Palm TX Wi-Fi PDA

If you tap and hold on the time area you are told the percentage of power the battery has left, as well as how much of the memory is free - you can also change the screen brightness and toggle the system volume on and off. It's very handy, but it does provoke a couple of gripes.

The percentage of battery power remaining also seems to show up if you tap the battery icon on the Favourites screen, but not if you do so on the application launcher screen. Please, Palm ask your OS developer to put the percentage information on the battery icon all of the time so that it is available at a glance.

And while I'm on the subject of the battery, please provide a charge light somewhere on the hardware so I know when the battery is full during charging. And please consider building your next device with a removable battery. For those that want to take their PDA away with them, maybe on foreign trips, and not bother with carrying cables, a spare battery which they can charge at home would be an extra well worth paying a few quid for.

It's hard to fault the software built into the T|X. The basics, such as calendar, contacts, notes, expenses manager, task manager and memos are augmented with a wide range of extras. There are applications you can use with either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, for example, Palm's excellent email client VersaMail, which can be used with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for connection to office-based Exchange Servers, the equally good web browser and a dial pad.

There is Pocket Tunes for music fans, capable of playing MP3 and WMA files as well as Ogg Vorbis, and nicely skinnable if you register it (for free). You also get a write-to screen note taker called NotePad - a type of software I find indispensable on any PDA - and a media viewer for looking at photos and videos (though there is no camera for shooting these integrated into the device).

An absolute treat for any professional user is DataViz's Documents To Go Professional, which allows you to create as well as view and edit Excel and Word documents. You can even run through PowerPoint presentations, which might be handy before meetings.

Verdict

For the most part Palm seems to have done a good job with the T|X, packing in features and offering the whole bundle at a good price.

Adding Wi-Fi brings the T|X up to the connectivity standard I expect from a PDA these days, incorporating 100MB of user accessible memory is a wise decision, and offering a range of software from office productivity to entertainment is a shrewd move that should help Palm capture plenty of interest. Usability is good for a handheld with such a shortage of buttons, with the icon bar and Favourites applications playing a strong part here.

But of course, it is those 'buts' that rankle. Next time round I would like to see a removable battery and a higher resolution screen at the very least.

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