It's a sickness, I know. I can't stick with a single PDA for more than a year. My Zodiac lasted almost nine months, the Tungsten T3 before it a month, the Tungsten E before that almost a year, which has to be the longest I had any single PDA. Part of it is my incessant need for change (I know, I know). But I gotta say as much as I loved the capability of the Zodiac, I missed my Tungsten E. The E was the closest to perfect I'd had in a PDA, which was why I hung on to it for so long. I only grudgingly gave it up when it became obvious to me that I really needed more than 32MB of RAM (irony alert: see below) and a 320x480 HVGA screen. The T3 was good and the Zodiac was better, but I remember telling all my friends I'd love to have a Tungsten E with more memory and a HVGA screen. That would be perfection.
Well, now I have it. The T5 isn't perfect, but it's damn close. I can hear the howls of derision already, but hear me out. I've said before the T5 isn't the perfect übergeek device, but for a writer on the go, it's great. It may not have WiFi, it may not have a vibrating alarm, but it's got what counts.
First let's go over the physical details. Other reviewers, notably
Julie over at the Gadgeteer, have gone over the specs and measurements and pictures (oh my!), so I'll focus on impressions. It looks like my beloved Tungsten E, just a quarter inch longer and a darker metallic (but not metal) casing. The D-Pad is similar to the E's except that it handles down keypresses with adequate feedback. The speaker is on the back, where they could install a much larger and louder speaker than found on the T3. This thing can wake you up, no problem. The finish seems about the same as I remember from my E, and the genuine, authentic pleather flipcover works pretty well.
Much has been made of the new connector, so let's talk about that. The new MultiConnector is about the same size as the older Universal Connector, but much more stable. It also breaks the power pins out into a segregated section, so you can plug in just the charger and leave the data pins alone. This is similar in a lot of ways to the way the Zodiac connector works, so I felt right at home. The change in connector does mean older peripherals won't work, but I don't see that as a big deal. Keyboards are IR or Bluetooth these days, GPS is Bluetooth, the T5 doesn't need the bulky battery sled that was almost a requirement for the T3... What's left? Why is it so important to keep the old connector? I don't get it. I'm using the same keyboard and the same phone with my T5 as I used with my Zodiac. Yeah, I had to buy new chargers, but I have to buy new cases, too. If you don't like it, keep what you have.
The only real complaint I have with the exterior of the T5 is one that I shared with the E upon which the T5 is so clearly based. There's no charging LED. I can deal with losing the vibrating alarm (I don't notice it when my phone does this half the time) and I can deal with losing the voice recorder (which I always thought was a good idea but never used because I'm always listening to audio anyway). But would it have killed PalmOne to put a simple multicolor LED in this thing? Something to glow orange while charging, green when charged, and flash red when an alarm goes off would be ducky, but no, not here. Like the E, I have to turn this device on, unplug it and then check the battery level before I know if it's really fully charged. Feh.
On the other hand, the battery life on this thing is stellar. The battery is rated at 1300mAH, a full 250mAH less than my Zodiac. Add that to a 416MHz processor compared to the Zodiac's 200MHz, and I expected a bit less time per charge than I had with the Zodiac, but more than I had with the T3 and its 900mAH battery. I don't know if it's the power-saving features of the PXA270 processor or better power management in Garnet or the fact that flash memory doesn't require an erg of power to keep data, but the T5 not only lasts longer than any other PDA I've had, but the power curve is smoother, dropping in smaller increments. I've been sitting here at a local restaurant typing, checking email, checking RSS feeds, surfing, listening to music for about three hours now and I'm down to 54%. The Zodiac would be down to 30% or less by now. I'm happy. Also, chargers are much easier to find. I have a car charger in my car, I keep the AC brick plugged in by my nightstand for charging while I sleep, and yes, the T5 will trickle charge by USB. It doesn't look like it because the charge isn't sufficient to trip the little lightning bolt on the battery icon, but your voltage will go up on USB if you don't use the device for anything else while you're sitting at your desk.
As we were all told as kids, it's what's inside that counts. So let's look inside the T5.
