Fishie
12-26-2003, 09:32 AM
A few weeks ago something horrible happened, I dropped my Ipaq 2215 at work along a couple of metal stairs after wich it continued to make a freefall onto the concrete about 8 or 9 feet lower.
The machine looked severely damaged and would power up anymore.
A very helpful lady on HPs customercare helped me out and after a little bit of fidling with screws(fastening em) and reseting the machine it worked fine again, as it does to this day.
The 2215 being my sixth(two PalmOS, 4 WinCE)PDA this year I was set on keeping it until the new OS comes out and not buy another one(altough the Toshiba e800 has been tempting me).
My Ipaq now has a crack and some bodywork scratches but works perfectly and will continue to do so.
Now in a few days im off to Japan and I decided hey why not be EXTRA sure and get a back up machine(im weak, im so very very weak), and lo and behold the TungstenE had a nice high res scree and was in promotion for 179€ and 10 cents, taxes included so I bought it on impuls.
After two Clie´s prior to the Tungsten E this would be my first Palm branded machine as well as the first one that would run on Palm OS5.
Ive been playing around with it for a while now and these are my impresions so far.
The machine feels both nice AND cheap at the same time.
Setting up and using versamail was a snap and I get it to do the same thing now wich has long been standard on PPCs, synchronise my emails or download emails from a server trough windows RAS by fiddling with the settings.
Sound trough the loudspeakers is LOUD and Kinomaplayer is STILL a piece of trash with bad res in big files with barely understandeable sound.
The antialiased icons and fonts dont look as nice as I remember they did on my latest PalmOS machine(Clie 615 running OS 4.1 on a Dragonall 33MHz processor) nor can you choose to have them in old resolution so they appear tiny on screen.
None of the Clie apps are compatible with this machine so no Clie Paint, remote comander or whatever nor do the pictures included with the Clie viewer show up on this one.
I found all these out when I noticed that the Sony installer had left all the things I had installed on my Clie in a hidden folder in Windows, one weird thing is I just choose a bunch of PRCs and PDBs from that folder and transferred em over to the E and one of em was the power one calculator.
The Clie came with a full profesional version altough in low res while the E came with a personal version in high res that could be upgraded to profesional.
So I suddenly had similar programs twice on the E one with less functionality in high res and one with high functionality in low res.
I noticed I had it twice so I clicked on the low res one, it came up and I closed it again.
The high res one was there as well but I didnt check it as it was on there as well.
I decided to remove all files that did nothing and soft reset the machine.
When it was running again I noticed the low res calculator icon was gone and when I checked the high res one it had become the full profesional version.
Definitly weird and unexpected.
As mentioned before Kinomaplayer is still a horrible program and as for MP3s Realplayer aint that hot either and will only play music from expansion cards.
Kinoma movies can be anywhere you want em.
The machine at a lot of things strangely seems slower then the OS4.1 Clie 615.
Games like Atomsmash run noticeably slower on a procesor that is many times faster at the same res they did on the Clie 615.
Opening large files is still a prolem and yes Documents and Word to go still lose a lot of their formating.
Docs to go does have the ability to open email attachements etcetera tough but for some reason the palm remains to have serious problems with files that have a simple .txt extension added.
Opening a large textfile takes ages as I noticed with Avantgo and some documents I opened
Infosync on avantgo gives me problems as well, doesnt fit around the screen, parts of it simply cant be navigated and it managed to make the E crash a few times already.
The crashes(again not trough third party aps or anything) and slownes of the OS on a much much faster chip make me fear the worst for OS6, if they are already having this much problems with an OS that is designed for compatibility and speed for older apps what will happen when they come with a new multitasking one built from the ground up?
Talking of crashes, not only does it happen with the avantgo infosync channel it also happened to adobe reader for Palm(despite the desktop conduit converting the files for Palm)as well as with hotsync itself for a couple of times wich ended up locking the machine itself requiring a soft reset on one instance.
Definitly nowhere near as stable as my Ipaq.
The batery is another low point, it doesnt manage much more then two continuous houres of usage(no wireles or anything) the machine sucks juice even when doing nothing like there is no tommorow.
Wich is very odd.
I choose the E on a whim and becouse ive been drooling over high res screens ever since I sold my Intermec 6651 and since the e800 came out(and to a lesser extent since I gave away my Clie 615) and becouse of the superlow price.
It does have its quirks but the included programs and nice screen make it worthwhile owning for me.
The extended PIM functionality, versamail etcetera are a welcome bonus to a cheap package with a great screen(pictures look realy nice on it), it lacks the bells and whistles Sony is known for so no spectacular introductory voice saying Hi I am Tungsten E from Palm as it would if it were a sony, no stylish extras or anything.
A functional machine at a low low price with lotsa excellent software added.
That being said, its a goner as soon as I am back from Japan(i hope I can resist all the gadgets they sell in Akihabara), and if the articles I will write and interviews I will conduct in Japan bring in more then I expect I will get me that Toshiba e800 and maybe get rid of the Ipaq 2215 as well while awaiting the new OS with native multiple resolution screen support.
