Palm Tungsten E

Yesterday morning in the dark I dropped my Visor Prism, which I’ve been using for at least 5 years, and I think longer. The screen broke just enough to lose a line of pixels. However, this grew to 4 lines by lunch time.

On the way back from the LPLUG meeting, I stopped and picked up a Palm Tungsten E.

Observations thus far.

The speed increase from the Visor is like upgrading from a 486 DX to a 1.8GHz Pentium. Or something like that. Yow!

The colors, and the screen clarity, are simply amazing. Photos look better than on my laptop.

Unfortunately, a number of the applications that I use frequently, don’t run under OS5. I’ve been running the same apps for 4 or 5 years, so there was no need to upgrade. Now, things that were free are no longer free, and so I can’t simply transfer data over from the old device, and in many cases I’ll have to spend $20 or $30 to retain the same functionality.

And, finally, it appears that Coldsync can’t sync to it. Yet. Presumably, it will with a 2.6 kernel.

I have not yet decided if I’m going to put up with these annoyances, and sync on Windows for a while, or if I will try to get something different. The OS5 thing can’t be got around without getting something old and/or refurbished. The Coldsync thing can be got around by getting a different device, but I’d have to do some research to find out which one. And since I’m expecting to upgrade to 2.6 as soon as there’s a solid distro with the new kernel, I can probably put up with it until then. I think. We’ll see. I have 14 days to return it.