This is the first in the Tungsten line to use non-volatile memory and PalmOne's NVFS, or Non-volatile File System. While the official specs list the T5 as having 55MB of program memory and 160MB of internal storage, this is only part of the story. In reality,
the T5 has 256MB of flash memory and 32MB of volatile RAM. The key difference between this and previous Palms is that the T5 works much more like a PC when it comes to handling memory. That 32MB holds the operating system (16MB, copied from that 41MB section of flash that no one talks about), about 6MB of heap space and 10MB of user data. This means that you can have 6MB of applications and 10MB of data running at any given microsecond. Most applications are smaller than this, so that's not a problem. System finds are still generally snappy because the OS can load all your PIM databases into that 10MB of RAM all at the same time to search through them. This only becomes a problem if you try to load a single chunk of data larger than 10MB. Otherwise the OS does a pretty good job of swapping data from storage in and out of RAM, just like a PC operating system. Some media applications (I'm thinking image editors) and networking apps (browsers are notorious for needing large memory storage for image-heavy page display) may need to be rewritten to support better memory paging, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised. Now that applications like DateBk5 and Shadow have been rewritten to support the T5's memory structure and PIM databases, all the software on my T5 runs like a champ.
Sort of.
I've noticed some oddities. Some of the popup menus, notably, the app selection in the buttons pref panel, extend "beneath" the non-dismissable Graffiti area. The blue highlight that shows you which part of the UI has the focus of the D-pad (a really nice feature for one-handed navigation) doesn't always disappear when it should. When I've got the system loaded to the gills with background processes (Fonts4OS5 and FontSmoother loaded, playing an MP3 with PocketTunes in the background, using pToolSet to augment the system find, clipboard and other stuff, ShortCut5 to use shortcuts my keyboard can type, probably a few more I've forgotten about), things can bog down. This is the first device that I've actually seen pFindTool disappear and fill in the actual Find dialog character by character. Sometimes ShortCut5 will "type" the expanded text slower than I could have with Graffiti. I should note, however, that these slowdowns are entirely the result of my loading tons of third party software. Remember you've only got 6MB of heap and 10MB of data memory. If you've filled a lot of that with background processes, it leaves less for what you're actually doing. Optimizing my system for speed is a work in progress, but out of the box the T5 is quite snappy. Most of the slowdowns happened after I tricked it out.
I should also mention that because of the overhead of NVFS, databases can take up more space on the T5 than they do on the T3. Because even the internal memory is still basically a hard drive under the hood, every discrete piece of data will take up at least 512 bytes, the minimum cluster size for NVFS. If you've got a 3MB file, that's not a problem. But a 24 byte resource file will take up 512 bytes. Put ten of those together and what would have take up 240 bytes on the T3 will take up 5K on the T5. But in actuality this isn't really a big deal. It could be if you only had the 55MB internal memory to play with, and this system is a much bigger headache on the Treo 650. But on the T5, it's trivial to install large data files and even some programs in the 160MB internal "card", freeing up more of that 55MB for other things. I've got my T5 loaded for bear, and I still have 29MB free of that 55MB. By comparison, I had 90MB used out of the 128MB on my Zodiac.
The internal card works like any other VFS volume, except it's non-removable. But it's still darn useful to have around, since most applications these days can store data on a card rather than internal memory. It's a great place to put documents, ebooks, dictionaries, and yes, even MP3s.
In addition to standard HotSync, there are two new ways to get data into this device. The first and coolest is Drive Mode. This is an application on the handheld that you run and tap "Start Drive Mode" to enable it. If your T5 is connected via the cable to a USB port on a PC or Mac, it (and the SD card, if present) mounts as a removable hard drive. You can then drag and drop anything you want to it just like any other hard drive on your system. This is why the T5 comes with a cable instead of a cradle. One of the two is necessary to use Drive Mode, and the cable is far more portable and practical. No one's going to lug a cradle with them when they travel, so why include one? Personally, I prefer the cable even on my desktop, since it takes up less space. But where it really comes into its own is when you can whip the cable out of your pocket and plug in the T5 just like any other thumbdrive. The only thing I'd like better is a retractable T5 sync cable that's even easier to carry.
The other way to get data into the device is File Transfer, a Windows desktop application. This allows you to navigate the internal storage memory and the SD card in a tree-structure file manager. This has two benefits over Drive Mode. One is that you can use this while your T5 is doing other things, where Drive Mode is an application unto itself. The second is that File Transfer has an easy "Copy to PC" button that makes it a breeze to back up your 160MB internal storage to your desktop.
The T5 runs a heavily PalmOne-modified version of Garnet 5.4. In addition to the flash memory support, it's borrowed a number of ideas from the Treo, notably a Favorites screen (cool enough that I don't feel the need to install ZLauncher) and the aforementioned highlighting for one-handed navigation. The other big change is the PIM applications and their databases.
