The only thing is I gotta wonder how long the Treo will last after finalizing the merger with Palm. Will Palm provide support? For how long? Palm will most likely kill off the entire Handspring line of products, this will include the Treo 600, which will no doubt be short-lived.
My journal has hot
"As previously reported, the T2 comes with 32MB of memory"
How come those devices always are so cheap on internal memory? I mean, get a least 128 MB in the cheapest of MP3 players these days. So what's the problem?
...um...like...a sig...
I'm not sure how many people will buy this product [the Tungsten T2] instead of waiting for its newly acquired Handspring Treo 600.
They're very different beasts, appealing to very different people. I can't imagine people in doubt between the T2 and the Tréo 600.
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
Why does palm insist on using a lower capacity, less adaptable expansion slot?
Seriously, compact flash is cheaper for memory:
SD costs 232 USD for 512 MB - http://www.pricewatch.com/1/226/5642-1.htm
CF costs 96 USD for 512 MB - http://www.pricewatch.com/1/226/4003-1.htm
1 Gigabyte is only available in CF, and the SD/ MMC format can only be used for memory whereas CF can do almost anything PCMCIA can. Is the space saved really that important? Or could the unit not afford the slight extra power drain? Why does palm insist on the clearly inferior expansion slot?
I really miss the black and white, 33MHz palms. What a wonderful idea those were. I never used more than 512K of the ram on those things and the batteries would last me weeks on end. My Palm III and Visor Deluxe worked without flaw for years. Now they've got too many faetures and extras, except for the zire, which feels very cheap and breakable to me (not to mention the TINY screen). I thought the whole idea for the Palm was SIMPLICITY. I think they'd honestly make more money if they just refined those old models, made them smaller and added mini-USB ports for HID keyboards and connectivity. The'd be selling twice as many palms, and the stable platform would finally give corporate customers time to evaluate and migrate to the Palm (right now they can't because the meaning of 'Palm' keeps changing, hardware and software). Here's an idea, LET PocketPC take the speed/features crown, make really high-quality reliable and simple Palms that people can pick up and USE. I'll bet they could put the whole DragonBall palm logic and memory onto one or two chips now, it would be beautiful.
About half the people I know who have Palms have the old ones and they SWEAR by them. I know people who have PalmIIIs that bought a second one, new, just to replace their current one when it dies.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Anybody know if it's possible to get it to syncronize with the desktop over the bluetooth connection?
A bit slow, but if you just want to update a few minor things it would be great (and it would save you a cradle, if you do it with secondary computers).
TC - My Photos..
Sometimes you don't even need to read the daily stuff. My suggestions for the top 10 daily Slashdot articles:
:)
1) Microsoft warns of a new security flaw.
2) RIAA, et. al. are fawking us bad.
3) Apple's doing something innovative.
4) New Linux release,driver,bundle,etc. announced.
5) Neat new digital device arrives. Runs Linux.
6) Palm offers a new Palm.
7) New video/audio format/program released.
8) Someone announces a game for Linux.
9) Obligatory offbeat science topic of the day.
10) SPAM is leading to the apocalypse.
Any other top ten lists?
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Apparently listening to music via my bluetooth headset is not an option. I love using it for my mobile phone. When am I going to get to use it for my PDA?
Yes. The palm itself is not powerful enough to resize the images and render the documents, so they use a mandatory proxy that does the job. I don't know how fast it is, but it's really annoying that the palm can't connect directly.
I hate the concept so much because:
How do I know that it uses a proxy? If you look at the palm web browser page, you'll see on the bottom of the page that they mention that ports 8827 and 8775 must be open. I can't check if this thing would work without a proxy, because their browser won't work with earlier palms.
I should mention the Palm (III and above?) can do normal TCP/IP as long as you use a modem and not the proprietary web-only palm.NET service (I think it can even listen too but I doubt it can run servers), and there are a couple of palm browsers that access web servers directly without a proxy, like the free EudoraWeb and Xiino. But nobody seems to support them anymore and they got problems: EudoraWeb is very nice but can't load docs bigger than 21k, and Xiino is even nicer than EudoraWeb but it got a very annoying bug with radio buttons (when there are many radio buttons, it makes some of them selected).
I couldn't find any usable browser for palm which doesn't have the problems I listed above, even that I looked a lot. If anyone can recommend me one I'd be very glad, but till then I am really disappointed and frustrated at Palm. I bet that the browsing in the competitors (PocketPC/Zaurus) is much better.
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
'cuz we all know T3 won't be nearly as good.
Why don't you try actually using that little handheld computer you have for more than just the basic 4 PIM apps?
First of all I'd love to have more than 4 buttons. Right now I have to use an app called Button Launch (its free people) that lets me assign more than 1 app per button. (counting what the buttons are already assigned to there's three apps to a button).
