3/13/2005 08:07:00 AM|||Larry||| Having spent the last 4 days fighting off a cold, there has been plenty of time spent with my Tungsten T5. The more time (it's about 4 months now) I spend with it, the better I like it. There are features that I am still discovering and old things that still amaze.

Old things:
The screen is still amazing. I keep it set at about half power and it can still be used as a night light. It is clean, clear and brilliant in displaying what you are working on. Reading e-books is a real treat on this screen and I don't even run a font smoother program or other enhancements. With the way it looks now, I am afraid of what might be discovered with third party products to make it better.
The non-volatile memory has yet to be tested because the battery life is simply amazing for what I do with it. I listen to "tungcasts" in the car on the way to work and running errands and for my daily sales work and have yet to get in trouble with the battery. In the four months I have had the unit, I have had to use the actual (or car) charger about 5 times. What I do is keep it plugged into the USB cable when I am near my laptop, which keeps it ever ready for a hotsync and recharges the battery. This method seems to keep mine in good shape.
The 256Mb of memory still thrills me every time I load a bunch of files. I still do not have a SD card (still on the wish list though) and yet, have 2 to 3 albums of music loaded, several movies of the granddaughter, pictures of the same and a ton of files in Docs-to-Go and right now as I look at it, there is almost 114Mb of free space total on the thing. WOW! is all I can say. However, I do look forward to the day when a 1GB SD card resides in the slot and I can load enough music to run the battery dead 40 or 50 times without a replay.
Drive Mode is still a great way to move files around. By keeping the unit plugged in when close to the laptop, popping into "drive mode" is quick and easy. Drag and drop the files and without hustle or bustle, they are on the extended memory ready for use.

New Things:
In reading Jeff Kirvin's blog, "Writingonyourpalm.net", he mentioned the link of pTunes with Windows Media Player. This was something I was not aware of and could not wait to try. Bigger WOW! on this. It was so easy to link and sync a playlist from WMP I could hardly believe it. With WMP you can build playlists in a lot of different ways, from ratings, to albums, to least listened to. It has been fun discovering different things to do with this link. Also, I was having a few problems with playback when dragging and dropping MP3 to the Palm, with skipping and some playback errors. Using WMP seems to completely resolve this issue. Now if I can just get pTunes to stop crashing the Palm, life will be rosey. I am still not sure what is causing this, but it only happens when I try to do anything else in pTunes while it is playing music. BOOM, locked up hard, which requires a soft reset, so far. This is an ongoing project to solve.

Needless to say, I am very happy with my Tungsten T5 and am thrilled with it as a replacement for my long time friend, the Vx it replaced.

I do not know what the future holds for PalmOne and PalmSource with the gloom and doomers predicting death soon, but as long as they continue to make devices that meet this standard or higher, I will remain faithful to the Palm platform. It is easy to use, very intuitive, and extremely versatile, as is shown by the number of programs that can be acquired for the Palm OS. Some time ago PalmGear boosted 20,000 programs for the Palm and that had probably expanded to 30,000 by now and the best part is a large percentage of them are free for the downloading and using. Free, I said...

What a country!
|||111072531718387530|||PalmOne Tungsten T5 Update