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Palm T|X and Z22 Reviewed
robf writes "The eagerly awaited Palm T|X and Z22 have been officially announced. Palminfocenter has reviews posted for both the Palm T|X and the Palm Z22." From the article: "The T|X and Z22 are the first new models to return to the Palm name, after the company reacquired the rights to the Palm name. Palm has decided to drop the Tungsten sub brand, in order to highlight the strong Palm name brand."
...use a notepad and pencil.
Too bad it doesn't have a camera, though. :-(
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As a long time user and fan of Palm, (I kind of consider them the tivo of the hand held industry -- maybe not the very first there, but one of the ones that got a lot of things right ergonomically before they got steamrolled by the industry and their own inertia), the time and technology seems about right for me.
Looking at the features list it seems to fulfill much of what I've waited for (good memory, expandable vi SD, nice screen, improved and enhanced original apps).
But a question for any who really know: Will the user be able to use this wireless capability to move pictures and mp3s to the device? That would just about lock it for me, but it's not clear from the feature list and description that that is doable.
Also, are there any users out there who would vouch for today's screen quality? I would be upgrading from the Palm m5xx which has a color screen, but that screen is of less than great quality and is quite anemic. I've seen other newer devices with screens that scream -- is Palm doing the same?
Is the Z22 backlit? The blurb doesn't say.
I would have bought a Zire 21 ages ago for a cheap e-book reader, had it been backlit.
I guess my old Handspring Visor Deluxe will still be in use if it's not.
Why Palm still developing handhelds based on PalmOS? I thought they entered an agreement with M$ to use Windows CE on Palms. Is Palm planning to continue developing a next-gen OS alternative to Windows CE?
What is Palm's strategy with regards to operating systems? How they going to be totally heterogenous and distribute hardware supporting both Windows Mobile and Palm OS operating systems (Garnet)? Is there any information on whether or not they're phasing out Garnet already ?
If you ever have the need to go into any kind of secure facility, you'll want a pilot (and phone) without a built-in camera. It'd be a drag to go in for a meeting only to have them require you leave your tools in your car.
The PIM apps more closely resemble Microsoft Outlook for better compatibility.
Right...how much something looks like Microsoft Outlook is directly proportional to how well-formed its email messages will be. Unless, of course, they're referring to ease-of-transition.
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Does the T|X or the Z22 play at least two gigs of music or have instant messaging? Otherwise it is completely irrelevant to the buzz today.
But honestly, I was so jacked up a couple years ago when the Zire first came out. I had to have it. The Zire is/was affordable and met all of my needs at the time. Then I discovered I could have SMS messages sent to my cellular phone as a reminder for my appointments (free incoming messages on my plan). Likewise I was rarely ever away from home or work and needed to know someone's work or home address; so I kept all my contacts on my phone, and kept up with my appointments via SMS messages and effectively made my Zire obsolete.
I'm certain others will find a spectacular value in the T|X with all of its functions especially being able to edit word and excel files on their handheld and transmitting those files wirelessly. But I tend to save those kinds of functions to be done at work place. My time is just that, my time.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Now that Palm is releasing a MS Smartphone, will "Palm" become just a brand name, and not a specific technology? Will Palm wind up licensing the Linux/PalmOS software back from PalmSource, or even reacquiring PalmSource combined with its Access, its new Japanese owner?
--
make install -not war
This is like trying to revive NeXT or OS/2. They had the whole handheld market "in the bag" and messed up. It is time to move on...
Sorry Palm, without user replaceable batteries, your products are dead.
Really, I've always thought palms were the epitome of the cool-but-useless-gadget phenomenon. I thought the Lifedrive, at least, was getting on to the right track. Bluetooth and Wifi, a 4GB drive, an actual file browser and the ability to transfer files like it was a normal external hard drive... I might, in theory, be able to use something like that. A couple revisions and a new (stable) operating system, and I might actually buy one. The current model however, when I tried one out, the included web browser kept crashing and the connection to an otherwise stable Wifi access point kept dropping.
