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.