Just As I Thought

In the palm of my hand

I don’t know if it’s old age creeping up on me or the vast number of things that I have to accomplish in the next few months, but I keep forgetting what I am supposed to do.
All day my mind churns out reminders, which I note and then forget shortly thereafter. I lay in bed thinking, “oh, I have to remember to do such and such” and by the time I’m in the shower, I’ve forgotten.
As a creature of habit, my little rituals are ingrained, from putting on my seatbelt to feeding the pets. If anything is outside my routine, it gets forgotten. And these days, everything is outside my routine.
So, yesterday I picked up a new Palm Tungsten T3, with the hope that a new, shiny gadget will enthrall me enough to get me writing down my to do list and carrying it with me. (Scraps of paper, post-its, and mental notes don’t seem to be working.) Hopefully, it will be enticing enough to integrate into my daily routine so that I will start to become more organized and know what needs to be done.

I went ahead and got the T3 because of a couple of reasons. First, it has Bluetooth. I’m a proponent of the cable-free lifestyle, there’s nothing more annoying that carrying a bunch of cables around with you. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that, just like my digital camera, you can’t charge the thing without the cradle and power cable. Why can’t they make these things charge directly? I’d much rather carry just a cable than two cables and a dock.
Second, it has a bigger screen than other Palms. The bottom slides down and reveals more space, which is nice. I hate the tiny little screens on Palms — I guess I was spoiled by my Newton with it’s enormous screen.
Third, it claims to have all sorts of multimedia capabilities. It turns out that to even put an MP3 on it, you need an expansion card. The T3 has 50MB of ram in it, but won’t let you load MP3 onto that internal memory for some bizarre reason.
One cool capability is the reading of PDF files using Adobe Reader. I just can’t figure out how it’s parsing the files — I made a document and the section headings went randomly all over the place. I’ll need to figure this out soon so that I can make PDFs of various documents I’ll need. Once I get this figured out I’ll be able to post stuff on our website at work for people to download to their Palms.
I do wish that data over mobile phone was more streamlined, it’s so complicated and slow that I disabled it on my phone. With the T3, I can connect to the internet via my mobile (and Bluetooth) and get e-mail, etc., which I might give a try. But it’s so pricey and I don’t want to burn up my cash downloading more and more spam, you know? Plus, there seems to be no support yet for the Motorola V600 that I use. (I did modify one of the stock modem scripts so that I can send SMS messages via the phone, which is a cool thing — I hate tapping out messages on the phone keypad, now I can write them on the Palm.)
So tell me. Anyone else have a Palm? What do you think of it, what suggestions do you have, and what software do you recommend?

1 comment

  • Ooh, gadgety goodness. You’ll have to keep us posted on how you like it. (I’ve been meaning to get a PDA for a while now, though to be honest all I really need it for is the contact management.)

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