I've had the Dash for about a week. Here's what I miss about my TC:
2-second access to ANY of the almost 5000 contacts I had in my address book. To get contacts to work in a respectable time, I had to weed out contacts down to about 1800 so that it only took 5 -6 seconds. When I had all of the conacts in there, the contacts app took 15 seconds to even open.
A decent freeware alarm clock. Big Clock was simple, fast & sturdy.
Freeware in general -- call me cheap (...or frugal...or fiscally conscious...or a tightwad -- hey, enough of that!), but aside from about 10 or so solid freeware offerings, the pickin's are slim. Everything else is $10-$40+ for basic, dumb stuff that there were 20 free variations of for the PalmOS. WinMob Smartphone is a relatively new platform, though.
A dedicated button for the calendar app. The home key takes users to a "Today" like screen, which is okay, but then I almost immediately launch from there into Pocket Informant.
A way to take quick, handwritten notes, like jotting down a phone number or a name -- no touch screen so this is something I'll need to live with.
The Daily Journal feature of DateBk5. Maybe it exists in Pocket Informant, but I've not found it yet.
A quick way to move to today's date when inside Pocket Informant -- again, maybe that exists. I did accidentally press the #2 while in PI and it did seem to bring me to the current date, but it seemed like it was doing some other sort of database scan because it showed the little WinMob hourglass equivalent for about 10 or 15 seconds. Something quick would nice.
On the Start App launcher: it'd be nice to be able to hit the first letter of the app name to jump down to that section of apps quickly. The more button is okay in combo with the directional pad & JOGGR bar.
When addressing an email, the check names lookup to the contacts list is pretty slow. It takes about 7-9 seconds to come up with possible matches. I guess that's not so bad, but it's just way slower than the instantaneous response on my TC's email app.
Now, none of these are total showstoppers, obviously. But they are just some things that I miss from my older handheld. I keep catching myself thinking, "If only Palm had upgraded their OS and provided a logical upgrade for the TC . . . ", but alas, that was not to be.
Okay, my TC's battery is starting to wear out significantly quicker than it used to. That's understandable since lithium ion batteries have a limited life. My handheld is about 3 years old, so I'm actually surprised it's lasted this long.
So, for the last year or so, I've been keeping my eye out for a worthy successor to my mighty TC. Up until now, nothing's really caught my eye. All of the Palm handhelds (Treo line, TX, E2, etc.) are slower, have some significant trade off that's a total drag and/or don't have a thumbboard for input. My input speed between grafitti 1 (never grafitti 2 -- <shudder>) and my thumbboard are about the same -- however, my accuracy is way better using the thumbboard versus using a stylus.
I've futzed with PPC handhelds over the years and while I don't think anywhere near the PalmOS in terms of ease of use, with the help of many third-party software offerings, a PPC-powered device can be fairly friendly to use. I actually lump WinMob devices in this category too.
Which brings me to the first handheld that's actually caught my eye in years: the T-Mobile Dash aka HTC Excaliber. It's thin, has a thumbboard, has WiFi, a fair amount of memory that's expandable (mini-SD...glad I've held off personally buying an SD card for my TC -- my work provided one for me to use in the meantime), it's got a decent 320x240 screen and has the main buttons in the middle of the device instead of at the bottom (pet peeve of mine for my TC -- that's always bugged me about it). So, here's a look at it:
This afternoon, I participated in our church's blood drive. While I was giving blood, I was reading a book on my trusty ol' Palm Tungsten C. The person giving blood next to me noticed what I was doing and started asking me questions as he was a Palm Tungsten X user. That began a 45 minute conversation about handheld computing and how to use PalmOS-based handhelds effectively.
I guess I've kind of forgotten how much of a geek I've been over the last 10 years or so when it comes to handheld computing. I still peruse several sites pretty much daily just seeing what's new out there. However, the thing that I was reminded of most vibrantly, is how much I've tweaked and personalized my TC. The gentleman, Dan, that I was speaking with seemed to be rather new to the platform, so I had a good time mind-dumping helpful applications and tricks to help the his PDA experience be more effective & efficient. So, here are a few of the suggestions that I came up with:
Helpful Websites
Check out www.freewarepalm.com for tens of thousands of freeware applications and utilities. There's a lot of really great freeware out there for the PalmOS.
www.memoware.com has thousands upon thousands of free, downloadable books and resources for reading on pda's. I've read Pilgrim's Progress, A.W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy, several works of Jonathan Edwards, John Owen and others. It's really a great resource.
www.the-gadgeteer.com - This is a great review site for things technical. There's a link on the left side for "PalmOS related" links. It's a good launchpad to reviews of software, handheld units and other Palm-focused websites.
www.palminfocenter.com - good for news on the Handheld happenings. The discussion boards can be rather abrasive, unfortunately. There's a small population of very opinionated posters that love to slam one another. All the trash-talking aside, there's some good geek news smattering the site.
