Posted on Tue - July 18, 2006

Palm TX review


I got my Palm TX and I have been experimenting. Here I will cover the actual device and the built in software.

The TX fits my hand nicely and the controls are fairly intuitive. I do miss the slight curves of my m515 though. That five way navigation takes a little getting used too.

The screen itself is absolutely gorgeous. I am looking forward to carrying photos on this one.

Battery life is significantly longer than what I had been using, and much better than my m515 was when it was new. Internet access eats up battery time though.

Transferring the files brought up the first problem.

There are two date conduits, Calendar and Datebook. Despite the name on the Desktop software, Datebook doesn't transfer to the Palm TX. Calendar does. Since the two conduits conflict, you'd be better off disabling the Datebook conduit entirely. Of course, categories still don't transfer with the appointment information, so I will have to go back through and recategorize things as I have time.

The new Calendar program works OK, but I am still switching to DateBk 6. I just really love the idea of colors and icons to help keep things straight.

Contacts works pretty well, with three exceptions. I really like the ability to send an email or open a web page from a contact file, but I'd long since set up my own files so that I have fields for a secondary email and a secondary web site. It would be nice if I could assign those fields to do the same. The search function in contacts is still among it's weakest feature. And finally, not everyone has or wants a cell phone. It would be nice if the dialer had an option to work as an old-style acoustic dialer.

I dislike the favorites screen, although I suppose I could like it with time. Two columns would be nice.

The calculator is desperately underpowered.

WiFi range is fairly short, about twenty-five to fifty feet on average. And of course, WiFi really drains the battery. Still, it's great to be able to surf the web with a few keystrokes.

I did find some problems with the web browser, but fortunately those seemed to be mainly non-compliant web pages.

I don't like the standard sounds.

Mail is okay, but could be more intuitive. A word of advice, a fair number of high capacity ISPs routinely block outgoing port 20 for anything except their mail server, so you might have to change the settings to a nonstandard port like 587.

The collapsing graffiti screen is pretty amazing, as is the screen rotation.

I don't like Graffiti2. That could be because I was used to Graffiti, and I am having real problems with T's, F's, and I's.

I haven't played with Office Docs yet.

Bluetooth range is fairly short, about 8 feet and the TX has to be at a certain angle at that range.

Overall, it is a pretty good device. I'll be writing about the old and new software I've experimented with.

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