My Palm Pilot is dying a slow and lingering death. It’s been with me for years now, but its usefulness is drawing to a close. Not only is it dying, but it’s not compatible with Win 7, which means I have to fire up a Win XP machine every time I want to charge the damn thing.
Can anyone recommend something to replace it? I would really like something like an Ipod Touch, but I don’t want anything from Apple. It needs to have:
[ul]all the Palm functions (calendar and contact list are the two biggies),
[/ul] [ul]
[li]the ability to store and play mega amounts of MP3s (a minimum of 8 mb, more would be better)[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]Wi-Fi access[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]Win 7 compatible[/li][/ul][ul]
[li]the ability to add a language besides English[/li][/ul]
A camera would be nice, but not necessary. I don’t want a phone; I’ll keep my cell phone separate from this. Ideas anyone?
A palm TX, T5 or T3 might be a good fit then. Your existing data should carry over without any problems.
The TX, while having the latest hardware and OS version (of the time) was burdened with a lousy new version of the Graffiti input system and has been known to have build quality issues. The T5 is generally reckoned to be very good though.
You can put other languages on it using third party apps like PiLoc (I use this for Czech font support)
I can’s say for certain that they are Windows 7 compatible, but if you do some searching on user forums like these:
I have used a TX for a few years now and love it, despite its well-known flaws:
Graffiti 2 sucks, but Tealscript allows me to customise “down” to v1.
Plastic digitiser scratches easily, so I bought a glass replacement.
Power button wears out. I just allow it to auto-off or do an “off and lock” stroke if I really have to switch it off “now”.
You want a smart phone without the phone. Honestly your request is kind of silly as 99.99% of the high quality PDA universe in 2010 are devices which include a phone. Unless you want to haunt eBay for older Palm PDAs you need to get over the whole “don’t want a phone” objection you have. No one is devoting R&D resources for stand alone non-phone PDAs anymore. An iPod touch is actually the closest non-phone hardware spec to your feature list, but you don’t want Apple stuff either.
For example, if your contacts are on your PDA, you’ve got to duplicate them onto the Phone too?
The Phone has the ability to sync stuff like calendar/contacts into the internet.
Or consider something like Google Voice. You can send people to voice mail, and it will text message or email a transcribed message to you.
With a smart phone, you can handle email and have email addresses and phone numbers all go together.
FTR, I used to had a Palm PDA, then a few Palm Treos, now a Palm Pre. Everything works very nicely on the Pre. You can also pick up Classic that will run the exact Palm OS apps from your old Palm directly on the Pre.
You could probably pick up a second hand Pre and just not enable any Cell service for it if you wanted.
And you need to be more respectful of other people.
My Palm Tungsten E2 was dying slowly, and finally gave up a couple of months ago. I too was looking for a non-phone replacement. I like the phone I have, and I don’t want to waste money on a PDA/Phone combination when all I need is the PDA part. I do understand that most people would like everything together on a single device, but that’s not my preference.
I have an iPod touch. It has everything you ask for except the camera bit. Last time I looked, I had a hard time finding PDAs without the phone function but nowadays they’re all phones.
There are a lot of good reasons to want a PDA without phone. If you look at smart phones they seem cool but in reality it is a way for cell phone companies to charge you more money each month. If they sold them with data plan optional allowing you to use the data portion of the phone in wi-fi only mode then it would be a different story. I suspect that is part of why AT&T changed the cost structure was to give smart phone users a break if they use their data mostly through wi-fi rather than the 3G network. I have been on the fence about getting a smart phone as my Palm TX is still going strong though it does have one issue with the on/off switch but i have found ways around that as taking the memory card in and out turns it on. As it is I am currently looking at Windows Mobile PDAs available from Asus. Also there will be many Android PDA like devices coming, i.e. the Archos 28, 32, & 43. Also, as many mentioned it is still possible to buy a Palm TX if you search. However I can attest to the quality issues as the first one I had was junk. I finally had to call Palm for service and instead of having them fix my unit I opted to pay a little to get a replacement first as I did not to get a unit back that I had struggled with for 9 months. The one I got back has been fantastic for 4 years now.