Like the other modern Tungstens, the T5 features modified core applications designed to sync more completely with Outlook. Date Book is replaced with Calendar, Address Book becomes Contacts, etc. I've covered this in
my Tungsten E review, so I'll just say that I really like having 32k Memos and notes again, and since I sync with Outlook anyway, I'm enjoying being able to set things like repeat settings on the desktop and have them reflected on the handheld. Again, if you use third party applications that make use of the built-in PIM data, make sure you get the latest update that supports the T5 to avoid maddening slowdowns.
A feature I've had since the T3 that I liked on the Zod and can't do without is landscape orientation. Sometimes you want a wide screen instead of a long screen. Good examples are while using a foldable keyboard or watching a movie. Where the T5 differs from the Zodiac is that it doesn't impose landscape where I don't want it. On the Zodiac, certain applications change the orientation to landscape no matter what (including the Zodiac launcher). Even if you're using an application in portrait mode, sometimes dialogs will pop up in landscape orientation. It's very clear that the Zodiac's "native" orientation is landscape and portrait is for special occasions. By contrast the T5 tends to do what I tell it to do. Period. I've yet to see the T5 force an orientation change. If I want it portrait, I set it to portrait and everything works in portrait. When I want landscape, I set it that way. This is a small thing, but it makes a big usability difference. For those of you that haven't used a Zodiac, think of how annoyed you get when Windows lets a background app take the focus away from what you're doing and you find yourself typing the latter half of a sentence into a dialog box instead of your email compose window. Same idea. My T5 doesn't do this to me. Yay.
Okay, I shudder to admit this, but my PDA has to have a little bling. I'm not talking encrusting it with diamonds or anything, but looks count for something. One of the reasons I got so little done with Pocket PCs is that I spent inordinate amounts of time fiddling with skins, fonts, WisBar configurations, Today plugins, etc. With the T5, I have a little to configure, but not as much as the Pocket PC. I do have the ability to improve the readability and aesthetics.
For readability, I finally get to run
FontSmoother. This didn't work on the Zodiac because it relies on YAHM, a Garnet-compliant hack manager that can't run on the Zodiac without being digitally signed by Tapwave. It runs fine on the T5, and oh, what a difference it makes. If you've ever seen anti-aliased fonts in Plucker, this gives you the same display quality system-wide. I'm typing this in Memos, and Trebuchet MS looks just as good here as it does on my Windows XP system with ClearType. This version of Trebuchet is even kerned properly so the spacing looks right. Much more readable and easy on the eyes than the default font.
I also get to change the skin on my status bar and Graffiti area, something that was impossible on the Zodiac but I really got into on the T3 for the month I had it. The default status bar on the T5 is good, and far more useful than the same area on the Zodiac (would it have killed Tapwave to put in a clock?), but it's a little cluttered. I have a skin that removes the black background behind the blue buttons and replaces it with white. As long as you're using a system color theme with a white background, this looks a lot cleaner and simpler than the default. This skin also adds a number row to the keyboard, which is very cool when I feel like tapping rather than scrawling.
Speaking of tapping, the T5 also gives me the ability to run
Fitaly again. Fitaly Virtual works well on the T5. I'm not crazy about the default skin, which replaces the status bar background with dark storm clouds, but it was a simple matter to use
SkinDIA (from Alex Pruss, the man behind FontSmoother, but also the guy that screwed up the graphics on the T5 Fitaly skin in the first place) to replace the status bar graphics with the defaults (or whatever else I want). Fitaly Virtual isn't quite as slick on the Palms as it is on the Pocket PCs (shifting doesn't show capital letters on the keyboard, for example), but it's still miles better than not having Fitaly. Expect a fuller review of this later.
Let's talk resets. Yes, the T5 is significantly slower than previous Palms on both kinds of resets because it has to do much the same things your PC does when it boots. A soft reset takes around 15 seconds, which still isn't bad for completely "rebooting" a PC, but is longer than the 3-4 seconds most Palms take. What really amuses me are people complaining about hard resets. A hard reset completely erases the data on your device, restoring it to factory defaults. Are people really doing this often enough to complain about the speed? For goodness sake, why?
