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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."
Okay, I know that I can navigate to my iPaq's memory (or CF & SD cards) via explorer, but how easily can you access the Palm's memory? Is there any installation necessary on the local computer before you can access this? I'm going to bet that this is more of a marketing ploy than anything. Attach the latest buzz word and hope people snatch it up.
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
I remember distinctly that palm OS5 was supposed to be a stopgap measure between the classic OS4 and the modern, BeOS based OS6... Essentially OS5 was OS4 with some badly needed modifications to make it run on faster hardware. And now that we're up to 5.4, the patches keep rolling in and in, as they add more ram and expand the featureset ever towards what OS 6 is supposed to contain, which is supposed to be in parallel development.
When are we getting the real Palm OS 6, with such badly needed features as multiprocessing and a file system?
The ______ Agenda
Palm's announcements are always underwhelming.
The $400 sounds okay, until you realize it does not include built-in WiFi. The screen is half VGA.
And it doesn't have the new version of the PalmOS. Instead we get 5.4, which as far as I'm concerned, the entire 4.x and 5.x OS's have been disappointments. The IP stack in the 5.x OS is what I'd consider unstable and unusable. Imagine that when networked apps crash, they actually crash inside the IP stack, not the application.
Don't get me started on the lack of multitasking.
Very disappointing.
Forget the arguments about processors, wireless connectivity and other technical issues, it's little things like this that make me want to buy a device.
Simple but useful features, that's what makes a product stand out
Mod parent up!
That's a heck of a surprise to me since I did just that on a recent trip.
fencepost
just a little off
Because Palm has this mad-on for Bluetooth for some reason. They've only had one model (Tungsten C) that has had built-in 802.11.
Charge from the USB connector?
...
Oh my, that's what a two yeard old Zire does!
And my Tungsten E. What's interesting to me is that in design this looks a lot more like an upgrade of the Tungsten E than the T3: no sliding thingy, the buttons and finish (oh no! you'd think Palm'd learn from their mistakes!) and form appear identical to the TE, and there's no voice recorder, the speaker's on the back, etc, etc.
So I'm guessing that the T5 uses the same connector as the Zires and the TE. Which has always seemed a great idea to me (I love that the hotsync cable is just a mini-USB cable and I can charge from it), but will piss-off those who like their universal connector products
Bluetooth and WiFi are not competitors, but aim at a completely different market.
I'm very pleased with my TH-55, which has Bluetooth AND WiFi, both of which I use, bluetooth + my T610 on the road, WiFi @ the office.
Oh, and the TH-55 has a voice recorder too, can't believe PalmOne left that one out of the T5.
Too bad Sony stopped selling Clié's in US/europe.
Lord... The PalmOne crowd will never be happy... Frankly, I an kinda tired of reading people bashing P1 for this unit. Sure, it's not revolutionary, but it's an improvement, especially on battery life. I don't really think the T3 needed a whole lot of improvement, (again, battery life) and I don't think this was intended to "unseat" the T3. I'm in the (seeming) minority of people who don't need WiFi, don't want WiFi and frankly could care less if P1 ever makes a WiFi radio on their devices. I get along just fine with Bluetooth and my Motorola v710. I can browse the Internet, get my email, and do everything I want Internet-wise. I've never been sitting in an airport or coffee-house and said "Damn... if I only had WiFi! Now I'm ruined!"
I'm willing to admit that Dell devices still may have higher tech specs, but honestly, until they can run PalmOS, I'm not the slightest bit interested. PPC sucks. It's not stable, it's a resource hog. It has more moving parts, and having supported both PPC and POS, can say without hesitation that in my opinion, POS is still far superior.
In conclusion to my rant, I'm not going to say "Way to go PalmOne!" They made some mistakes. (Plastic case? Oops!) On the other hand, I don't think this is a miserable failure. It's an evolutionary device that is slightly better than the T3. I think that everyone's expectations were simply too high, and mostly unreasonable. If P1 had come out with a device with WiFi, people would complain about battery life. If it had a voice recorder, people would complain that it turned the device on in their pockets. I don't think that Palm could have satisfied people after having such a long break since their last release. And to those of you wondering, I don't work for Palm. Let's just hope that the long-term reliability of this unit is an improvement, because that's where P1 could go horribly wrong. My T3 had far too many hardware problems, and if the T5 exhibits the same problems, then P1 could really be in trouble.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
The differences are between this and Tungsten T3: * better file transfer * flash memory * favourites view * 102 more MB * USB device only 2 of those features would cause me to even consider upgrading from my Tungsten E, and I'd be more inclined to just get a USB stick. Are PDAs so good that no "wow" features exist for them? Cause they're all looking much the same to me (except for features such as built-in cameras, but that isn't so much PDAs getting advanced features as people trying to converge technologies).
Um, you can't have it both ways. Do you want upgradability or not? Why must I have upgradable wireless (as if I will somehow need new fangled 500 megabit wireless, whenever it comes out, on my PDA) but not upgradable everything else?
Your logic makes no sense.
Palm has forgotten the mantra of the original developers that made the Palm III such a success -- keep it small. The Tungsten T is just barely carryable, and the newer versions just keep getting bigger. Personally, I'd rather see Palm spend their energy reducing the size of the T series than increasing the features.
The Subaru STi Ships without a Radio (wireless, heh) from the factory. It's a brand new top-of-the-line boy-racer mobile.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
I'm just hoping and praying that with OS 6 they clean up the horrible accreted apology for an operating system that is OS 5. But chances are PalmOS 6 will just be the same mess as before with even more extra functions and layer after layer of backwards compatiblity functions and even more horribly it will be both little endian with big endian for the legacy functions and so on. Yeuch! Asking for a C++ API is like asking for sugar coating on a turd.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Unfortunately (depending on who you ask - personally I'm a PocketPC fan) Palm-powerred devices are going down the drain in terms of market share. They made the right decision in splitting off their hardware and OS department. I'd expect to see PalmOS go into more appliances - the Tapwave Zodiac is a great example of this. One thing that's always irked me is the attitude of the Palm community in general with new features. It's basically "we don't need that!" when presented with a competing platform's feature, and lo and behold, 2-3 generations later, it's being touted as a huge feature, and people are clamoring over it! For reference's sake, I've used a PalmOS IIIxe, a iPaq H3600, H3900, and a Tapwave Zodiac. Carry the Zodiac, but primarily because of emulators.