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Sunday, October 10, 2004

Tungsten T5 Handheld - too little, too late



So palmOne's much vaunted, much-speculated new PDA is pretty much a failure with the handheld community. The criticisms are many, including
- no wifi
- plastic casing
- no voice recorder
- about $100 too expensive
- a new connector replacing the increasingly misnamed "Palm Universal Connector"
- no cradle
- no Cobalt a.k.a. Palm OS 6.0 (now 6.1)

Other than the selling point of an unprecendented (for PDAs) 256MB RAM (made up of 157MB of non-volatile flash that works just like a USB Flash drive and 55MB of "normal" RAM), there's really nothing new about the T5. Even the higher capacity battery, while a plus, is non-removable.

It's quite disheartening to see a product such as this coming from palmOne at this point of time. For long-time palmOne customers, it's not a compelling enough upgrade. For new users, there are all-singing, all dancing PDAs that offer much better value, such as Dell's X50v.

I will probably give this one a miss, since I'm quite happy with my Zire72. Can't wait for the new Treo to come out, though.

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