My poor brain!

[gilana]

My palm pilot seems to have died last night. It suddenly stopped turning on. Tried a soft reset, tried charging it -- nothing. Of course it's out of warranty, and it's a Tungsten T3, which they don't make anymore, and none of the new models have the stretch display I love on this one. Just tried to call Palm to deal and was on hold for 11 minutes without speaking to a human, at which point they hung up on me. According to the web site it would cost $169 to have it repaired, and I'd probably be without it for a while.

So. Do I order a new one today? Get it repaired? Start hunting eBay for a used one which will probably also die on me soon? Any words of wisdom or comfort? I'm twitching without it already...

Comments

[gilana]

Thanks for the input!

The LED does come on, but it doesn't make the little noise when it connects or disconnects, and it won't hotsync. Pretty sure it's dead, Jim.

I went to a Palm kiosk and took a look at the TX -- I expect I'd get used to it, but it does feel much larger in my hand. I really loved how small the T3 is when it's not open. Sigh. I am tempted by the bluetooth plus wifi, though; I've been using the bluetooth with my cell phone to get net on my palm when I need it, but that's so slow, and wifi seems to be getting a lot more common. And it seems like the only other real choice would be the E2, and that seems slow and low on memory after the T3. Man, this is worse than when they stop making your favorite style of jeans!

I like the Mac desktop program a lot more than iCal; can Missing Sync work with that, do you know?

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I'm a computer hacker, not a Palm Pilot doctor! ;-)

I liked how small the T3 felt, too... though I found that sometimes I was annoyed because I'd accidentally slide it shut while I was trying to do something with it. So the TX does solve that problem for me.

I use iCal because I like the integration with everything else... and I sync it with .mac and my cell phone and ipod, too. I *think* that you should be able to use Palm Desktop with Missing Sync by just selecting the correct conduits, but you might have to stand on your head for a bit to make it work. Missing Sync will uninstall (or at least disable) Palm Desktop's conduits when it installs. You'll probably have to manually copy over the Palm conduits and disable the Missing Sync ones that you don't want to use (the disabling part is easy; Missing Sync has a nice UI for doing that; the copying part is a pain though). I haven't verified this, though, since I don't use Palm Desktop anymore. You can use the TX on MacOS without Missing Sync, though Palm has had a lot of install problems with Tiger (if you're running it).

Now if only isync/Missing Sync would sync some of my bookmarks over too...

Good luck! Sorry it died on you.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

By the way, I should mention that the TX uses flash memory for its main storage. The good side effect of this is that if your battery dies, you don't lose everything. The bad side effect is that it means that starting some apps is noticably slower the first time as they're loaded into regular RAM.

I've had a few crashes on mine - I start something and it reboots. It doesn't happen often and I'm expecting Palm will release a firmware update that will fix it.

By the way - if you do get a TX - you should *not* just sync your old T3 data to it. Palm says that doing this can screw it up and make it unstable. Palm should have some directions on their site for moving old Palm data to it.

[gilana]

Thanks! Just bought the TX from the Palm kiosk in the mall here. I could have gotten it cheaper online, but then I would have had to pay a lot for shipping to get it here quickly, since I'm going so nuts without it. See what you started? ;)

And thanks a lot for the heads-up, I'll be careful transferring the data. Not sure I would have noticed that otherwise, which would suck.