At this rate, I think we'll see an iPod with an input device and wireless networking before Palm gets their act together and makes a device worth carrying around.
I dunno, it doesn't look as if Palm is doing anything as good as the thirdparties used to...the Sony Clie SJ22 (same demographic as the Z22) had a 320*320 screen, which was Sony's default, even on their cheapest B+W models. Plus Palm is confused about form factors...crude sexual jokes aside, they focus solely on the thickness, as opposed to the side to side width. The Tungsten's weren't very good to hold, kind of cutting into your outstretched hand, but the SJ22 felt much better, thicker but not as wide. (Of course it limits the size of the screen, but still.)
Ah well. I just Ebay'd up that Samsung clamshell Palm/phone...Palm/Treo doesn't understand the beauty of clamshell design either.
I've been a Palm loyalist since 1997, but even to me it's clear the future ain't so bright for the brand and the nice little UI.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I just got a Palm Lifedrive a month and a half ago, and a lot of my friends really like the device, but I'm hesitant to recommend it to people until we have some indication of which way the operating system for it is going. If the company that acquired palmone doesn't keep up with the OS, I don't see any point in investing in Palm any further. Too bad if they don't too, Palm makes nice devices.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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I had one of the original Palm Pilots, and I've never understood why they lost the Pilot name. Most (non-techie) people I know still talk about "pilots" when they are referring to any PDA. Is it too generic or something?
By dropping the Tungsten brand , they are pissing off existing customers like me who are Tungsten owners. I am not sure whether they will win new customers or not but I know for a fact that I am not buying any more stuff from Palm.
What's wrong with your memory then?
Am I the only one who does not like Palm dropping the Tungsten and Zire names in favor of the T and Z prefixes? To new users unfamiliar with Palm, it would probably be seen as useless letters in front of a useless number that adds confusion as to what the letters stand for.
This seems to be something HP has done with the iPaqs, with their endless amount of models. Just from looking at their site, they have an h, hx, rx, and rz prefix, which is then followed by a series of 4 numbers. These numbers and prefixes mean nothing to me, since I am not an iPaq user, but I am assuming that the higher the number, the more features it has.
I own a Tungsten T3, and Mac compatibility is pretty limited. Going through some of the features on the new models, I am curious why the Palm needs an SD card to play MP3 files if you're syncing it with a Mac? What kind of sense does that make? How come Windows can store files directly in the on-board flash memory and the Mac can't?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
but Palm still hasn't come up with a PDA to beat Sony's last Clie models. My Tj-37 is two years old and has WiFi, a camera, lots of expansion, a small form-factor and great battery life. And before anyone goes on to say that "a business PDA doesn't need a camera" let me say that I use the crappy camera in my Tj-37 all the time. Sure, it's not a 2MP wonder, but I do have it with me all the time.
If and when my Tj-37 dies, I'll likely replace it with a Clie TH-55. This thing has wifi, 320x480 and absolutely awesome 8+ hour battery life again in 2003. The EU version even had bluetooth. With the camera and small form-factor, Palm still hasn't come up with an equal to this device. Really, Palm 2005 is just now catching up to the Clie from two years ago.
It's a shame, when Sony pulled out of the market, Palm OS and the Palm platform just stagnated.
My last two Palms - a Tungsten and a Zire 72 - made high-pitched humming noises. So loud I could hear it while sitting down and reading an eBook or reviewing notes. The Zire 72 runs out of battery juice within 45 minutes if I have the Wi-Fi card running.
Add to that experience the poor syncing with my Mac OS X and frequent Palm Desktop crashes with Windows XP SP2, I started syncing my calendar, address book, and notes to my iPod.
