Reviews
palmOne
Tungsten T5
A beefy, fast machine with a great screen, some dazzling
features, and almost too much power
The
new Tungsten T5, flagship of palmOne's current lineup, is a mixed
bag of stylish, upscale design, incredible specs and features,
and a few strange deficiencies for a PDA at its lavish $400 price
level. The target audience is handheld computing for professionals
and power users, and on most levels, it fits that niche nicely,
although on some levels, it may be too complex.
Sporting
silver-colored plastic casework within a few millimeters in size
of its half-the-price baby brother, the Tungsten E (from a couple
feet away, it's hard to tell the two apart), the T5 boasts 256
MB of memory, the most in any handheld sold so far, a blazing
Intel 415Mhz XScale processor, BlueTooth radio, a revamped interface
(PalmOS "Garnet" V5.4.5) and a beautiful 320x480, 65,000+ color,
half-VGA TFT (trans-reflective) screen.
On
first blush, one is immediately tempted to say "Wow! How much
can they pack into such a tiny machine!?" This baby is fast, although
despite its more than double the clock speed, it did not feel
any faster than my 200 MHz Tapwave Zodiac 2. Without crunching
numbers, I have a sense that Garnet has just gotten so huge, like
Windows XP, it simply needs that much more horsepower to run it
at an acceptable speed. It's also somewhat frightening to think
that my four-year-old Windows 98 machine is only 400 MHz and here's
a handheld that's even faster.
Specs
being what they are, part truth, part hype, the first thing you'll
learn is that of that 256 MB, 215 MB is available to the user,
while 160 MB serves as an internal Flash "drive" for almost any
kind of files you want to stuff into it, and 55 MB is dedicated
to "program" memory, used by PalmOS and internal applications,
features and data. Flash RAM is good. Lose your battery power
and you don't lose your data. The T5's battery is robust, and
I got about a full day of very heavy, almost constant use while
writing this review without a recharge.
The
T5's memory layout may be initially confusing, but think of it
like this: the program memory behaves the same as on earlier models,
in that it holds the data you can HotSync: appointments, contacts,
notes, memos, email÷you know the drill. The 160 MB, internal flash
drive is more like a built-in memory card, and requires new utilities
to manage its contents. The T5 also sports a single SD/SDIO/ Multimedia
card slot, so expansion possibilities are many and sundry, depending
on what kind of accessory card you want to shove into that slot.
Sadly,
there's no built-in WiFi. Before we carry on with a brief tour
of this new beefed up wonder kid, there's something quite important
you need to know...
Bug
fix patch online
If you buy a T5, the first thing you should do after taking it
out of the box and turning it on is to verify if it has the so-called
"Calendar Bug." Some early review units, including mine, and possibly
units on store shelves, have a bug which rears its ugly head when
you switch into the Calendar app and change from Agenda to Month
View -- it will lock up the T5 every time. Go to the URL below,
and follow the easy instructions to verify whether or not yours
has the bug. If it does, you'll want to download and apply the
OS patch supplied on that page. If not, mop your brow and be glad
you don't have to do it, as it is a time-consuming task.
www.palmone.com/us/support/
downloads/tungstent5/ tungstent5update.html
How some T5s slipped past Beta testing, never mind out of the
factory and into their boxes with this bug on board is a mystery,
but that page will answer all of your questions if you buy one.
While performing this flash upgrade to cure the bug, I was flabbergasted
at how long the T5 took to recover from a hard reset -- just over
two minutes while you sit watching screen after screen. First
a palmOne screen, with a progress bar, then a PalmPowered screen,
then a Tungsten screen followed by the digitizer set screen. Then
language selection, then another palmOne screen with a Graffiti
area and another without it, and another PalmPowered screen, and
finally another Tungsten screen. This is nuts! My 2.1 GHz XP Laptop
doesn't take that long to boot up from a cold start. A soft reset
on the T5 takes almost a minute. By comparison the Zodiac 2, at
200 MHz, running PalmOS 5.2.7 is ready to rock and roll after
a soft reset in six seconds. Strange, but true.
