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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: PalmOne Tungsten T5 Handheld | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted PalmOne Tungsten T5 Handheld Reviews (cont...)Date: 2005-05-16 Best Palm OS device I've ever owned I've had the T5 for a month now and can honestly say it's the best Palm OS device I've ever owned. I've owned 2 color hi-res Clies before this. What I really like about the T5: *Great color screen. The clarity and brightness is better than the ones on my Clies. I've yet to see a PDA with a better color screen than this. Go to a retail store and check it out for yourself in person. It's fantastic. *Large internal drive. It's great to have the extra internal memory in addition to the ability to use an external card. It's live having two card slots. This way I can still keep a lot of apps on the handheld while swapping out the external card for movies or playing MP3s. *Plays movies beautifully. There is a free player for Palm OS devices on the net called TCPMP. It does a great job of playing movies on my T5. I just love it. To convert regular DVD movies for my T5, I use Pocket DVD Studio. *Non-volatile memory. I just hated losing all my data with my Clies whenever the battery drained or I had to do a hard reset. And this used to happed with regularity. With the T5's flash memory, data is retained on battery drains, though not on a hard reset. The good news is that in over a month of use, I've never had to do a single hard reset. Soft resets, yes. But not one single hard reset. So this is the most stable my data has ever been on a handheld. I like the T5 much better than the clunky slider design of the T3 which annoys me. Some complain about the design and finish on the T5, but to me the design is sleek and stylish. And I can't see anything cheap or flimsy with the finish. It feels solid and well-made in my hands. The T5 is not perfect. There is a slight hiss in the audio, which is otherwise of excellent quality (loud, clear etc.). The hiss is most noticeable when you wear the in-ear bud type headphones. So I simply use my external type compact headphones with my T5 and all is good. Still, this is something that PalmOne shouldn't have overlooked. Another thing to be careful about is the new file system the T5 uses, which is a little more finicky than older Palm OS systems. Some apps simply won't work well with it. However, I put well over 50 apps on my T5, and only about 3 or 4 I had to remove because of incompatibility. If you get a T5, make sure you do a clean install of all your apps, one by one, testing each as you go along. That's the only way you can weed out the apps that won't play well the T5. This is what I did and while I may have to do a soft reset now and then, I never have the need for hard resets. If you have the patience to do a clean install like this, you should end up with a T5 like mine -- a relatively stable device that handles MP3s, movies, and graphics beautifully,in addition to doing all the traditional things a Palm device should! Date: 2005-05-12 new features negated by functionality I agree with all of the other 1 and 2 star reviews, with the exception of battery life. The battery on the T5 is much better than previous builds. The T5 is truly a promising machine with many new features and memory improvements. Beautiful screen, navigation, etc etc. HOWEVER Let the buyer beware. Any of those new features advertised for the T5 (and they're all there) are completely negated by the functionality of the PDA itself. For instance, I have always used my palm products as an alarm clock. It's anybody's guess if the T5 is going to wake you from one morning to the next. The alarm volume is fine, but that's only when it decides to go off. The "snooze" feature is as hit-or-miss. And this is not error on the part of the user. More... - The clock, when it decides to go off, and other alerts such as meeting notifications will keep the T5 energized if you are not there to acknowledge the alerts, thus completely draining the battery. - The data entry interface regularly misprints your stylus inputs, and is very slow to update once you've written a character. - The T5 is not a sturdy device. Very cheap case and buttons, which sometimes need to be pressed twice. - Many soft and hard resets, never for any apparent reason. The list could go on to include the new plug device that doesn't interface with any other accessories, or the lack of voice recorder, wifi, etc. The important thing for the buyer to note is that he/she is likely to spend $300 on a device that is going to frustrate to no end on usability alone. Date: 2005-05-09 Don't bother I ordered a T5 for the office on April 28. When it arrived, I plugged it in for the 3 hour charge time recommended in the documentation. When I checked later--no charge. So I check the output of the charger with a voltmeter and nothing. Palm agrees to send me another one. When it arrives several days later it's an international adapter. Great---now I have an excuse to go back to Jamaica. Another call prompts them to send another one but a check this morning shows it not scheduled to ship until this Wednesday. The request was placed this past Friday. By the time I get the new part, I will have had this thing for two weeks and been unable to use it. Date: 2005-05-03 I'm very disappointed I bought this T5 for my husband for Christmas. It's now only May and the battery is dead. Not rechargable dead. He can't use it at all. That's a lot of money to pay for something that only worked for five months. What do I do now? I'm not buying another one. I wouldn't waste my money. He did enjoy it quite a bit while it worked. He did have problems with it syncing. I suppose I'll have to pay to get it fixed with another internal battery. If the battery is going to be such poor quality perhapse they should make it something more replacable. Just a thought. Date: 2005-05-01 a nice PDA I've just upgraded to the Tungsten T5 from the ORIGINAL Pilot 1000 (Us Robotics! PalmOS 1.0.6, no IR, no backlight, sync over a serial cable!) I just don't understand what the negative reviews here are all about. I bought my Tungsten T5 at the PalmOne store at Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta. The price (and rebate) were the same as what is currently offered here on Amazon, except THEY THREW IN THE WIFI CARD FOR FREE. Sweet! Some comments after a week of using it: 1) Wifi capability is not that huge a deal. Its nice to be in a coffee shop or some other wifi-enabled place (they are becoming more common each day) and grab your mail off of Yahoo or something, but its not as if I MUST be attached to the internet while I'm out and about. If I did, I'd have gotten a Treo or something with the Tmobile or Sprint data service. 2) In my opinion, this is not a high-end PDA nor is it being sold for a high-end price. If I wanted a "high-end" PDA, I would have bought a Treo 650, or one of the more expensive PocketPC offerings. The reviews trying to compare the T5 to those other offerings are not being fair. 3) The display is beautiful, and the extra resolution is very nice. 4) Synchronizing over USB is nice (I realize most PDAs do this now). You could also do Bluetooth if your computer supports it. The Tungsten T5 will charge up via the USB cable if you leave it plugged in, which was a nice surprise to me. It might be less nice if you have it plugged into a battery-powered laptop though. 5) The T5 can do a lot of other nice things like play mp3 files. Buy a $75 1GB SD card, load it with mp3 files, plug it in, and who needs an iPod Shuffle? ;)
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