And yes, if you have to do a hard reset it will wipe out both the system "RAM" and the internal card. If you think about it for more than a half-second, this makes sense. The point of a hard reset (which should be a rare occurance) is to start fresh because something on your device has been misbehaving. What's the point of doing this if you potentially leave the troublemaker behind to start again? If you don't want to lose your data in the internal memory, I have two suggestions. One, back it up regularly to your PC, which is very easy with the File Transfer program on your PC (see above). I'll admit this step shouldn't be necessary, as HotSync should have the option to back this up for you. Maybe in an update. The second suggestion for avoiding data loss is: don't do a hard reset! A soft reset fixes almost all problems with no data loss at all, and most of the ones it can't solve can be solved by a "firm" reset. This is done by pushing the reset pin while holding up on the D-pad (not the power button!). This is like booting Windows in Safe Mode and will allow you to remove things like keyboard drivers and other "embedded" third party software that normally can't be deleted because they load into memory on boot-up. A hard reset is a last resort, and you shouldn't have to do one. If you're doing a hard reset, waiting a few minutes should be the least of your problems.
My T5 has been remarkably stable, and most of the resets I've done so far have been completely intentional. But I did two things when I upgraded to the T5 that I'm willing to bet most folks having problems didn't do. First I went out on the net and downloaded fresh copies of all the third party software I wanted to run, and checked all of it against the
list at 1SRC of T5-compatible applications. I knew going in that each application I was installing would work on the T5. I also completely removed all Palm software from Windows and uninstalled Palm Desktop before inserting the T5 CD. This guaranteed me a clean start without worrying about an errant preference setting from the Zodiac causing problems. By starting fresh, I've had a very good experience. I did copy my data from Palm Desktop's backup directory before I removed Palm Desktop, and I selectively reinstalled what I needed from that after I got the T5 up and running. Works great.
While we're talking about bugs and solutions, there is a find bug in Garnet 5.4. It works like this. If you search for a string, lets's say "sm", the system will only show the first eight instances of that string. So if you have more than eight Smiths in your address book, you won't see the ninth one. PalmOne hasn't issued a fix for this yet, but I have one. Lengthen your search string to something more specific. I mean, come on. Is searching for "sm" really going to give you useful results? The point behind the system find function is that you don't have to scan through a list but can just jump quickly to the data you need. Searching on something so general as to result in a list of more than eight items from a single application defeats the purpose. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "So don't do that." Common sense, people!
Another common lament about the T5 is the lack of WiFi. I've talked a bit about this before, but let me go over it again briefly. PalmOne did some market research a while back and determined that less than 10% of those that owned WiFi-enabled PDAs ever used WiFi at all. Less than 10%. Remember the Palm Tungsten C was one of the first WiFi-enabled PDAs, and while WiFi has become a standard feature on many Pocket PCs, it's rarely used and sales of the Tungsten C were disappointing. PalmOne decided to keep cost and complexity down by not including WiFi as a standard feature. That that really need it can use the PalmOne WiFi SD card.
To quote one of my favorite
movies, "these are the facts of the case, and they are undisputed."
Now, there's been much gnashing of teeth in the geek community over this decision. The lack of WiFi in a "high-end" device signals the end of PalmOne, or the Apocalypse, or some foolishness. There's a prevalent meme out there that if a device doesn't have a better "bag of features" than the competition, then it can't compete with other devices, even if the "missing" features aren't really used. This is hogwash. Not only do I go online with my T5 every day, several times a day, but a friend of mine ditched a Tungsten C to get a T5. Why? He was tired of driving all over town to find a hotspot so he could check his email. I pointed out that he already had a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, and he started wondering why he was limiting himself to only connecting at certain locations.
That's right, limiting. WiFi is a location-dependent technology. PalmOne put Bluetooth in the T5 over WiFi because Bluetooth is ultimately more useful. Not only can it connect to cell phones to get on the internet, but it can connect to Bluetooth GPS units, Bluetooth keyboards, Bluetooth headsets.
Speaking of Bluetooth, the implementation on the T5 works flawlessly. You can turn Bluetooth on and off via an omnipresent icon in the status bar, and you can also connect and disconnect from the network in the same screen. It connected to my phone, a rare Sony Ericsson T608, with no problems, and connecting to the internet is automatic when I run an application that needs to. It even turns Bluetooth on for me if I haven't turned it on when an application needs to access Bluetooth. My only complaint with it is that it's Bluetooth 1.1, not the newer 1.2. Near as I can tell, the only thing 1.2 would get me is the ability to use stereo headsets instead of mono, but that would be cool. My headphone cord is about the only wire I still fight with on a regular basis.