To scribble quick notes down I use The PocketMod - an ingenious combination of paper, planner, and orgami. A single sheet of paper becomes a folded booklet with eight different pages. No batteries, it's paper so if I drop it I don't cringe, and I get a new one every week!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Sony_Clie_TH55_
For comparison, these have basically the same specs except:
Sony TH-55 advantages:
Palm TX advantages:
I've been a PalmOS user for many years, and this is the most appealing device since the Tungsten|T3, and the price is competitive. However, this is what they should have released almost two years ago!
- AlanH
I've been using palms for years, but I've finally jumped ship. I've just replaced my tungsten E with a dell axim X51V. I wanted to stay with palm, but I needed a top-end unit with wifi and a high-res screen for effectively replacing my old department laptop when I'm out of the office.
the 51v is nearly 50% more expensive than this new T|X, but since work is paying, price wasn't really an object. The screen is 480x640; it has 802.11b and bluetooth 1.2 (though the bluetooth seems broken on windows mobile 5 for prety much anything except file transfer and activesync at the moment); a damn sight more software runs on windows mobile rather than palm os (stock PIM software is about the same; pocketplus and pocket breeze rock bigtime); double the storage (256MB vs 128); and a user-replacable battery, so I can buy up to 3300mAh if I'm going to be away from mains for a long time (stock is 1100mAh). The CF + sd slot looks to be really useful too, as I'll get myself a 4GB microdrive as well as several useful addin cards that go in the CF slot; and the processor runs up to 624Mhz. Average lifetime is about 4 hours solid use, and since it's non-volatile storage, it doesn't matter if the battery goes flat. Spanks the best palms available, including this new one easily.
If palm sold a top-end PDA with similar specs, I would have stayed. As it is, I think palm are going to struggle to hold onto anything other than the entry-level PDA and smartphone market. Even in the midrange, existing pocket pc's compare well with this brand new palm.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
It's very hard to understand why a non-Linux PDA is of any interest to this crowd. My Nokia 770 came in last week.
The display is better than any modern Palm - though monochrome it's clear in just about any lighting conditions, bright sunlight or pitch black (with backlight). It works nicely with 15 minute rechargeable NiMh AAA which blows away any of the expensive difficult-to-replace LiPoly batteries in new Palms. It uses Graffiti rather than Graffiti 2 so it's possible to enter text reliably on it without using an external keyboard. And it looks pretty close to how it looked when I bought it 8 years ago (even though I used it for 4 years) unlike my Tungsten T|3 which has become worn down because of friction from the protective flip cover itself(!!!). One other thing, the glass screen has no scratches on it unlike recent plastic displays which scratch horribly pretty quickly. All in all, I think the original Pilot is yet to be beaten apart from the lack of SD card support.
A lot of people slam Palm OS for not having multitasking or memory protection (and being somewhat buggy on the T5) but it still has some advantages. Namely, it's very fast, syncs reliably, and is easy to use one-handed.
When I first switched to Pocket PC, I found the interface to be horribly clunky, syncing a pain in the ass, and memory management a joke. And I was always waiting for things to happen and many times I ran into weirdness that required a reboot. I went back to Palm out of disgust.
Last year I re-switched to Pocket PC when wifi-enabled VGA devices that could play 30-fps hi-res DIVX movies came out... the OS still scared me, but the hardware was too cool to resist.
But now I don't use my PDA as a PDA. It's still slow. It still runs out of memory. Switching between landscape and portrait modes takes several seconds and the screen elements don't always render properly.
I find it to be so damn frustrating that I usually leave it at home. I was hoping Windows Mobile 5 would solve some of the problems, but because of how it's changed its use of non-volitile memory, it's much slower at various tasks (read some of the reviews... opening a Word document that took 3 seconds with Windows Mobile 2003 now takes 18 seconds).
Reportedly the T|X has solved the T5 bugs. Sure, multitasking comes in handy now and then, but right about now Palm's instant task-switching is sounding more appealing than Windows Mobile's crappy multitasking.
