Palm TX Handheld

Palm TX Handheld | excellent.

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Palm TX Handheld

	Palm TX Handheld Palm Palm average customer review:based on 652 reviews view larger image
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Palm TX

This is my 2nd TX - the first damaged by an unfortunate accident. Went back for the successor unit as I'm extremely pleased with the product.

excellent.

excellent product. wi-fi is fantastic, and does what its supposed to do. arrived fast, and in excellent condition. bluetooth is a great tool to have for transferring pictures from a phone to the handheld. excellent tool.

A high end Handheld with nice features and price

The Palm TX is Palm's new wireless handheld. It features a improved 320 x 480 pixel screen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless and 128MB of nonvolatile memory. The TX adds Wi-Fi at a very competitive price.

Palm has announced a new partnership with Microsoft, so the Palm TX may have the last Palm OS version that there will ever be. The Palm TX crams a lot of useful features into one tiny device that will many any gadget lover drool. In the Palm TX, they were able to fit Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity into one gadget, which is rare for Palm. It's a pretty well-rounded little PDA, but how does it all come together? Let's take a look...

At first glance, you may mistaken the Palm TX for PalmOne's earlier Tungsten T5 due to it's design. The traditional silver case is replaced with a sleek bluish-gray case. The Palm TX is quite compact too, measuring only 5 x 3 x 0.5-inches and weighs about 5 ounces, which is very pocket-friendly. Text and images are quite sharp and brilliant on the Palm TX's 4-inch diagonal LCD display. On the bottom of the display, there is a little toolbar for commonly used features, similar to what the Tungsten T5 has. At the top of the Palm TX, there is an SDIO/MMC slot for expansion,
stylus holder, power button, and a headphone jack.

Internally, the Palm TX features a 312-MHz processor, 128MB of memory, and wireless connectivity. The Palm TX's Wi-Fi capabilities are compatible with both WEP and WPA encrypted wireless networks. You can also access the Internet via using the TX's Bluetooth connection to connect via a Bluetooth cell phone. The SD memory slot can accept up to 4GB (I am not sure about the 8 GB Cards as I don't have one) of added memory, which makes storage for the TX almost unlimited. Also, DONOT use SDHC with the Palm TX as it will not work with it.

Software included with the Palm TX include the Palm OS 5.4, VersaMail 3.1, and Document To Go 7. There is also Pocket Tunes, which is a portable media player that will play your MP3, WMA, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis audio files. Palm also includes a few games and handy programs, like a nice calculator and world clock.

I have an iPod, and without a doubt, the Palm TX could never be compared to it for playing the music files. The iPod is easier and more flexible to use as a music player, So, your palm can play music files but don't expect too much.

The Palm TX performed pretty well too with me. It smoothly plays video, opens Word documents, and opens Web pages. The internet browser is not that good but it is still usable, don't expect the flexibility of the iphone's safari browser. The only weakness to the Palm TX is its battery life, which is just above 4 hours with the Wi-Fi antenna off. The average PDA gets at least above 5 hours and even up to 8 hours of battery life.

The main advantage of the Palm TX, its ability to run lots of medical and pharmaceutical software that can help medical students and professionals to make their job easily. I mainly bought it to run my favorite Pharmaceutical software such as Drug IX, Martindale, Medical directories and all of the nice pharmaceutical software library for the palm OS. It makes my life easier while working in research and in public pharmacies. It is a very good choice for medical students. Although, I think the iPhone will change these concepts when the same software is available for the iPhone.

Also, the palm TX freezes from time to time but it reboots after reset very quickly not as slow as the Palm LifeDrive.
In conclusion, the Palm TX is a welcomed addition to the Palm PDA family. It brings a lot to the table, including excellent Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity features as well as a lot of expansion opportunities, including large Secure-Digital memory cards. The included multimedia applications also make the Palm TX an excellent portable media player. The TX is great for the on-the-go
person who wants all their data in one place and the chance to listen to some music in between.

Finally,

Advantages:

* Excellent Screen
* Dual Wireless (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi)
* Rich Software, one handed operation
* Very good for medical software

DisAdvantages:

* not 100% stable
* Low battery life
* No Voice Rec, Vibrate, LED
* No included cradle

Finally,

It is a very good buy for the Price (259 $), Highly recommended for medical students.

