Palm Tungsten T5 - migration from E2.

[radioman]

I just picked up a Palm T5 for approximately 100 dollars on Ebay, after I lost the E2. The my hope is that my initial impressions will continue. I believe the only difference between the T5 and the TX is the WIFI support, which could be useful, but you would pay a premium for that device. As well, I am an iPhone user and can move to the platform when the product/feature sets are in place. However, I needed the full features offered and did not want to spring for a Windows Media device after challenges with interfacing WM devices with my Apple computer, not to mention additional required accessory costs, learning curves, etc.

I have only just got the T5 up and running, but my first impressions are as follows:

- Huge screen, bright, great resolution. Using the Pleco Reader on this screen is great.
- Unlike the E2, the writing area can be moved out of the way, and appears very well handled by Pleco in how the writing area interact with Pleco.
- Full screen writing as well as landscape mode is easily implemented and works well with Pleco.
- No crazy digitizer problems like my E2.
- Cheap at approximately 100 dollars, bought through ebay.
- Battery life - TBD. More screen real estate must have some effect on drain, but I am hopeful it is on par with my E2's battery life, which I considered very good.
- Accessories - E2 Accessories, including power supplies, external battery power extenders, cables, etc. all work with the T5.
- Significantly more memory than the E2, avoiding previous issues with Pleco brought forth by the E2 memory limitations.
- Slightly larger (actually longer) than the E2. This is not material in my opinion.
- Easily shift license from old unit by just going to the Pleco Home page.

I will provide more feedback after using this some more, I also would be interested in other people's experience or comments.

 

[mikelove]

The TX also has less built-in memory, though it's all in one place as opposed to the T5 where it's split between the main PDB store and a separate internal VFS drive. And oddly enough the TX also has a slower processor, I think in an effort to improve battery life. Anyway I'm glad it's mostly working well so far - the extra cache memory over the E2 should make a huge difference by itself both in terms of stability and speed.

 

[tianjinpete]

Agree with all the features listed, but as a T5 owner I can say that its one drawback is the touchscreen -- that it often fails is well-documented -- in fact, just today I was thinking of going to my local dealer to try to replace the screen -- after hours of work on software fixes, I've pretty much figured out it has to be hardware -- there's a dead spot right in the middle of the screen that can't be calibrated -- PowerDigi didn't help -- so now I'm brushing up on my Chinese for key words -- I'm secretly hoping the guy will give me a good deal on an Axim or Ipaq -- I need something to go along with the Dopod S900 -- something like a "desktop" PDA, hehe

 

[radioman]

Thanks to all for the comments. Well its been about a month since I wrote about the T5. My updated comments are provided here.

- I do see a slight degradation in speed at times, but the overall performance appears smoother (my guess is to having more memory doesn't hurt.).
- The screen, while bright enough for most situations is not nearly as bright as an iPhone screen. But it is still overall very functional.
- Battery life overall is quite good.
- All old Palm E2 accessories appear to be supported in the T5. I have had no problem.
- The screen is very much an improvement on my E2, but it is not perfect. It is not as bright as an iPhone I still get some strange behavior where pressing lightly can be interpreted as a press somewhere else. However, I have found that, when writing, using strokes with a a conscious amount of pressure make the thing behave well.

I believe that the T5 and E2 digitizer is the same, or at least similar design. I changed my E2 digitizer before and it really helped (powerdigi can't solve the problems I had observed). If the T5 was experiencing this quirky digitizer issue, my guess is that changing the digitizer would help a lot.

General Digitizer SOP - do not beat on it.
- I put a screen cover on the unit, one of those plastic film things.
- I also keep the flip door cover on the device (I did not with my E2)
- If I have to write a bunch a characters over and over (like learning to write a new character) I would make sure I had pen and paper to practice, rather than doing all that repetitive writing on the screen. If I am just going to go through flashcards, and want to write a character a few times that I just missed for practice, then I'm not too worried about that. But initial learning of a character where you want to learn to write it on paper (and therefore want to write it 20 or 50 times in a row), I would in fact to that writing practice on paper while running the flashcard session on the Palm to the left of the practice paper.

Other things.
- Memory is much larger than E2, for what I am doing with Pleco, the unit does not have any problem.
- The ability to move to landscape to portrait is really handy, as well as full screen access, easily bringing up the battery meter (helpful in long flashcard sesions when you do not know when you will run out of gas).
- Running out of gas (i.e., battery life) is in fact annoying because you need to reboot the unit, and Pleco on startup makes a new flashcard file on the Palm rather than access the one on the flashcard first. My guess is that one of the last things the palm does as it dies is it says "turning off some essential processes", which may make the memory card inaccessible and put Pleco into some state where it does not see the file and then will make it. I then have to go seek it out with Pleco Mover and kill the newly made file. This does work, but would prefer not to have to do the step.

In General - VERY happy to have the T5 over the E2. Of course, looking forward to the iPhone!

 

[mikelove]

Somehow managed to miss this post before - sorry about that.

The T5's greater memory capacity could certainly help, we can cache twice as many database records on it and hence there's a lot less churning / reloading of data from the card, but its processor is also running at about 2x the clock speed of the one in the E2 so that could be making a difference as well. You could probably get additional speed by moving files from your SD card to the T5's internal flash drive, I believe the interface to that is a bit faster (though the actual memory chips aren't so fast IIRC, so depending on the operation I suppose the card might be faster in some cases).

With the flashcard file disappearing, one hack that might work for that would be to use FileZ to move some random file (not a Pleco flashcard database) into your T5's internal memory and give it the exact same filename as the flashcard file you keep deleting. Unlike with user dictionaries, with flashcards if Pleco can't create a file with the name it wants it gives up and starts up with flashcards disabled, and when it tries to open the existing file it'll discover it's an invalid flashcard database and cheerfully ignore it, so using this technique you should be able to get it to go right back to the SD card file when power is restored.

 

[radioman]

Some more thoughts on the T5.

- Battery life is very good, I can probably run flashcards in excess of 5 hours of constant on. I have an additional battery pack so can run the thing for 12-15 hours probably if I need to.
- The way that they have the pop-up menus takes care of MANY of the issues I had with the Palm E2. Things like checking battery levels, changing the brightness of the screen, etc. can be accessed without bailing out of a flashcard session.
- In the past I wanted a way to hot-jump out of a flashcard session to use the dictionary. With the way that the menu scheme is structured is in the T5, this is easy, as I just press the main soft "home" button and I can start "Pleco" again. This takes me back to the start up position of Pleco, where I can just use the main dictionary. When I want to start my flashcard session again, I have hardware set up to just start the flashcard session again, where ultimately it takes up where I left the flashcard session before I jumped out of the session to begin with.
- Screen resolution is excellent, Brightness is ok, but not near as good as the iPhone.

Overall still very happy with the unit -

If I was to consider one thing different, I would consider getting wifi enabled upgrade model, the Palm TX ( I assume would allow full running of Pleco external pop-up dictionary when browsing Chinese news, etc. ).

 

[mikelove]

Pleco lookups in web pages on Palm are a a bit spotty, sometimes they work and other times they don't. In general the Palm's built-in web browser is less-than-ideal for reading Chinese (owing to the lack of native Chinese character support), so given that Instant Access-type background functionality is completely impossible (disallowed by Apple) in official iPhone apps, if you want to use Pleco to read Chinese web pages Windows Mobile's probably the only decent option. (and even with that I can't make any promises about how well Pleco will work with the new version of IE in Windows Mobile 6.5 until we get a chance to test on it)