Digital Common Sense

Interesting conundrum here just recently. My Palm Tungsten C died. Dead dead dead. Given that it’s about 3 years old, that’s not terribly shocking, although I have gotten better life out of other Palms, and have some really really old ones that still work fine.

You have to appreciate that in my normal routine day, with me are the T|C, a Blackberry, a Motorola V265 and a Motorola Talkabout two-way pager. Yeah, I’m fairly connected. And yes, I use them all. A lot. The right tool for the right job. They do have different needs they serve.

Replacing the T}C isn’t an option. It’s a requirement. But with what? I can still get the same model from Palm, but it’s really discontinued now.

Why not a Treo to replace the T|C? Well, the Treo has less memory, less functionality and no Wi-Fi built-in. I could add a Wi-Fi card, but then the slot for my 1G SD card would be consumed. All the reasons that kept me from getting a Treo all along prevail. It doesn’t give me what I need.

Why not another Blackberry? Well it’s an interesting mix of the best and worst of everything. A great email tool, but I need to at least read (preferably edit/create) Word and Excel documents on the fly. And I have hundreds of PDF files on the SD card. Blackberry is useless for those. The other thing that annoys me about the Blackberry (I have a 7250), it is without doubt the crappiest cell phone and form factor for a phone I’ve ever used. That’s the only model available through my wireless provider. And again, no Wi-FiWhile I use the one I have for some very specific things, it doesn’t serve my needs as the right tool for the job.

Now I’ve determined that I can’t combine to a single device. None meet my needs. I still need a handheld and phone as a single converged tool. While I lean toward Palm, I did go look. PocketPC or Windows Mobile or whatever it is we call wince (remember it began as WinCE) today all meet my needs. But to meet my needs I have to throw so many add-ons into the mix that they cost the same as a laptop. Cost-to-value ratio just never has been an equation that made any sense. It still doesn’t make sense.

If it were readily availble in the states at a fair market price, my choice night be the Sharp Zaurus SLC760 running Linux. But it’s only available in Japan, very pricey and not a viable option.

I admit I’m a fan of Palm. The T|C was my ninth Palm device, dating back to the very first one. They’ve always been solid and reliable. Three options - T|C, T|X or LifeDrive.

While replacing the T|C with a twin was the first thought, it turns out the T|X actually has more memory and horsepower for $100 less, sans the built-in keyboard. So the T|C dropped off the list of choices.

The LifeDrive - now there’s a whole different approach. 4G drive built in. Drag and drop file transfer. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. And a multimedia tool Handheld/PDA, USB flash drive workalike, iPod shuffle-like replacement (I’m not presently a pod person), and my 1G SD card slips right in to give my 5G of information in my shirt pocket.

In the end, I wound up with the T|X. The LifeDrive looks sharp, but has had lots of issues with battery life and heat. The fact that it’s a microdrive does impact performance, and just doesn’t make sense for 4G of space. So I’m fiddling a bit with the new T|X getting things reorganized one more time.

Well, that was posted on Saturday night. But for the second night in a row, the TungtemnT|X lost all battery charge overnight. I can’t live with a PDA that’s a rock in the morning and has to be plugged in all the time to operate. So it went right back where it came from. Words cannot my utter displeasure at this turn of events. Now the question remains is my problem because this new T|X isn’t so great, or did I just get a lemon? And do I care?

As it turns out, I do care. Enough that after two days of fighting with the T|X, but getting a chance to use it a bit in between problems, I decided to go get the LifeDrive after all.

While I’m not overly impressed with the idea of a micro drive in a handheld initially, I think about where things are headed. I actually want a handheld with an 80 Gig microdrive, so maybe I need to get off the flash mindset and think about reality. Swappable micro drives could do the trick.

I’ve loaded it up with about 300 meg of tunes and a couple hundred in podcasts. I’m still not a pod person, but I’m going to give it a whirl. Mostly I’m planning for another trip to DC in a couple of weeks and gearing up for some entertainment to pass the time en route. With the LifeDrive autosynching capability, it’s really easy to have iPodder pick up the stuff I want to listen to and have it all ready to go whenever I want to walk out the door.

Videos are the same. There some portable DVD stuff that allows copying movies. I’ve loaded a few videos I had around, but no movies. Mostly checking the quality. Battery life appears to be good for some work, surfing and a couple of movies if you’re really cranking on it. Enough to do a SEA-IAD flight anyway, but I’m more a book person on planes most of the time, so we’ll see.

I think one of the biggest pluses is the ability to click into drive mode and treat the whole things as a USB flash drive. I lopiedc Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird setups from a working USB drive and it flies like a champ. So any PC with a USB port becomes a launching pad for all the files I’ve installed and basic net connectivity tools.

I have a few programs I’ve cleaned out and disposed of. Old Palm software that’s been hanging around forever. I still have a couple to install and set up. Notably, I have to get MobilDB reinstalled and configured, then port my 90 some-odd databases back in for use.

So far, everything works. Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint files, PDFs, MP3, MOV, all the basics.

Naturally, if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I’ll keep quiet. Yeah, right….

Filed by Ken at 8:19 pm under General, Mobility & Handheld, Technology