By David Gewirtz
Product reviews often talk about new products but don't let you know how these gleaming goodies stand up to the test of time. Our Six Months Later series does. In this series, we look at products after they've been used in real-world situations for at least six months. This month, we look at the palmOne Tungsten T3 to see if how well it withstood the test of time.
When we last looked at the Tungsten T3, in our review (see http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200310/00001107001.html) back in October, it was a brand-new product. We've had it in active use for the past eleven months or so (pushing our six months later premise even harder) and it's actually stood up quite well.
I've personally used the T3 as my primary PDA for the bulk of this time. That, itself, is quite an endorsement, since we've had a long line of new and sexy PDAs come through the office since I first put the T3 into service.
Of them all, the Tapwave Zodiac (a Palm OS device) had a bigger and better screen, the Dell Axim X30 Pocket PC had WiFi in addition to Bluetooth, and the Navman PiN (also a Pocket PC) had a built-in GPS. But while each of these are great devices, none had the combination of small size, screen quality, and features to justify moving my data off the T3.
So let's look at the key issue that Six Months Later can address: reliability. I've had no problems at all with the T3 since I started using it. That said, every time I use it, I remain convinced that the unique sliding base of the Tungsten T line will break. It hasn't; it just feels like it will.
That's my biggest concern about this device. The portion of the unit that houses the application buttons and the direction pad slides down to reveal either the Graffiti area or more screen space. The unit slides open smoothly, but doesn't close well. It requires some fiddling or a hard push that always seems to stress the device. No harm ever seems to come to it, but it does stress me out. After holding and handling an iPod, it seems to me that this rough closing aspect of the T3 is something Steve Jobs would have never found acceptable if it was an Apple product.
I have one other concern, small though it is. Ever since we started covering Palm (now palmOne) back in 1997, we've always been able to download copies of the Palm Desktop from their Web site. This still exists, except, apparently for the T3. When you try to download a copy of Palm Desktop for the Tungsten T3, the Web site tells you to install off your "provided CD." While it's reasonably fair to require the user to have copies of the original CD, I'm always nervous when I can't get an update from the Web. The folks at palmOne need to fix this, and soon. Let's hope they don't turn this into a common practice for their newer devices.
