palmOne Announces Tungsten T5

btornado writes "palmOne has officially announced the Tungsten T5, which is due out in early November. It features 256 MB of flash memory, Palm OS Garnet 5.4 with a 320x480 display, and Bluetooth connectivity with support for the SDIO Wifi card. It is also the first device to support the Multi-connector, which allows you to trickle charge from the USB cable. You can also configure the T5 as a USB drive to transfer files."

Comments

Wifi Support

[Metatron]

Support for a WiFi card ... why does it not have WiFi in it ?????

Re:Wifi Support

[jht]

Well, WiFi is probably more of a niche for a PDA than Bluetooth for the most part. WiFi support (probably just 802.11b) will only get you networking over a short distance wherever a network is available, and it sucks power rather quickly. Odds are, though, that you're more likely to use WiFi with your laptop.

A PDA, OTOH, needs mainly to talk to it's "mothership" desktop, or to a cell phone, or some other "personal" device. Right up Bluetooth's alley. In fact, probably the best way to think of Bluetooth on a PDA is as an expansion port that just happens to be wireless.

I use Bluetooth to sync my Palm and my PowerBook, to connect my cell phone to my Jabra headset, to iSync everything, to connect my iMac to peripherals, and in a pinch I use Bluetooth to get GPRS internet access with my cell phone from my PowerBook when I don't have any other form of access available. I also have used my cell phone with the Palm (a Tungsten T) the same way.

And though I don't use it as much, I have a Dell laptop with Bluetooth, and the cordless phone at my office uses it both to talk to the base station and to sync with a PC.

OTOH I have a Pocket PC as well (an iPaq 1935), and I use a Sandisk SDIO WiFi card with it. Very rarely. There's just not much I'd do with it that isn't better served by the laptop, and the SDIO card sucks power so quickly you can practically see the power meter drop.

Mind you, I'm not dumping on WiFi. It's great, and useful, but it's just good for one thing - networking. In PDA's that's enough of a niche compared to what you can do with Bluetooth that I'd rather have Bluetooth in my PDA given a choice of only one.

Power consumption...

[blueZ3]

WiFi sucks power like crazy. It reduces battery life by over 70% if the SDIO WiFi card is any indication.

And, as another poster mentioned, WiFi seems to change about once a year - and I'd rather buy a new $100 SDIO card than a new $400 PDA.

Cheaper T3

[TonyZahn]

I think the real news here is that the price of the T3 has dropped to $350 with the releaase of the T5.
Another $50 and I'll be all over it...

Re:Where is OS6?

[MadChicken]

I agree with multitasking/threading in a LIMITED way, but certainly not a file system. That's the stupidest contrived need for a PDA I've ever heard of. For those of you with Winboxes, open up your "Program Files" folder. You really want something like that on your limited memory PDA? Yikes. I used an iPaq for a year, and file systems... what a waste (Ever heard of a program called WIMR? Don't need one on Palms). The database idea Palm had 'way back was well ahead of its time... the only thing that was missing was being able to install generic files on that "file system"; like MP3s or DOC files. Nice if/when desktops catch up to that (WinFS?)

As for Multitasking, again, CE machines are a nightmare of "wanna be a desktop" os overkill. This is a sweet and smart way to do it, instead of "Start | Settings | Memory | Running Applications | End Program" or loading a program to make the close button actually close something.

My iPaq is now sitting in the cradle, and has been for about 3 months, untouched, while I carry my Tungsten E upstairs and downstairs just in case I need it.

OK! Ignition started, pour on the kerosene!