There are other good sites, but these are a pretty good springboard to the rest.
PowerGuard Lite - This app schedules & runs back ups your handheld files to a directory on your SD card. The advantage of this is that if I'm ever away from my PC and my Palm crashes (it does happen once in a great while), I can restore from my card and I never lose more than a single day's worth of updated data. Mine backs up every day at 5:15pm, which is usually while I'm driving home. Since I've been running this, I almost never sync my handheld to my PC anymore.
Launcher III (free) or Launcher X (shareware) - Launcher X is the latest iteration of the venerable Launcher III. I'm cheap, so I still use the free one. It's a nice tab-based launcher that allows for dragging/dropping applications to different tabs for categorization as well as to little widgets for beaming or deletion and other stuff. Nicely written app.
Noah Pro - a free 133,000 dictionary. Words are majuscule . . . and cool.
TCPMP - The Core Pocket Media Player - great for watching movies our listening to mp3's on your handheld. To covert a DVD movie, use http://www.fairusewizard.com/. Here's a great tutorial on the process. Another really nice thing about this player is that it remembers where you left off, so that the next time it's launched, you can pick up from where your last session ended. I watch the movie "The Incredibles" and I also listen to messages from John Piper, Ravi Zacharias and others using this app. Very nice & stable.
Songbook (Shareware) - I play guitar and this is a great program for carrying my music library with me. It is a pocket chordpro format interpreter and has a desktop app that helps with drag/dropping text files to your pda.
PalmVNC - it's nice to be able to connect to our home PC on our sunroom balcony and turn the iTunes volume down while I'm downstairs. It's also kind of fun to play tricks on my kids while they're using the PC.
BatteryGraph - nice for historical analysis of battery performance. Yes, my name is Clym and I'm a geek.
ZBoxZ - this is great to use for unzipping files I've downloaded to my SD card from my handheld browser. So, I can download new apps from freewarepalm.com and install them without the use of a PC. Kind of cryptic user interface, but nice once you figure it out.
OperaMini - this is what introduced me to the whole Opera community in the first place. Very nice java-based browser. It still is persnickety and can freeze with fair, but unfortunate regularity. I'm sure it's a combination of the Opera Java code and the IBM Websphere Java environment for the PalmOS platform. Still, even with that downside, it still offers the best one-handed navigation and browsing experience, IMHO.
NoAlarms - nice, quick & easy way to suppress any alarms when I'm going into a setting that I don't want interruptions in. I use it every time I go into our church service and in some other important meetings.
DateBk5 - Relatively expensive shareware, but amazingly robust and flexible calendar application. I most often use the icon-ized month view, detailed weekly view and the nice user interface for entering appointments. Best of all, it uses the built in Datebook/Calendar databases, so it's compatible with the Palm Desktop and other PC-side software. It has more features than I would ever use.
There are tons of other apps that I use (I literally have over 100 loaded on my pda), but these are the ones that jump to my mind for recommendations to new users.
On a completely "housekeeping" level -- I'm actually posting this entire entry (& I've posted a couple of previous entries) from my Palm TC via an email from Versamail to my "supersecret MMS email address" that's provided by Opera. I compose an email and send it to a specific email address and the email is automagically converted into a blog entry. Pretty cool stuff and it gets past the field limitation of the Opera Mini browser that I posted about early on. Pretty cool.
MMS/email blogging seems to have some limitations too (how do I do tags? How do I do formatting? Can I send HTML?), but it's more likely just a matter of me learning what the capabilities are.
I'm also toying with the idea of opening up multiple blogs through blogger.com. Their implementation of a dashboard to control multiple topic-specific blogs seems to make a lot of sense to me. However, I don't think I like the idea of compartmentalizing my blog entries so definitively. But then again, people who want to read about my family events vs. Computing entries vs. Guitar music vs. Theological topics won't have to weed through the other stuff they're not interested in. Maybe I'll handle that through tightly managing the tags attached to the entries . . .
I'm still thinking through this one, knowm'sayin'?
Great site for new worship music. The New Song Cafe is truly a great guitar resource where you can learn how to a play a song from the original artists.
I've had the Dash for about a week. Here's what I miss about my TC:
WIDGETIZE