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First Impressions: Not Perfect, But Still Impressive

I've owned a Palm Vx since shortly after they first came out, which was probably about 7 years ago. I've used it off and on up until just recently, and even today with its grayscale screen and 8MB of memory it's still a solid little PDA that gets the job done.

Still, I knew it was time to upgrade because so much of the software I wanted to use simply wouldn't work on the Vx's minimal memory and antiquated (albeit stable) OS. So I asked for and received a Palm TX as a gift recently.

Here are my impressions after only one week of use:

PROS

- The Palm OS itself. There's nothing sweeter than turning on your Palm and instantly the screen comes on right where you left off. No booting up, no shutting down, just instant gratification the way it should be. Now if only the people at Microsoft could figure out how to do the same with Windows!

- Great graphics and screen quality. The included music video clip looks very good, although I'm sure it falls short of an iPod/iPhone.

- Navigation has a very "fluid" feel to it. Screens appear and disappear smoothly. You can tell Palm has put some thought into the interface design of the latest OS.

- Expandable memory slot. I have yet to use it, but I'm looking forward to popping in an SD card loaded with MP3s and trying out the TX as a portable MP3 player. It's also a great way to keep your data separate from the programs, assuming the program you use supports storing its data on a memory card.

- Collapsible graffiti area. Gives you full access to the screen real estate when viewing photos, videos, spreadsheets, the Internet, or other documents.

- Rotatable landscape/portrait mode. 'Nuff said.

- WiFi. I did have some trouble setting it up at first, but the problem turned out to be mine and not the Palm's. I finally sorted it out and bingo: I had the Internet in the palm of my hand!

- Bluetooth enabled (although I have yet to try it out).

- Decent collection of software to use right out of the gate. So far I've only needed to install a few of my trusty old programs to the TX. Documents To Go is especially cool, giving you the ability to open and work with MS Office Documents.

CONS

- Graffiti 2. Ugh -- I'm already looking forward to reverting my TX back to Graffiti 1, as soon as I get up the nerve to do it (apparently you can't go back to Graffiti 2 once you convert to Graffiti 1). Yes, I know Palm had no choice because of a legal settlement, but they should have at least settled out of court and bought the rights to Graffiti 1 or something.

- Tactile feel of the graffiti writing area is kind of mushy, as if you're writing on a thin film of Jello. My Vx had a hard glass surface that took a real beating, whereas the TX screen feels soft like I'm going to dent it with the stylus. I think a good screen protector film is needed here, something with some texture to it to give it a better tactile feel.

- Palm Desktop. Yes, it works, but Palm has done little to enhance this software since I bought my Vx back in 2001. That's a long time to go without a significant upgrade, if you ask me.

- The bundled encryption feature is painfully slow, too slow to make it useful on a regular basis, which sort of defeats the purpose.

- Although it's got 16x the amount of memory that my old Vx does, 128MB of onboard memory just doesn't seem adequate in these days of multi-gigabyte iPods and other MP3 players. I have an MP3 player that's at least 3 years old and barely the size of a pack of chewing gum, and even that has 1GB of flash memory.

- The sync cable has a terrible plug on the end. The engineers at Palm really botched this one. You have to push hard to get it into the TX, and each time I go to remove it I feel like I'm going to break it off. Plus it's all too easy to accidentally press the HotSync button when you're trying to remove the cable from your Palm. A major engineering faux pas, in my opinion.

I'll probably update this review as time goes on and I've got more to add, but for now if you're a Palm enthusiast you'd be doing yourself a favor to upgrade to the TX if you haven't already done so.

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Lost Reliability - I'm going back to an analog-life

I have been a Palm user ever since they were owned by 3Com and haven't switched to a smart phone... yet. I was a brief Pocket PC user but that platform sucks.
This product was to replace a LifeDrive that died and frankly was never more than barely alive. Although it is already more dependable than my LifeDrive I have had continual problems with syncing, resetting and just plain poor reliability. It may be due to 3rd party software I have downloaded but even still in this day and age of tech "necessity" these things should be worked out.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

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