Impressions of a new Palm T|X

For those who didn't hear, Palm announced a couple of new handhelds this week, and one of them is the Palm I've been waiting for all my life: the Tungsten T|X. It's basically a T5 with WiFi, Bluetooth and 128 MB of RAM, and I'm fortunate enough to be holding one in my hand. Yep, even as I type this. I just can't put this bad boy down.

I've uploaded a set of opening and unpacking pics to our TUAW Flickr account. In a week or so I'll post a more thorough review, but for now I thought I'd post a few initial impressions in case anyone else out there is thinking about grabbing one of these:

• The T|X is just slightly heavier than than T5 - no surprise.
  

• It has a dark steel blue body, but in most light it almost looks black to me

• Software install and setup went just fine, including enabling the iSync conduit (I'm running Tiger 10.4.2). Calendars, contacts and todo's are syncing perfectly.
  

• WiFi works well and it maintains a strong signal. One quirk so far: the T|X couldn't connect to my AirPort Express with WPA security enabled. Guess I need to learn a little more about wireless security compatibility.

• The screen is bright. Really bright. I haven't compared with another Palm yet, but this is the first Palm I've having to turn down the display's brightness on a bus ride home at night.

• There is no "Disk Mode" application, like the T5 and LifeDrive have. I don't know yet if I can download this from Palm, but out of the box I don't see another way of mounting the T|X as a drive like the T5 and LifeDrive.

• There is also no "File Browser" application either. More investigation pending.

• This seems to be the first Palm made during/after Palm's recent re-naming, as the name atop the device is "palm," not "PalmOne."

All in all, I'm happy with the device. I've installed a few standard programs like a newsreader, and everything's humming along just fine. I'll work everything into a comprehensive review examining this device as a Mac PDA, but in the meantime feel free to ask me anything you'd like to know in the comments of this post. I'll try to answer as many questions as I can.