Palm T|X

Palm T|X
========

I have got a "new" Palm T|X [1]. It is not for me but for my wife. Thus
I will little possibility to play with so I'm trying to summary my
experience with the machine just now.

We already had the T|X at home long time ago. It was my wife's first an
only actual PDA device. It was in times when even the project Gutenberg
[2] offered books in Plucker format so it was easy to read the e-books
on the device. But our original T|X was not in perfect technical state
(the touchscreen was unable to calibrate properly, for example) and the
device died after few years. Then we replaced it with the Ainol Novo 7
Paladin tablet (a 7" thingy with a MIPS CPU but with the Android).

The "new" one is only little used and it seems to be fully functional.
My wife already tested it and she found no issues.

So what I like on the T|X:

1. Big color screen: it makes reading in bad light conditions very easy
(it is important as she is going to use the device during her train
rides, usually in morning and in evening). The tiny screen of the Sony
UX50 is cute but this one is easier to read on.

2. Compact size: it's even a bit smaller than the Palm III so it fits
in most pockets. The 7" tablet doesn't.

3. Speed. Yes, I mean speed. The device is FAST. The PDF Viewer (it's a
port of the infamous XPdf) is much faster here than the same program on
the UX50.

4. Very good stylus. The tiny thing on the UX50 is not bad but this is
the actual stylus. It's not worse than the stylus of the old Palm III.

5. Audio jack. The normal 3.5mm one.

6. SD card port. Yes, it's Palm so use is limited and by default it
supports card up to 1 GB only. But it is useful for PDFs, music files
and such stuff.

7. About 100 MB of on-volatile user-accessible memory for Palm programs
and application (the UX50 has 16MB, the Palm IIIxe has 8MB). It's more
than I can use, I think.

And what I dislike:

1. Connectors: no standard connector is here. It use Palm-specific
something which can be found on few other Palm models at best. But we
have at least 2 cradles so we can live with that.

2. The battery. It's build-in and its soldered to the mainboard.
That's simply stupid.

3. The OS: Actually I have little problem with the Palm OS. Except
language support. To be able to read Czech text I have had to buy a
commercial language package which even today costs as much as the Palm
itself (for OS 2.0-4.0 there was a GPL-license one but there is none
for the Palm OS 5.x).

References:
[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Palm%20TX
[2] gopher://dante.pglaf.org/