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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."
on InternetNews.com .
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Why don't they call these things Tung-Pilots? Come to think of it, that would imply a revolutionary way of inputting data into the things.
Sony also announced two Clies today, which cost $200 and $250 respectively. Not bad, but not revolutionary.
For more information, click here.
The 21 seems to rectify those problems with being underpowered. I'm sure that in a month or so, you'll be able to buy refurbished 21's for $80 or so. At that point I might finally cave in and get one.
What surprises me, and the thing that's kept me on the sidelines so long, is that none of the units offer 802.11 B. A friend of mine has a Handspring with an 802.11 B card, and speaks the world of it. I bet a lot of folks would jump in and start using PDA's, when 802.11 B becomes a standard feature.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
It's about time woke up and smelled the price points, man.
...9. What's next? Here's to hoping the story continues on this line- I'd use a Palm device if PalmOS wasn't so primitive. I want/need a pocket computer, not an expensive organizer, and before the PalmOS can fill that need, it will need to be able to do a couple those little features we take for granted in a real OS, like multitasking. :) Will PalmOS 6 be the analogue to Apple's OS X?
For a while, you've been able to pick up a very good PocketPC device for around $200- currently the Dell Axim X5 Basic, and before that the iPAQ 3100 series (all the usual 3600 specs, but with a B&W screen, 16 MB of RAM instead of 32). Both of those PPC devices are very capable little PDAs that can just about do it all.
Palm, on the other hand, has only tossed us some pretty crappy bones for a cheaper Palm device. Yeah, you could get a Palm m130 for $200 (now $180), or the low-end Zire for $100. However, both of these models are pretty limited. The m130 has an old, slow processor (although, it still displays PDFs faster than my 400 MHz Zaurus C760, or a 206 MHz/400 MHz WinCE device), little RAM, and a small, non-reflective screen. The m130 has a limited SD slot and the Palm serial connection. For the same price, you could get a PocketPC device with 3x the screen real-estate, 4x the RAM, 5-10x the processor speed and 3 expansion options (SD, CF, serial), usable for various networking options and memory upgrades.
However, it seems Palm is finally putting out something
In a way, this model has the potential to be the company's iMac analogue. When you think of it, the PocketPC vs Palm race parallels the Microsoft vs Apple one. I'll put the MS vs Apple in parens:
1. Palm (Apple) comes out with a superior product at first: the first Palm PDA (the original Mac 128K).
2. Microsoft comes out with an inferior product as a reaction to #1: WinCE 1.0 devices (MS Windows 1.0).
3. Palm (Apple) keeps on moving forward, doing incremental updates, eventually arriving at the Palm III (Mac OS 6).
4. MS finally gets a larger chunk of its act together, gets a better hardware platform, puts out PocketPC. (Win 95)
5. MS and PocketPC starts to claim territory that was once very clearly PalmOS-land.
6. Does a CPU and general archetecture upgrade, moving from dead-end m68k CPUs to ARM-based chips. (Apple goes from m68k to PowerPC.)
7. Palm sticks to a friendly to use, but somewhat ugly to code for and quite primitive internally OS, while Microsoft has had something resembling a "real" OS for a while. (Apple sticks to its primitive-cored Mac OS 9, MS has NT, 2k, 9x [although they suck just as much ass as OS 9, even though they look better on paper].)
8. Palm comes out with the Tungsten E, which provides almost all of the features of a more expensive PDA for a lot less. (Apple comes out with the iMac, pretty much all the features you need, but for cheaper.)
Of course, this is totally ignoring the Newton, which is where Palm did well to steal a lot of ideas for PalmOS, although ignoring a handful of very important architectural elements. I also ignore all name changes, referring to USR, Palm, PalmOne, etc just as "Palm."
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The Tungsten T3 retails at about $400 (US), the Tungsten E at $200, and the Zire 21 at $100.
Overall, it looks like the Tungsten E is the best value of Palm's offerings to date (320x320 color screen, multimedia, Graffiti 2, 32 MB of memory). For $200 more you get Bluetooth, wireless Internet, and a rotating screen; for $100 less you get a black-and-white screen and a no-frills, PIM-focused device. It really feels like Palm is listening to its users when they say what they want in a handheld.
I bought one of these to replace my wife's ailing M100. I was pretty surprised to find out that it doesn't have a backlight. What the hell were they thinking?
True, it doesn't include "backlight" anywhere on the list of features on the side of the box, but since (almost) every other Palm OS organizer ever made has a backlight, it's not like I would have expected it to be optional. Who would buy a digital watch or a cellphone without a backlight?
-Mark
Dang, only 6 comments, and the server is down... Must've been running a Palm server. *chuckle* [/obligatory]
In all seriousness though...
