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

[capitalcor.livejournal.com]

Although I have never had a palm, I can relate to when I was forced to change cell phones. I had a piece of crap once that worked anywhere and all the time. Once my contract expired, I was forced to get a flip phone. Sure it is shiny and pretty and glows, but it never has a signal and accessing the phonebook requires a code longer than your social insurance number. My condolences to ya.

[annoyinghandle.livejournal.com]

I've got an old T3 that you're more than welcome to, if you like. I'm not at all sure that you'd be able to upgrade to the latest version of the OS, and I don't know how well it would get along with a 2GB card. If you want to give it a try, email me.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reminding me. Danny says I should try Ebay for a Palm Zire 72 to replace the SECOND one I've destroyed by etching the screen.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

You do have to wonder when companies, or the designmers in this case downgrade components in a new model and then expect it to fly. Um, hellooo.

LG did that when they "upgraded" their flip phone with a very decent camera phone but sans bluetooth and audio playback capabilities to the essentially similar model with bluetooth and audio playback but literally did such a poor job of it's overall design that the reviews were pretty much universally negative, even the camera's image quality was downgraded. Does not make sense.

Sounds like the new tungsten has been hit with something similar.

But I'm glad you got it going.

[trulygrateful.livejournal.com]

I saw this and thought "I can't stand Palm Beach, FL either, but what the hec does he have against Palm Springs, CA?"

Then I realized that you weren't talking about places, but a piece of electronic gadgetry essential to your human existence.

I humbly defer since mine is a simple Zire 71 (or something like that).

[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.