I had my first chance to actually play with a Tungsten T5. I am not going to post a long, detailed review or rant, but I really do feel as an upgrade to the Tungsten T3 it fails miserably. It simply feels cheap. If it actually was cheap, that would be justified.
One critical loss that will impact developers: Gone is the T3′s easy-to-reach reset button. This alone was enough for me to give up the Tungsten T5.
For those unfamiliar with the Tungsten series, the T, T2 and T3 each previously had a reset button large enough that you could poke it with the writing tip of your stylus. The Tungsten T5 has a pin hole reset button again, with the small, less comfortable stylus. The stylus has a reset pin, but you need to unscrew the top like the Tungsten E series. Interestingly, the Tungsten T3-style stylus seems to be unavailable from PalmOne… unless you want a gold plated one for $39.95 US.
About the only thing that impressed me was the new versions of various bundled applications. They’ve come a long way in a very short period of time. In particular, I liked the World Clock 2.0 so much that I tried to copy it to my T3. No luck.
The T5 really feels like a device that was released about two months too early. I’ve posted a few of my headaches just with the NVFS implementation on my blog and I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from other developers that are equally frustrated. I haven’t even touched on some of the obvious stuff like the reset button. Ugh.
-Jon
Other obvious stuff — the screen. It’s not as bad as the m130, but it compares poorly to every other Palm I’ve used.
Thanks for the blog pointer, btw. Looks like the sort of blog I want to read.
Glad you like it.
I also enjoy yours as well. Keep up the good writing!