What's
in the box?
When I first saw the T5's box, my eyes immediately shot to the
"Free Hard Case" sticker on its lid. "Cool!" I thought, until
I read in the microscopic print that the hard case isn't in the
box! You have to buy the case, then do the rebate dance before
it's free. palmOne, please, just toss it in and don't make your
customers go through this.
The
T5 emerges from its little cardboard cube with a familiar silo-stored
stylus, yet another version of palmOne's black capped, silver
affair, which I found adequate, if a bit skinny and slippery to
hold. The T5 itself sports a non-removable leather book cover
style flip lid to protect the screen. It'd be nice if this lid
had some kind of fastening clasp, but it doesn't. You'll also
find a USB HotSync Cable. Sorry folks, no desktop cradle, and
as of this writing, one isn't available yet. To me, this is a
serious omission for a $400 PDA. The included AC power adapter,
yet another wall wart, plugs into a tiny hole in the T5's bottom
edge, or docks with the HotSync cable and the two plug in together.
And here we go again, yet another totally new style of both connectors,
so forget about using your older ones as spares. The cable snaps
into its port with a positive click, and sports a small round
HotSync button, but removing it from the port felt clumsy to me,
kind of a wiggle and tug routine. I can only speculate whether
it will stay tight and secure through hundreds of inserts and
removals, because it just has a strangeness to it that I can only
describe as "fragile." Time will tell.
Digging
deeper, we find a folded 9-panel "Read This First" leaflet -- the
initial set up guide, a Windows or Mac dual-platform CD-ROM with
the new Palm DeskTop and a bunch of other software to install,
a Graffiti cheat sheet sticker, and.. uhh... wait a minute...
where's the manual? You know, a book. No book.
The
T5's user's guide is a 172-page .PDF file on the CD. I don't know
about you, but with a machine at this price point, or for any
piece of consumer electronics that costs $400, or even $50, I
want a little manual I can carry around with me, not just to learn
about my new baby, but to refer to any time, anywhere.. palmOne
calls this "User Friendly" but I call it cost-cutting. A product
this powerful and complex begs out for a real paper manual, not
just a .PDF file. I'm sure not going to print out 172 pages.
Thankfully,
there's a handy and seemingly complete "BlueFish" T5 User Guide
right on board the T5. This guide is like a little built-in web
site with hotlinks, a back button, and bookmarking. Very nicely
done, but for some reason I can't fathom, the Graffiti entry areas
slide up as soon as this guide is opened, and they can't be retracted
with the status bar button. That's a head scratcher if there ever
was one.
Around
the machine
On the top edge of the T5 is the now-familiar slightly recessed
power button, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, an IR beaming window
that's totally invisible, and the SD card slot. On the back of
the silver case is the mono speaker (strange place for it, indeed)
and a reset hole. Unfortunately, it's back to paper clip sized,
although the stylus' black top unscrews to reveal a reset pin,
so leave your paper clip home.
Flipping
open the leather lid reveals a huge (for a PDA) screen, and a
logical array of silver hard buttons beneath it: Home, Appointments,
the five-way controller in the middle, Contacts, and Files. Pressing
any of these will also turn the T5 on, but they can be protected
from accidental pressing with a preferences setting, and their
functions reassigned to your favorite or most used functions,
as you'd expect.
The
new interface(s)
PalmOS Garnet sports an appealing new Favorites interface. Here
live quick single-tap links to often-used features, on a very
attractive screen that can have up to four pages of eight items
on each÷even a photo as a backdrop. Favorites is eerily similar
to Windows' XP's start button menu. Intentional?
Press
the Home hard button a second time and Favorites vanishes and
the familiar icon mode appears. Press and hold the status bar's
home button and there's a Most Recently Used app list. Again,
shades of Windows. No pun intended. Okay forget that. It was a
pun. I couldn't help myself.