The machine looked severely damaged and would power up anymore.
A very helpful lady on HPs customercare helped me out and after a little bit of fidling with screws(fastening em) and reseting the machine it worked fine again, as it does to this day.
The 2215 being my sixth(two PalmOS, 4 WinCE)PDA this year I was set on keeping it until the new OS comes out and not buy another one(altough the Toshiba e800 has been tempting me).
My Ipaq now has a crack and some bodywork scratches but works perfectly and will continue to do so.
Now in a few days im off to Japan and I decided hey why not be EXTRA sure and get a back up machine(im weak, im so very very weak), and lo and behold the TungstenE had a nice high res scree and was in promotion for 179€ and 10 cents, taxes included so I bought it on impuls.
After two Clie´s prior to the Tungsten E this would be my first Palm branded machine as well as the first one that would run on Palm OS5.
Ive been playing around with it for a while now and these are my impresions so far.
The machine feels both nice AND cheap at the same time.
Setting up and using versamail was a snap and I get it to do the same thing now wich has long been standard on PPCs, synchronise my emails or download emails from a server trough windows RAS by fiddling with the settings.
Sound trough the loudspeakers is LOUD and Kinomaplayer is STILL a piece of trash with bad res in big files with barely understandeable sound.
The antialiased icons and fonts dont look as nice as I remember they did on my latest PalmOS machine(Clie 615 running OS 4.1 on a Dragonall 33MHz processor) nor can you choose to have them in old resolution so they appear tiny on screen.
None of the Clie apps are compatible with this machine so no Clie Paint, remote comander or whatever nor do the pictures included with the Clie viewer show up on this one.
I found all these out when I noticed that the Sony installer had left all the things I had installed on my Clie in a hidden folder in Windows, one weird thing is I just choose a bunch of PRCs and PDBs from that folder and transferred em over to the E and one of em was the power one calculator.
The Clie came with a full profesional version altough in low res while the E came with a personal version in high res that could be upgraded to profesional.
So I suddenly had similar programs twice on the E one with less functionality in high res and one with high functionality in low res.
I noticed I had it twice so I clicked on the low res one, it came up and I closed it again.
The high res one was there as well but I didnt check it as it was on there as well.
I decided to remove all files that did nothing and soft reset the machine.
When it was running again I noticed the low res calculator icon was gone and when I checked the high res one it had become the full profesional version.
Definitly weird and unexpected.
As mentioned before Kinomaplayer is still a horrible program and as for MP3s Realplayer aint that hot either and will only play music from expansion cards.
Kinoma movies can be anywhere you want em.
The machine at a lot of things strangely seems slower then the OS4.1 Clie 615.
Games like Atomsmash run noticeably slower on a procesor that is many times faster at the same res they did on the Clie 615.
Opening large files is still a prolem and yes Documents and Word to go still lose a lot of their formating.
Docs to go does have the ability to open email attachements etcetera tough but for some reason the palm remains to have serious problems with files that have a simple .txt extension added.
Opening a large textfile takes ages as I noticed with Avantgo and some documents I opened
Infosync on avantgo gives me problems as well, doesnt fit around the screen, parts of it simply cant be navigated and it managed to make the E crash a few times already.
The crashes(again not trough third party aps or anything) and slownes of the OS on a much much faster chip make me fear the worst for OS6, if they are already having this much problems with an OS that is designed for compatibility and speed for older apps what will happen when they come with a new multitasking one built from the ground up?
Talking of crashes, not only does it happen with the avantgo infosync channel it also happened to adobe reader for Palm(despite the desktop conduit converting the files for Palm)as well as with hotsync itself for a couple of times wich ended up locking the machine itself requiring a soft reset on one instance.
Definitly nowhere near as stable as my Ipaq.
The batery is another low point, it doesnt manage much more then two continuous houres of usage(no wireles or anything) the machine sucks juice even when doing nothing like there is no tommorow.
Wich is very odd.
I choose the E on a whim and becouse ive been drooling over high res screens ever since I sold my Intermec 6651 and since the e800 came out(and to a lesser extent since I gave away my Clie 615) and becouse of the superlow price.
It does have its quirks but the included programs and nice screen make it worthwhile owning for me.
The extended PIM functionality, versamail etcetera are a welcome bonus to a cheap package with a great screen(pictures look realy nice on it), it lacks the bells and whistles Sony is known for so no spectacular introductory voice saying Hi I am Tungsten E from Palm as it would if it were a sony, no stylish extras or anything.
A functional machine at a low low price with lotsa excellent software added.
That being said, its a goner as soon as I am back from Japan(i hope I can resist all the gadgets they sell in Akihabara), and if the articles I will write and interviews I will conduct in Japan bring in more then I expect I will get me that Toshiba e800 and maybe get rid of the Ipaq 2215 as well while awaiting the new OS with native multiple resolution screen support.