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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.
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
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.