I have a Kyocera 7135 Smartphone. It runs Palm OS 4.1 and has 16MB of RAM. It also has a SD Card slot, 3G speed capability and a built in MP3 Player with a stereo headset. My AvantGo app alone has 8MB worth of channels (thats around 50 channels folks).
Not to mention I have real estate software to synch with my state's MLS systems, SnapperMail for on the go email, iSilo for reading ebooks at my leisure, PocketQuicken that synchs to Quicken Deluxe on the desktop so I can do away with paper checkbooks, Teal Script so grafitti can learn from me and not the other way around, Tipper so I can calculate the exact tips at restaraunts, upIR for IRC on the go, SplashID for keeping all my bank account, credit card account, web logins, and other sensitive data all in one encrypted place.
My PDA is more than just a glorified addressbook/datebook/todolist/memopad. Its a real friggin handheld computer. AND it does it all in 33Mhz. I can't wait to see what can be done when Smartphones get 400Mhz CPU's like the standalone PDA's already have.
www.kyocerasmartphone.com
I could never be satisified with the earlier models.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Because it's ultra reliable, the batteries last weeks, it does the key orgnisational tasks I require, it incldues an 8Meg Memory Stick for backing up (I only use 250k so far!), it's well made and most importantly, it doesn't pretend to be a multimedia machine. How complicated is it to download video to a Palm T2 and how much can you get in 32Meg? I will by a multimedia PDA when, like the iPod - it has a 30 gig hard drive. And built in 802.11g. Sony's new Clie 50 still lacks the RAM, but it accepts Memory Stick Pro, so one could watch hours of video! Now that is innovation!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
It's much smaller when you hold it than it appears when people see photos of it. I've had one for a couple months now, and I could never imagine going back to a seperate phone or PDA. It's not perfect, but it's close.
My only P800 gripes:
- 12 bit colour screen
- low res camera, fairly poor lens (webcam quality)
Other than that, it's great. Both of those gripes are addressed in the new P810 which may be released by next year.
Any company making PDA-style devices without having a GSM phone in it has missed the boat IMHO.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
What?
Palm bought Handspring to flesh out their core markets. Handspring had basically committed to being only a "convergence" pda company (the treo line had become their only moneymaker), and had spent a lot of time listening to both customers and providers.
The treo 600 is supposed to be the distillation of all this - hardware revisions were made to directly answer the requests of Sprint, et al. This is another thing - Handspring had very good relations with the providers - and a completely different set (Sprint, Cingular, Orange) than Palm (ATTW).
Notice that palm has never once tried to make an true phone/pda (the tungsten W only supports "handsfree" phone). My guess is, if anything, the tungsten W is short lived.
The tungsten C, on the other hand, with the fast processor, high res screen, keyboard, ram, and WLAN is another direction the market is going - notice all the PockPC models, the new Sony's, etc.
Handspring the brandname is probably quite short-lived. The treo line and the engineering behind it and in the future? A much better chance.
atleast not in Denmark, where I live. In danish, "tung" means heavy and "sten" means rock. So this is the "heavy rock t2". Not exactly a handheld I'd like to own!
Bjarke Roune
* no support for playlists at all with native player
* dodgy plastic lens on camera really limits things. 640x480's not that bad (i remember paying quite a bit for the first domestic digital cameras that did this and being reasonably happy) but a glass lens would really help
* dodgy new memory format - the memory stick duo. it's a sony, so maybe you can't expect an SD slot, but it'd be nice. the duo cards are *really* expensive
* provide a means of terminating running programs without third party software. why don't the apps have a "close" icon? this is plain dumb
there's probably a few more, but these are the main gripes. don't get me wrong, i love mine. make it a little bit slimmer and less plasticy and i'd be *really* happy
should have called it a t3 and did a terminator tie in.
My first impulse to your subsequent posts was to call you a moron and label you a luddite. But you have valid reasons for your position so I must respect that.
This is the way I look at the PDA situation.
First of all color screens. My first PDA was a Kyocera 6035. 8MB, no expansion slot, 20Mhz CPU, greyscale screen. Basic unit. Great cell phone, great PDA. But I wanted MORE. Humans are able to see color and for good reason. More information can be conveyed with color than via black and white. I want that visual bandwidth.
So now I'm on my Kyocera 7135. I've got color, a bit faster CPU (33Mhz), an MP3 Player, and an expansion slot. These few things really make a difference. It can play videos too believe it or not although that is one function I don't really use. Voice memos (something the 6035 could do as well) is something I've just gotten into. Ever park your car at the mall and forget where it is? Now I just make a quick voice memo of its location.
PS I would love an addressbook in 16-bit color. That would enable me to put a picture next to every person's contact in my addressbook. Maybe the next generation of Smartphones will have that so I don't even have to open the flip to see who's calliing! (Well technically I don't now because of the LCD on the top of the phone but I mean SEE not READ who's calling).
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.