If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Even in the default configuration, a simple sync operation can crash the OS and crash it hard. I gave up on the notion of keeping the think updated. I just jot the changes down on a piece of paper so I can enter them on my computer at home. I've lost WAY too many phone numbers and address updates to a hotsync that went to bad I had to do a hard reset to recover from it.
Palm's slogan should be "How do you want your data mangled today?"
I've been advising my family and friends against Palm for ages, eve since I had chronic problems with my damn T2, and Palm tech support was useless. They dragged the tech issue on for weeks until my warranty had expired, and only THEN did they say I should send it in for service. Great, I'm going to spend over half the purchase price to get it serviced. Sure.
One of these days I need to get around replacing it with something more stable, like WinCE or pen and paper.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
LAst weeekend: they showed up at the store VERY early and I'll tell you what: It's a gorgeous unit. Comfortable to hold, very fast, and the wifi and bluetooth work as advertised. They are very hot little items. I've been considering a small laptop, but between the improvements in Graffiti (my last palm was a m125) and the wireless, I might have to change my mind.
This is a personal information manager, not an ipod competitor, not a pimp toy, none of that stuff. I bought Palm machines over the years and I really resent that the crossing over of the device into the moronic mainstream meant Palm had to deal with user feedback that was in my opinion quite idiotic. This was a device that got its breakthrough for being able to organise your days, keep your appointments, tasks and contacts for years to come in pocket and within a click, and so on - but then the morons got on board and you had all those 'users' complaining about not being able to watch movie trailers or simpsons' episodes on their device, why oh why would I want to watch a movie trailer on my personal information manager?!!! to my horror palm went along with their nonsense and 'pimped' out the devices till reliability in build and operation suffered and battery longevity was devastated - battery life went from a month to now just a few hours, ranging from less than 3 in some devices to 7 at most in the most undesirable device (z21). I hate those who won't buy a Palm if it won't play a song or a movie trailer - just friggin' don't buy it and shut up about it alright.
The specs say the T|X runs Palm OS 5.4, and the camera says it's good for OS 5, without specifying a subrevision, so one would think it'd work ok. $80.00 doesn't seem out of line, either, though the reviews on Amazon are a bit mixed.
I also found this Veo camera, which is 640 x 680 instead of 1.3 MP, and is about 25% less expensive.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But... my Palm (the M505, soon to be the T|X) is always with me. On my Palm, I have, and use:
There are tons of other apps for the Palm, these are just the ones that I've found (so far) that are particularly useful to me. YMWDV.
What this all boils down to is that I am never without something interesting to do, a place to make, keep and use notes and lists, and share photos and ideas.
The T|X will add web browsing and email, a lot more memory, the ability to play back music and audiobooks, and basically the form factor won't change at all. The T|X is just about the size of my current M505.
I can turn on my Palm anywhere without aggravating anyone or looking for some desk space — in a meeting or a movie theatre, at my desk, in a car, on a train, bus or plane, in a restaurant, store or at a customer's job site (we do some consulting and fast note taking capability is always useful in that venue.)
Palm just about as fast as I can write "normal" text on paper. It's really a very good system, and I'm eager to see what the T|X's Graffiti II will be like.
Palms really aren't laptops, and vice-versa. I'd truly hate to be without a Palm or Palm-like device. I use it every day. I use a laptop very seldom by comparison. Mostly on trips when I'm going to be out of town for more than a day or two — at that point, things I need to do require a full blown computer. But I still take the Palm everywhere, and usually leave the laptop in the hotel room or the car. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Here are more reviews with some info answers good number of questions:
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/Palm-TX.htm
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/Palm-Z22.htm
I don't know about MP3s or Photos, I don't really see the need for those, but the Palm doesn't do what I really would want either. I have a laptop, and I use it for most things, but sometimes it's too big and awkward for what I'd want, and that's when I'd want something else. For me to justify the money and extra baggage that a portable would require it would need to do much more.
