Thoughts on the Tungsten T27 January 2003 Guest Columnist Stewart Midwinter takes a look at Palm's new top-of-the-line and how it works for writers. Is the new Palm on the block a serious writing tool? Read on... A few thoughts after using a Palm Tungsten T for a couple of weeks... Never mind the hardware. Slight differences between one model and the next are of secondary importance compared to the usability of one model compared to another - and that comes down to software and the OS. I'm a long-time Palm user (bought my first Pilot 1000 in August of 1996), and I also own an older PocketPC - a Compaq Aero 2110. My new Tungsten T is my first colour Palm, and also my introduction to PalmOS 5. Here are some thoughts. Palm still, for me, retains an ease-of-use advantage over PocketPC in the basic PIM functions, and the general feeling of the OS is less clunky. Of course, I use a few add-ins to smooth things along and make life easier, like LauncherX, which greatly improves on the standard interface, and whose built-in gadgets simplify file manipulation and handling the expansion card. True, there are similar little utilities that help the PocketPC, like GigaBar, which greatly improves the OS on that side. Where I'm seeing deficiencies in the Palm OS is when I go beyond the basic functions. In particular, the management of files and programs in memory and on the expansion card just doesn't cut it, especially if you load on many programs (like I do), if you try to place all your programs and data on the card, and most especially when trouble strikes in the form of file corruption. A number of programs used by writers just don't work properly with the expansion card. Quickoffice apps will run off the card with a shortcut in RAM. Yay! But if a spreadsheet has a chart, Quickchart has to be in RAM or the chart won't display. So this app is broken too. And Quickword supports FontBucket fonts, which is great, but Quicksheet doesn't, which sucks. The two base Palm fonts are overly large for the hi-res screen of the TungT. Then there's QuickPoint, which crashes your TungT if you try to view anything other than speaker's notes in a presentation, even the sample presentation that they include with the app. DocumentsToGo cannot be loaded on the card, period, though of course you can put documents there. If you forget this and do put the program on the card, with a LauncherX shortcut in RAM, when you try to open a document the Palm freezes up. When you reset, subsequently you can't even open Docs2Go without crashing your Palm. You then have to open a file management tool like the freeware FileZ or LauncherX's built-in file tool and systematically hunt down all Docs2Go application files, preference files, and 68k emulation files in order to return to a stable situation in which you can then re-load the applications themselves. This is not a good example of ease of use of an expansion card! Which brings me to the next point. The PalmOS makes it difficult to easily clean out corrupted or undesired applications. Sure, you can use the basic launcher to delete applications, but this also deletes the data files. You can use the built-in delete function in LauncherX, and in that case you can separately delete the application, the preference files, and the data - which is a good improvement - but this does not always work. In that case you have to open a file manager and hunt down individual files. When you do that you might find, like me, that you have 365 files in RAM. What a schmozzle! Everything thrown into the same container! No wonder it's difficult to repair a problem. Imagine if every program on your PC's hard disk was in ONE FOLDER - that's the PalmOS model. The directory structure used by PocketPC is big improvement, because each app and its accompanying settings lives in its own directory; this makes cleaning up much, much easier to do. What happens when a file gets corrupted in PalmOS? You'll know this has happened when you try to open one of your Launcher tabs and the Palm freezes up. Say it's your Document Reader / Editor tab. Which app is causing the problem? there's no way to know, except one... hard reset, then load each of the 365 files back in, one by one, until the Palm crashes. then delete the previous file. This is laborious and tiring in the extreme! (BTW, SyncWizard simplifies this process, since you can just drag files out of your Backup directory on your PC, and drop them on the Palm window in SyncWizard one by one, or 10 by 10, until you find the problem). Another problem deals with files on the card. Some apps can only find files on the card if they were moved *by that app itself* from RAM to the card. If that app is corrupted, and you re-load it, all of its data files will now be invisible. You have to then delete the files off the card, sync them into RAM once more, then transfer them another time back to the card. Tedious and painful. Next, it's great that TungT includes support for an MP3 player, but loading files to the card plain sucks. The HotSync process is slow, slow, slow, even with a USB cradle. It takes over 10 minutes to load a 3-minute song file. Softick's CardExport is a big help, because it treats the card like an external SCSI drive, and drops that file transfer time down by a factor of 5, but that program is still somewhat unstable. The built-in process and VFS just don't cut it with large files. Summing up, all is well with PalmOS while things are running smoothly. I greatly enjoy using the OS, and the TungT screen is a joy to behold. I much prefer the interface over that in PocketPC2 2000 (yes, I know there have been some improvements in PocketPC 2002). But the real test of an OS is: how quickly can you recover from a system crash or total loss of the contents of your RAM? For me, right now, Palm OS 5 still fails this test. Try this right now. Grab your PDA, and give it a hard reset, wiping the RAM clean. Can you recover all your data and apps from your card, without recourse to a PC? If so, how long does it take? If not, and you're far from home, you are screwed. And that is not the performance that I want and expect from my PDA !! Maybe in 6 months or a year, more Palm OS developers will have a smoother integration of the card. Maybe more apps will run properly when installed on the card. Maybe there will be more apps that are optimised for OS 5. Right now, many apps just plain don't run in OS 5 or if they do, they seem to treat expansion cards as an after-thought, an add-on, not an integral and necessary part of today's PDAs. Do we have to wait for Palm OS 6 to see that? I sure hope not. cheers |