I'd have to say no. My 3(?) year old Vx still does its job remarkably well, and I don't want a Palm-based Pocket PC do-alike. The Tungsten E is getting closer to what the Vx was in it's time, but it seems they keep skirting handily around the midrange model that I'd like and be able to afford - especially with that battery life! And no expansion capabilities either... a shame as well. I don't want to pay $200 extra for a little SD slot, or likewise...
Oh well, I can keep waiting. *pats the Vx*
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
2 problems with the Tablets.
1. They're shit slow. The top-end ones run P-III Mobile 1GHz CPU's. No CD-ROM, no expandability.
2. They run Windows XP Tablet Edition (Which is a variant of Home).
Get a thin laptop with a Centrino or P4-M CPU instead and see some real performance and portability. Oh, and they're way cheaper than the Tablets
Or get a cheap beast (Like my base-model Thinkpad G40) for the price of a high-end PDA.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
(Note to moderators: please do not rate this informative. Check the link first. Aargh, why do I actually have to make such qualifying statements first? Do your job, or don't use the mod points. Maybe I'm just too subtle.)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Considering the Zaurus is competition to these devices, and does offer these utilities, it's relevant.
Oh, and there are console and SSH apps for Palm OS. They're quite popular for Sysadmin types. Who are a huge target market for these babies.
And the 911 offers full-time AWD instead of on-the-fly 4WD.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
And actually there is a compiler (not cross though) for the palmos. OnboardC. Open source too!
I'm very eager to get my hands on the T3
PalmOS devices for the educational market? Alphasmart agrees with you.
2. They run Windows XP Tablet Edition (Which is a variant of Home).
Actually, it is "a superset of Windows XP Professional"
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
User Interface.
I can tap on my cheap TI keyboard much faster than i can ever hope to enter data with a pen on a palm. Even using the screen as an input device doesn't cut it: tactile feedback is GOOD.
Also, i have no idea why HS are pushing graphing calcs: there aren't many college courseswhere you can su programmable calculators.
And finally, battery life.
If you want power and usability, you're always going to ahve to dish some money. Heck, nowadays, it's more like, usability == money; power is easy to get. It's not like it's not possible now: there's a package to emulate the hp48 on PPCs and Palms that has been out for a while. Still, it makes you much less efficient. In the calculator world, if you want power and usability, for real world usage, and not only HS, get an HP (while they're still decent), which is what has been used by those who interact with their calculators all the time(engineers, bankers, etc) for many years, not a Palm.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
I bought a T2 a couple months back, even though I knew the T3 was going to arrive "soon." (Photos of the T3 had already been leaked, but it was common knowledge that Palm was sitting on the T3 for some reason.) Since I didn't know how soon "soon" meant, I got the T2. I have few regrets. The T2 undoubtedly has better battery life, and I don't have to worry about excess wear on the portion of the display reserved for handwriting, because there are no live pixels in that region.
So why did Palm release the T2 at all? A few reasons. If you look at the difference between the original Tungsten T and the T2, there are very few. The main differences are: The T2 has a better display, the T2 has double the RAM (32 megs versus 16 megs), and the T2 has a newer PalmOS revision. It's this last part that is perhaps the biggest change, since the newer PalmOS comes with Graffiti 2. As you might recall, Palm lost a lawsuit over the original Graffiti handwriting recognition system, and as part of the remedies, they agreed to migrate to the new Graffiti 2 HWR system across their entire product line. I think the T2 was released precisely to comply with the remedies required of them, and it gave Palm an excuse to slip in a few other revisions to the device. The original Tungsten T was, at the time, the only professional PalmOS device from Palm still using the original Graffiti HWR. Even the Zire series had moved to Graffiti 2.
Even more people use cars, telephones, and clothes every day. Do you also feel that we need standardized education on crankshaft design, that all high school graduates should know the current provided by dialtone from an ESS7, and that all citizens should be familiar with cotton cultivation techniques?
The fact that these devices are ubiquitous is a cause and result of the fact that one does _not_ need to know arcana like "what a megabyte is" to use them.
Since you have a IIIx you can use the Graffiti Replacement Trick. The reason Palm moved to Graffiti 2 is because Xerox sued Palm over a unistroke character patent.
-- iCEBaLM
It's more useful in a portable device like this. While out, you're more likely to have a BT cell phone with you than be in range of some access point. Ideally of course you'd want both, but realistically I'd take the cheaper BT if I could only have one. I just wish they'd start including BT as a standard feature even in the low-end models.
Aargh! I'm still waiting for a useable phone/organizer combo. I think putting a clunky treo to your ear is absolutely ridiculous, and something as slim as a mobile phone can only have an impossible screen. Now there are organizers with GSM, organizers with bluetooth and bluetooth headsets. Where is the problem with combining them? All those nice innovations, but never in the same package. Ok, I'll stick to my Vx a little longer...