Let's talk about the internet. The T5 includes Blazer 4.0 as its web browser, and this thing is amazing. After fighting with the Tapwave browser and supplementing it with Blazer 2.0 (designed for the original Treo), Blazer 4.0 is a revelation. It can handle all the sites I hit on a regular basis and does a great job of compressing and reformating sites to look good on a HVGA screen. It fully supports xHTML, CSS, JavaScript, VPN and everything else I need to do online when I'm away from my PC. Most importantly, it can handle a notoriously twitchy website I need for one of my jobs, allowing me to drastically reduce prep time at home and report the results of my work on the road. For me, the T5 was worth it for this alone.
Email is more important to me than web access, so I was looking forward to running the new VersaMail through its paces. I use an IMAP server with my hosting provider for email, and I make heavy use of IMAP's folders and syncing stuff on the road. I only want to handle an email message once unless it's something I need to defer for later attention. I process my mail quickly, reading and then either deleting or filing. Filed messages either go in the Filed folder if I don't need to do anything with them but want to keep them around for reference, or Respond if I need to do something about them later. VersaMail almost does what I need, but not quite. My biggest gripe with it is that it doesn't have any way I could see to purge deleted messages so you don't see them again when you open up your desktop client. A friend of mine uses VersaMail on his T5 for a POP3 account and it works great, but it still needs some work for IMAP. Fortunately,
SnapperMail works flawlessly on the T5 and IMAP is stellar in SnapperMail.
There's some other nice surprises. The calculator looks like the same old thing, but looks can be deceiving. Press right on the D-pad, and you get scientific, logic and even measurement conversion functions. I think this is another gene from the Handspring side of the house, a reskinned version of Parens, which had long been licensed for the Visors and Treos. The World Clock also bears a striking resemblence to City Time, another Visor staple. Not only do you get a nice geochron view, but you can set up time zone locations that the Calendar actually understands and respects. Nice for those of us who travel.
The new Media application does a great job with photos and videos. I liked Kinoma on the Zodiac, but really, this could not be easier. Want to convert a video clip to view on the device? Drop it into the Media window in Palm Desktop and sync. That's it, you're done. WMV and Quicktime files are converted to .asf files and stored either in the 160MB storage area or on your SD card. Quality is very good relative to file size. My only complaint with this is that it's a little too easy. There's no obvious way to change the encoding settings, but if you know which text file to modify deep in the bowels of your PC, you can actually change the frame rate (defaults to 20 frames per second) and bit rate (defaults to 384kbps). I've had good results and a bit of storage savings by dropping to 15fps and 256kbps. Photos are easier, and any photos you add to the device can be used as backgrounds in the launcher or the Agenda screen of the Calendar.
Audio is in the barely capable hands of Realplayer by default, but this is easy enough to change. I've got the latest version of Pocket Tunes loaded and it integrates cleanly into Windows Media Player. In fact, I have Windows Media Player set up so that every time I turn on drive mode, WMP detects my 1GB SD card through the T5 and automatically installs 75 randomly chosen rock songs rated three stars or better and 50 randomly chosen tracks from movie scores (for background music while I write). Shuffle this, Apple. I've also found that if I tap on a podcast MP3 in the Files program (I have a shortcut to that folder in my Favorites screen), it automatically opens up in Pocket Tunes and starts playing. This is even better than the way I handled podcasts on the Zodiac. Sound is adequate through the external speaker, and really loud through the head phones. Keep in mind that I have hearing damage in both ears and even I think max volume is way too loud. However, the sound isn't as "clean" as it was on my Zod. There's a faint underhiss that's barely noticeable when listening to music but pretty blatant when you pause the music. Audio snobs might not care for the T5, but it's great for those of us trying to listen to
Air America in heavy traffic.
Bottom line time. Is the T5 worth the $350 (after rebate) that I paid for it? Hell, yeah! Instead of focusing on what it doesn't have, let's look at what it does:
- big screen
- great battery life
- sleek form factor
- loud audio
- flash memory that doesn't lose data on power loss
- top-notch web browser
- solid Bluetooth implementation
- FontSmoother
- Fitaly
- Easy data access from any PC or Mac
- Standard application compatability (well, better than the Zodiac, anyway)
Sounds like a winner to me. What about you?
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