Palm TX user review

A little over a week ago wifey and I broke down and bought two Palm TX’s as anniversary presents for ourselves to replace our aging Sony Clie T615’s. You know you’ve turned into an old married couple when you buy gadgets for your 16th anniversary. On the other hand I took her out on a day long date on the actual day so there’s still romance there :-).

I know that Palm spells the name of this new device Palm T|X but I and wifey much prefer just "Palm TX". It’s the Texas Palm. Unfortunately it’s not nearly as big feature-wise.

In general we both like them. There are some things we really like (built-in wifi, larger screen) and some we don’t. They’re all detailed below.

Gripes:
1. It’s at least two years behind the curve. This would have been an industry-leading device back in 2003. It’s a little crusty in 2005. We’ve been waiting for wifi from Palm for a long time (built-in, not add-on) but it’s finally here in a form and feature set we want at a time when we’re looking to upgrade.
2. Customizability (or limitations of) are silly.

a. You can only select from two apps for the "home" button. That’s horribly stupid. I should be able to select any app I want for my "home" button.

b. You have to press and hold to customize the silkscreen buttons. That’s dumb. You should be able to customize all the buttons, hardware and virtual through the preferences panel.

c. Sound themes? Where are they? We still only get a handful of alarm sounds to choose from. Why are the sound selections limited to what we had in ’96?

d. The Launcher is still extremely limited. Is Palm expecting third parties to do all their work? License something if you have to Palm. The default launcher is so old it’s cracking at the seams.

3. Turning it on is unreliable. Sometimes the power button just doesn’t respond and a soft reset is needed to get it going. This is with no hacks loaded. For a while I’d thought it was something I installed and decided to do a hard-reset, cleaning of my backup directory (getting rid of hacks of all kinds) and a reload. Even that didn’t fix things. At the moment I think that the auto-lock timeout mechanism is somehow locking the entire device so that it won’t power back on. I’ve got auto-lock turned off and for the last 12 hours it’s been behaving just fine. I’ll give it another day before I send in a support email to Palm.

4. OMG! What has happened to Graffiti?! Actually we know, but damn G2 is horrible. It’s unusable crap. No wonder everyone else prefers keyboards. Anyone who’s had to learn to use a Palm device since Xerox screwed the industry would of course rather use a little tiny keyboard. Using Graffiti2 is like having one hand cut off. Garbage, garbage, garbage. I’m using some hacked G1 libraries and loving it. G2 must die.

5. No alarm/recharge LED. What’s up with that? LEDs don’t cost much and I much prefer to have the visual indication that an alarm is going off or the unit really is charging without having to turn the device on.

6. Writing on the screen is tricky at best. Sometimes it works as expected and other times it switches between selection and writing for no apparent reason. This feature is a great idea but it’s still not fully cooked and needs more work from Palm and tweakability.

7. Full daylight viewing is almost impossible. The screen is very hard to see when outside in bright sun.

Wishes:

1. We would love to have a phone in this device. No, I don’t want a phone with PDA features, I want a PDA with phone features. I’d be very happy with all the dialing done as a virtual keyboard (no, I don’t want a little-bitty keyboard on my pda) and some sort of retractable earpiece. Or maybe some kind of common connector scheme (yeah, I know the manufacturers are not likely to cooperate on that) that allows me to plug them together when I need and otherwise keep my pda, phone and camera as separate devices. Maybe I’ll go full bluetooth some day. For now though, this is my first BT gadget.

2. That Palm would focus. They came out with a great device almost 10 years ago (wifey and I have been users since the Palm 1000 came out) but they don’t seem to know what they want to produce. Features on the Palm devices have stagnated, they can’t decide if they’re a PDA company or a phone company, they’ve split the company, renamed themselves a couple of times now, come out with a plethora of similar devices. Come on Palm. What are you doing?

3. That they’d fix my gripes.

Likes:

1. The larger screen and virtual graffiti area. I love it. Can’t get enough.

2. Wifi. Once I remembered that I’d disabled 802.11b support in my router things worked mostly fine. I have had a few problems with DHCP and sometimes not being able to get an IP address but after I changed the TX’s to use static IPs things got much better.

3. Reasonably small footprint. The TX isn’t much larger than the Clie T615 so I didn’t have to get used to something much larger or smaller.

4. Flash memory. Nothing pissed me off more than to leave my clie for a couple of days and come back to a dead machine that had to be completely reloaded. Not having to worry about that again is wonderful.

We’re keeping them and reasonably happy but still wish Palm would get their act back together. We’ve been palm users since the first Palm device came out and would rather use their products but at this rate they won’t last a lot longer.

Update Nov 7, 2005

After playing with the TX a bit longer and talking with a few other users I’ve come up with the following:

1. Having the TX auto-lock 30 minutes power-down seems to be working just fine so far. I don’t know what the fatal combination was as I’ve also been leaving BT and WiFi on as well (I usually try to turn them off when I’m not explicitly using them). I’ll keep an eye on it but so far I haven’t seen the power-on lockups in the last week. 30 minutes later… Ok, just to clarify, I turned on auto-lock with a delay last night and hadn’t had any problems until I wrote about it. My TX just failed to come back on. I’m turning the delayed auto-lock off again.

2. A phone add-on combined with a bluetooth headset would be really nice with this device.

3. Palm needs to be publicly flogged for yet again changing behavior of the OS and breaking apps (TealMaster specifically). Palm, what happened to the (apparently obsolete) idea of stability? Stop following in Microsoft’s footsteps and get back to trail blazing!

4. I also haven’t seen the power-on problem where it takes a herculean effort to get the device to come on. I suspect that the power lockup I’d mentioned before and this problem were related. It’s been behaving itself for a week now.