If it were not for the cost of the data plans I would have a smart phone now. Keep looking as I am sure you will find the right device with some careful research.
I think you should consider the Samsung Galaxy Player. It’s basically an Android phone without the phone capability. It looks like you get all the Google apps including contacts and calendar.
Archos also makes some handheld non-phone devices with Android. But I’ve had horrible experience with Archos products, and judging from online reviews, they haven’t gotten any better. (The quality of their firmware is especially bad.)
You can get a smartphone and block any data sent from it. Why would you want a PDA without a phone? My phone costs less than your PDA probably will and I can stores thousands of numbers, I have 38GB of memory on it. A full calendar, tasks, alarm, oh yeah and I can connect to my PC at home. I pay about 50 and have unlimited data and text, i can even use it to teather my pc to the internet. Want a good idea? Add your google voice number to your free caller list if your provider has one. All calls to and from your phone are now free! Well less the 1 minute you get charged just for the connection
We just switched from our Tungsten E handhelds to iPod Touch a few months ago.
The pain in the neck part was converting all our calendar / address book stuff. We opted to use a gmail account to be the repository; you can search the needed steps but basically we had to dump everything from Palm Desktop into a .csv file, import it into Yahoo calendar, then export that. Then do a visual inspection - for some reason, a lot of my husband’s entries didn’t load into Yahoo. There are doubtless ways to get it directly into the iTunes-native calendar/contacts (I think they may use Outlook somehow but don’t quote me on that). So over the first week or two, we spent a fair bit of cleanup time.
You don’t mention the need to share a calendar; this was something we had wanted for years (that Palm never supported; some third-party apps did the job, but badly). By linking our Touches to gmail, it syncs PERFECTLY - exactly as we’d been dreaming of for years. I add something on mine, next time I’m connected to wi-fi it gets uploaded automatically to gmail, then the next time my husband is on the wireless it gets downloaded to his. Plus all the cleanup work could be done on the computer, on the gmail account - much easier than on the handheld.
Anyway - if you don’t need phone capability, the Touch is a great option.
Music: obviously it handles that! Not as gracefully as my Nano (it’s a pain to have to press the “wake up” button, slide the slider, and then sort thru the library to advance to a new track). But for an all-in-one, I’ll put up with it.
What we’ve lost: Well, there is NO solution for our Pocket Quicken tool (we could enter transactions, sync to the desktop, and have them appear in the desktop version of Quicken). Intuit shows ZERO interest in providing a conduit for this. And the grocery shopping tool we used. There are plenty of them for the iphone/itouch, but none of them come near the functionality of our beloved HandyShopper.
I can comment on these, having made pretty much the same decision.
First off, a newer smartphone will come with the mandatory data plan. That’s an extra 30 bucks a month for two years.
The OP might simply not feel the need to be that connected, especially at that price. Personally, it’s rare enough for me to be out of reach of a computer, that I can live with a few “gaps”.
Yeah, it’d be nice to have all the contacts in one place, then again a LOT of my contacts are ones I never phone, so it’s no hassle to have them separate.
An iPod Touch has the ability to sync contacts/calendar to the web as well - we use this extensively. Then when we do make the smartphone leap, we’re all set and we are not locked into one platform.
I went from a Palm TX to an iPhone, and missed HandyShopper terribly. Currently I’m using Grocery IQ as my shopping list app; it’s pretty darned good, but isn’t quite as good at the “be everything for everyone in list-making” qualities that HandyShopper was. It works on iPod Touch as well.
I second the Ipod Touch. Alternatively, why not buy a discontinued blackberry, and a big expansion card? The price is probably only going to be a fraction of what a new cellphone goes for, and you’re under no obligation to get a data package if you buy it used and outright.
