New Palm Lineup Reviewed: Tungsten T3 & E, Zire 21

Geartest.com writes "PalmOne (AKA Palm) launched three new handhelds today: The Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. Without going on at length about the features of every model, the T3 has 64 MB RAM, a 320x480 display that rotates from portrait to landscape mode, a software writing area that slides out of the way when you aren't using it, built-in Bluetooth, a voice recorder, and Palm OS 5.2.1 that runs on an Intel XScale 400 MHz processor, which Sony dropped from the top-end CLIE in favor of its own silicon. InfoSyncWorld reviews the Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. PalmInfocenter also has a T3 review. ZDNet UK has a Tungsten T3 preview. And the Detroit Free Press has an overview of all three devices."

Comments

A review can also be found

[Sir Haxalot]

on InternetNews.com .

New Sony Clies too

[generic-man]

Sony also announced two Clies today, which cost $200 and $250 respectively. Not bad, but not revolutionary.

Re:But the big question is:

[jandrese]

I have both a Palm VIIx (got from work) and a Zaurus SL-C750 (also from work). When I got the Zaurus I seriously considered dumping the Palm, but I havn't yet. While the Zaurus is much _much_ more power, it is not nearly as polished (I'm running the English hacked ROM from the Cacko team) as the Palm. The address book and scheduler just aren't there yet on the Zaurus. The keyboard input is great, but their handwriting recognition is the pits, which is a pain when I swich it into PDA mode. Oddly, the Palm (which I have overclocked to 32Mhz) feels snappier. The Zaurus has this annoying delay every time you turn it on. I also have a metric crapload of third party software installed on the VIIx, and havn't been able to give up the web clipping stuff I've set up yet (this won't be a problem once those 3G Cell Modem CF cards come out though). It's slow going installing stuff on the Zaurus though, because you have to pretty much port everything yourself, since the software compiled for the 7xxx series Zaurus's tends to break the 7x0 series.

On the other hand, the Zaurus has a lot of cool features. My officemate transcoded the LOTR movie into a WMV he can play directly off of an IBM microdrive (it looks _nice_). The Zaurus has a full web browser (Opera) including a PDF reader, which is nice when I'm close enough to an 802.11b access point to use it. The screen completely blows away the Palm (640x480!) which is nice for ebook reading (although there are no ebook readers for the Zaurus that can hold a candle to Weasel AFAIK. I've been HTMLifying the books and using Opera, which is suboptimal). The terminal on the Zaurus is very nice, although the keyboard is not designed for terminal work (^V sends a paste, although ^C works ask you'd expect, although to even get control you have to remap the kana key.

Overall, both devices are nice, but neither eclipses the other's functionality at this point. I don't like how the Zaurus has it's built in battery, I much prefer using rechargable AAAs like the Palm so I can swap them out when they get low. This has been an annoyance because the Zaurus is rather power hungry and you have to keep the charging brick around if you want to use it for more than a few hours at a time, unlike the Palm where I can read an entire ebook before I need to replace the battery. I know the battery will be expensive to replace when it wears out too.

Hmm, that's pretty rambling. Lets just say that different people will prefer different devices based on their needs.