Palm T|X Personal Digital Assistant Review - A Brief History of Palm
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The PDA was not invented by Palm Computing, but the Graffiti and Hotsync applications created by the company revolutionized the fledgling industry. Palm Computing introduced the Pilot (later models were called PalmPilot then just Palm) with funding from US Robotics and the device became an instant hit.
When 3Com bought US Robotics (and therefore Palm Computing), the founder, Jeff Hawkins, jumped ship and created a rival company called Handspring. Among their other products, Handspring developed the Treo, a PDA and cell phone combination device. Meanwhile, 3Com spun Palm Incorporated into a separate company. Eventually, Palm Inc. split into two companies-- palmOne and PalmSource (hardware and software companies, respectively).
At this point, palmOne bought Handspring, bringing Jeff Hawkins back along with his Treo line of PDA phones and the company reverted to calling itself Palm Inc. (after a little legal wrangling). PalmSource has recently been bought by a Japanese company called ACCESS; the future of the Palm OS and its much speculated and anticipated ver. 6.0 is unknown.
Specs
The T|X is the last of the big-screen PDAs produced by Palm Inc. who has decided to concentrate on advancing the Treo, which has a much smaller screen and a miniature keyboard.
Sporting an Intel 312MHz ARM-based processor and 128MB of built-in storage (100MB usable), the T|X runs Palm OS 5.4 (known as Garnet). It has both Bluetooth and Wi Fi (IEEE 802.11b) built in, as well as an audio amplifier and headphone output for listening to media. The 320 x 480 high resolution display view can be rotated 90° for a wide-screen aspect.
The device comes bundled with Calculator, Contacts and Calendar apps, as well as the Blazer web browser, Documents to Go Professional (ver. 7), Pocket Tunes MP3 Player, and VersaMail email client. Also included are Bluetooth and Wi Fi managers. Additionally, there is a Solitaire game, which resides in ROM that I can't get off... I prefer Spider myself.
Installation
Since I was upgrading, I first synchronized my Clié, then plugged in the T|X. I discovered one minor annoyance (to me, anyway) -- the T|X has two cables: one USB cable with a large connector, and a power cable with a small plug that went in next to the larger one. Now, the Sony also has two cables, but they meet in a single connector that plugs into the PDA. Trying to plug one or the other cable into the T|X inevitably resulted in my accidentally hitting the sync button on the USB cable, whether I was ready and wanted to sync or not.
I plugged the T|X in, and the computer detected it right away. I selected the PDA name I wanted to install and the machine immediately set to installing from the Clié backup.
I was given a warning that there were a few programs incompatible with Palm OS 5 and that they would not be installed, which was fine... most of them were the Sony native apps anyway. I was pleased to find that the sync went extremely fast, compared to what I was previously used to. The only problem I ran into was with Documents to Go-- my previous version loaded on the T|X and the new version installed on the PC with the installation disk, so I had to remove all the old documents and reinstall them on the computer, then load them up again.
I may end up having to uninstall Docs to Go and reinstall from the T|X disc, as there seem to be some lingering issues between the old and new versions.
Next: Using the Machine >>
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