Along
the bottom of the screen is the status bar -- a panel of tiny software
buttons -- Home, Find, Menus, Alerts, a clock (tapping this brings
up a window with a good-looking battery meter showing the actual
percentage of juice left, a nice touch), two memory meters for
the two parts of internal storage, the all-important screen brightness
slider, and a simple sound control. Next, to the right, is the
BlueTooth radio toggle button, although there's no external light
of any kind to let you know if BlueTooth is on or off, an icon
to turn on "scribble anywhere in Notes" feature, a button to rotate
the screen in and out of landscape mode, and the status bar along
with it, and finally one to slide up three different choices for
on-screen text entry -- Graffiti 2's triple windows, onscreen keyboards,
and legacy style soft buttons with dual Graffiti panes between
them.
If
all of this sounds confusing and baffling and overly-complex,
(and believe me, I've skipped over quite a bit due to space) well,
it is and it isn't. Like any next generation GUI, this huge array
of controls and buttons and screens and windows and user-controlled
preferences takes some getting used to, and can be approached
on many levels. Just because you have 20 choices where you used
to have two doesn't mean you have to use all 20. There's a lot
of power here, but spend a day or two poking and tapping around,
and it'll all start to feel natural and easy after a while. Like
going from an old car whose dash and knobs are familiar to a new
one that feels totally alien for a while, the more you live with
it, you learn where everything is and what it does.
A
world of file possibilities
With its whopping (for a PDA) storage, the T5 introduces a new
concept of Files to PalmOS. This is not ho-hum stuff, but truly
an innovation, and a very exciting one.
Using
new Drag and Drop programs that install to your desktop machine
along with the familiar but revamped Palm Desktop, you can now
just hook up your sync cable and drag files right into the T5,
and that means any kind of file, whether the T5 knows what to
do with it or not. In this sense, the T5 becomes a very powerful,
very portable solid state disk drive, cable of not only manipulating,
viewing, playing, and running Palm formatted files and applications
you "drop" into it, but also acting like a 160 MB USB Thumb Drive.
If
the Palm version of Adobe Acrobat Reader is installed on your
desktop and the T5 and you move over some .PDF files, they're
scaled and usable in your hand. Drag over .MP3 files and the built-in
tiny mode RealPlayer (or other MP3 player you might install) can
play them. (PalmOS RealPlayer really needs an equalizer or even
basic tone controls, as it's pretty bare-bones). Drop in Word
.doc files, Excel, or PowerPoint files, and Docs To Go lets you
view and edit them on the T5 in more ways than I can even describe.
But
this gets even better. You don't even need special software on
your desktop machine. And totally alien data can be stored on
the T5 too. To do this the T5 adds a radical new feature to PalmOS:
"Drive Mode."
Turn
"Drive Mode" on, and cable the T5 to any modern Windows machine
or Mac through USB and it will appear on the desktop or laptop
as just another portable, removable drive. If you have a SD card
in the slot, that also appears as its own drive. Use Windows Explorer
or the Mac Finder, open it up, and drag and drop files into folders
on the Palm. They're now in your hand. Unplug your cable and move
them to any other desktop or laptop. This is an absolutely breathtaking
feature, and one of the T5's best. I was literally stunned to
see how nicely it worked. The only downside is while in Drive
Mode, the T5 can't do anything else. All PDA functions vanish
until you quit Drive Mode.
Once
files are in the T5, shift PalmOS into Files mode to see them
in a list, just as you would on a desktop machine, including files
inside of folders. Rename them, move them around, work with files
on your handheld as you would with any removable drive. Drive
Mode is simply just too cool.
To
sum up
There's a lot more about palmOne's new Tungsten T5 than what's
covered here. This is a beefy, fast machine with a beautiful big
high resolution screen, a lot of storage, a new GUI, and some
truly dazzling features. Yet, in a way, it almost feels like it's
trying to be too much of everything, and it looks virtually identical
to the Tungsten E which is half the price. The palmOne T5's learning
curve will be pretty steep if this is the first PDA you've ever
owned. Whether you need this level of power and this many features
is a personal decision. The lack of a hard case, a real printed
manual, and a cradle in the box smack of cost-cutting.
--Harv
Laser
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