A Weekend of Palm Frustration

[bjarvis]

I've had a Palm PDA continuously for about 7-8 years now. I started with the Palm III, upgraded to the Palm V, had a brief time with a Palm Vx, spent two years with my Tungsten E and, last week, purchased a refurbished Tungsten E2 via eBay.

The upgrade path from one to the other has always been fairly seamless: one syncs up the old beast with the PC, plug in the new one, and resync to restore the data. Some minor apps stop working between models because of changes in hardware (eg. colour screen) and minor issues with the OS, but these have mostly been trivial.

• The E2 required me to rip out the old Palm Desktop application from my PC to install a version particular to the latest models of PDA.
  
• The E2 no longer uses the same old photo viewer but has now a "Media" application which does provide better photo album support but its viewing sucks badly and was utterly incompatible with the old files, requiring me to relocate all of my original images rather than simply copy data. And it's a memory pig.
  
• The E2 has Bluetooth support but syncing with my iMac via Bluetooth takes over 20 minutes: it should go much, much, much faster than that. I'm still checking into this to see what on earth has gone horribly wrong.
  
• The 2GB SD card which works delightfully well on my Tungsten E isn't even recognized on the E2. Somehow, Palm has introduced brain-damage to the newer model to make it incompatible with SD cards larger than 1 GB. WTF!?
  
• The E2 has interesting performance delays. When I hit one of the front buttons, I might get an instant power-up response, or I might get a 1-3 second delay. I can merrily scribble along in Grafitti, but it periodically pauses then rapidly catches up. At first, I thought it might be Bluetooth or infrared processing taking up a timeslice but shutting both off did nothing for the overall performance.
  

In short, it's a big disappointment. I'm largely finished moving my calendar entries, memos, to do lists & addresses to it and Docs To Go seems to work well, so I'll stick with the newer model --my Tungsten E was getting flaky in its old age-- but this hasn't been the smooth transition it should have been. And I'm still shopping for a 1 GB SD card at a reasonable price.

Comments

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

I;ve given up on mine. I have never been able to get it to sinc with my address book or calendar and I finally said screw it. I listen to books on tape on it, and that is about it now.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for a way to automagically download podcasts to the beast but I haven't managed it yet. The best I can do is download the MP3 and use a separate USB adapter to place the file(s) on the SD memory card. Horribly manual, not to mention wear & tear-inducing.

I like listening to NPR podcasts but there's a limit to how much tech stuff I'm willing to put myself through when I'm only half awake --and therefore dangerous-- before going to work.