On Sunday, during a quick trip to Odessa for bulk groceries, we stopped in at Circuit City. I have been eying the new Blackjack from Sony, but I hate my cell service (because it’s a phone - not ‘them’ in particular) so signing another contract just to get a $100 discount on a $500 piece of hardware seemed a really stupid idea. I wanted to check out the newer generations of Palm devices. Here’s a quick summary of what I’m using now…. I had a Palm viix a few years ago, and it was great for what I was doing it with it at the time. But now I’m looking for something more sophisticated without having to haul around my laptop. I made a mental list of what I wanted to be able to do with the device:

  • Post to my blog
  • Check email
  • Read news
  • Subscribe to news feeds
  • Interact with customers concerning their web sites..either
    • store and view static versions on the device or
    • connect to the live site
  • Easy to use contact list
  • View, edit, send Microsoft documents
  • View, send PDF documents
  • Chat using GoogleTalk
  • Watch videos
  • Had to have expandable storage
  • hee, and a few games, too

THREE HOURS later we walk out of the store with $1800 less than we had entered with. And that’s not a typo. “one thousand eight hundred dollars.” And this is what I finally settled on:
Palm TXA Palm T|X. Circuit City gave me a really good price on it, cheaper than anything I had seen elsewhere on the web. Though it wasn’t advertised in-store for that price, after talking with the manager, I got the online price. So far, I have set up the device with:
Plogit to post to my blog. Though the software documentation doesn’t specifically say it will work with WordPress, it does. I just had to figure out putting the path to my api rpc into the device correctly. As you can see from the previous post, it works great. And it’s open source!
Causerie Unified Messenger for instant messaging. Worked great with GoogleTalk, which is the only IM I’m really interested in using, and only because it’s what I use to Twitter with. It’s not free, but I have until January to decide if I’m using it enough to justify the $30 price tag.
Patience. 15 solitaire card games. I had this on my old palm and probably used it more than anything else. I know, what a waste of time, but fun is fun.
The Palm TX supports SD cards, so I got a 1 gig Polaroid card. I hadn’t read any documentation to know whether it would handle the 2 gig, but now I know it does, so I wish I would have gotten the darn thing, but oh well.
It comes ready to connect to available 802.11 networks, and is actually pretty fast. It scans for available networks, and remembers network setting, so I can set up multiple hotspot networks on it. The Blazer browser that comes pre-installed does an OK job of rendering pages. You can view pages with or without css and images. I can’t use many of my Google tools from it, but I knew it wasn’t going to replace a full browser anyway. It also comes with VersaMail, but I am having no luck at all getting it to work correctly with my email account. For handling documents, it comes with DataViz Documents to Go, which does exactly what I want, at least for now. It has a decent video and image browser, and comes with pocket tunes and can play mp3 files.

Now, even with the sdcard capability, this fella’ will not replace my iPod. For one, multi-tasking is impossible on the Palm. So I’ll be moving my video podcasts to the Palm, but my regular audio podcasts and music will stay with me via my good old nano. I have been annoying my husband for 2 full days now with this thing, and I guess it’s time I put it away and go join the family for a fun-filled night of movie watching. As long as it’s not Larry the Cable Guy or Ron White again….

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about the rest of that $1800 bill. We got some great deals on other stuff,too. A 52″ TV, 2 Polk speakers (I know nothing about audio equipment, but apparently these are really great speakers), and a DVD burner with hard drive. So, the Palm was just a small fraction of that bill, and my husband left there even happier than I did.