Falling on my sword a bit…but not really

I know I’ve mentioned the Treo 600 rather obsessively in the past, but I am now officially glad it has yet to arrive through T-Mobile. After long consideration, I’ve decided to instead be a 2 piece guy (for now) and manage my life with Palm plus Phone. I really like the Sony Ericsson T-610 as I’ve also mentioned previously and the more I used it, the more I don’t want to give it up. As a result, I’ve been trying to find as many Bluetooth options in my devices to enable as much connectivity as well as simplicity. The Tungsten C unfortunately did not make the cut. As much I was enjoying it, I’ve decided to give it a rest for now (possibly for good… any buyers?) and picked up the Tungsten T3 which is an amazing unit.

It does not have wifi, just bluetooth which is just fine since it easily connects to my phone for data usage. I could write a great deal on this but it so happens a nice page was done today at GearBits, which you can read here.

While the T3 is not new, I thought I would share some quick thoughts on what I like since it is pretty different from my previous Palm.

First – the return of Grafitti. No keyboard, but if you’ve been using Palms as long as I have this is quit easy to deal with.

Next – Stereo Sound. I did not realize I was missing this until I heard my first sounds on the T3. Games in the speaker or with stereo headphones are great!

Voicememo with built in mic! Not sure what Palm was thinking when they decided that the TC had to use an external mic, but this feature is infinitely more useful when you can just hit the button and record.

The screen is amazing. 320×480 half VGA and extremely bright. Pictures from Splashphoto are amazing and in my newly minted parental role, I have MANY pictures. Guess I’ll be getting a larger SD card soon to handle them all.

The only negative so far is that the battery is not the best. In fact it is actually weaker than on my TC which is odd since I always thought that bluetooth was supposed to be more power efficient than wifi. My guess is that it is probably the screen more than the radio… but I could be wrong. I’ve just installed BTToggle to see if I get get some more time from it. Don’t get me wrong… you can download a great deal of email with the battery, I would not do to much web browsing which I see more as a nice to have rather than a need to have since this is a small device anyway. The screen really does make this far more pleasant than on the TC which I was most familiar with.

So far so good with this combo punch. It’s interesting that I ended up this way (for now) given the hype on the Treo and it’s all in one capabilities. For me it all came down to the lack or bluetooth and the micro keyboard. I may have gotten used to the keyboard over time, but it did not seem easy given my testing usage.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.