Essential features: access to important snippets of information with minor inconvenience.
Important features: perform functions allowing them to take the place of other electronic gear, not just add to the bat-belt.
Useful features: stuff I'd like, but wouldn't pay much extra for.
If the device can do some of the things in the optional list, that would be great. The most important ones would be to provide access to the Internet, or to act as a cellular phone. A phone could also do some of the PDA things, but in my experience they may be OK at displaying things like contact information and calendars, but they're awful at allowing you to update, add, and change things.
So far, I've found a few things that are pretty good. The Danger "hiptop" can do a lot of these things, but the one thing it's really missing is the ability to act as a modem-like device to get your laptop online. The blackberries are also good, but not all of them do instant messenging, and are weaker in the "multimedia" sort of area. Then there are things like the Treo, but I've heard it has major stability issues.
Does anybody know if a device that's small enough that you can hold it in one hand and store it in a pocket, but can act as a good mobile phone, modem, and web client?
Do not ask why I need that much memory, or I'll just toss a Bill Gates quote back at you.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Try buying another Palm, first. Not a new one, an old one.
I've had several handhelds, including two Jornadas, two iPaqs, and a T-Mobile phone... as well as a Visor, Visor Prism, and my current refurbished antiquated Sony Clie SJ22. After several years of trying to make my Pocket PCs live up to their potential, I went back to PalmOS 4 and I'm SO glad I did.
I can't imagine buying a PalmOS 5 device, though. Spending more money just to run 68000 code in an emulator instead of a real 68000, so I can do the stuff that I got the Pocket PCs for... and finally decided weren't worth the poor reliability and poor software selection.
I think that's whan Palm lost the plot. They should have stuck with the Dragonball chips for the run-of-the-mill handheld, and held off on the ARM until they had a real native ARM OS for it.
Oh, and blown whoever it took to keep Sony in the fold. Or at least put a bloody thumb controller on the thing so you can hold it comfortably in one hand while reading it. Though I guess Sony's no guarante of that... their last few models didn't have one either. Maybe someone stuck some stupid pills into the Palm OS 5 source code.
Is it just me or does "WiFi + Earphones + Microphone + PalmApp = IP phone?"
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
PalmSource was acquired by ACCESS. PalmOne (now called Palm), is still an independent company. Palm(One) license PalmOS from PalmSource, at least until 2008. But technically they can license any kind of OS they want, in fact they just licensed Windows Mobile 5.0 for the Treo 700w.
So as far as Palm is concerned they are just licensing the software from Palmsource, waiting (desperately) for PalmOS 5 successor, Palm for Linux.
I suppose the T|X will be a whole new experience, I'm hoping it'll be as reliable, but a web browser (via wifi no less) sure is a lot more complex than most of the stuff I've been using. So I guess I can expect some level of annoyance. Especially considering how pathological some web pages are.
Part of what made owning those Palms so pleasant was that they just worked. Well. I'm ready to find out, anyway. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I just keep my eyes open for something real cheap that I can plug a usb keyboard into to take notes of meetings. Does the Z one have a usb slot - the web pages for the zire-ish one were light on details.
I would just love to have something real small and a roll up keyboard to take notes at meetings.
Still looking
I saw in TFA that the T|X doesn't have vibrate. TFA for the Z22 didn't say. I recently was looking at new Palms to replace my m500, but didn't really like any of them since the ones with features I'd actually want, like a nice color screen, lacked vibrate. Don't the people designing Palms go to meetings and such? I've had a palm (pilot) since 1997 and one of the main things I've always used it for is the alarm feature, and it's always set to vibrate so it doesn't annoy other people I might be with. I'm just not very interested in one w/o vibrate. Maybe I'm the only one, but I find that hard to believe.
Does Garnet do Unicode? If not, is POL going to get it? It's an encoding mess to use Chinese on Palm OS.