all handhelds and pdas

I have owned my T3 since Christmas 2003. Initially I was completely enthralled. It is fast, has a great diplay and plenty of memory. I was disappointed with the battery life. I was upgrading from a Clie' 710C. I am able to listen to music and read books for an entire travel day with my Clie..not the T3. I simply purchased a seperate MP3 player...no big deal. Then, 1 week ago I started having strange problems. Programs that were working fine had started locking up, forcing a hard reset! I started trying to track down the individual program that was causing the problem. I would install a single 3rd party program and attempt to run it. Most would lock up. However the internal programs (address book, calendar, etc...) continued to work. I finally broke down and contacted customer support via e-mail. I explained in detail the steps I had gone through. They replied that it sounded like a hardware issue and told me to call in for a return authorization. When I did this, they wanted to go through the entire process again. On top of it they seemed clueless. As a matter of fact, they were so clueless, that I ended up completely frustrated and thanking them for their time and hanging up! Later I called back hoping for another support tech. It appears that the phone support is offshore which led to communication problems both times. However we were able to overcome these and I did receive a SRO.

I am writing all of this to reinforce other reviews. The T3 is a great PDA, but it does appear to suffer from some quality issues. It doesn't have a great battery life (when are they going to wise up and put in removeable batteries?) and the customer service seems to have gone to the toilet!

one of palm's newest PDAs is the tungsten T3. palm has given the T3 a huge, hi-res screen and the ability to switch from portrait to landscape orientation.

pros:
- bright, transflective TFT 320x480 display is stunning and easy to read even in daylight.
- uses the same sliding design as previous palm PDAs but in this model, instead of exposing a graffiti area, the case opens up to show more screen.
- and to take advantage of that bigger screen, you can tap one button and the display switches from traditional portrait orientation to landscape. very cool.
- built-in bluetooth.
- 400MHz processor.
- 64MB of RAM, 52MB of which is available to the user
- MP3 and multimedia support.
- pocketable at 4.3 (closed) x 3.0 x 0.66" weighing in at 5.5oz.
- strong software bundle - now includes the new Contacts and Calendar applications (with Contacts, you can finally store multiple addresses for each contact)
- uses the same cradle as the T2.
- expansion slot supports SD, SDIO, MMC.

cons:
- no built-in Wi-Fi (although you can use the expansion slot for an add-in).
- battery not replaceable.

this is a solid PDA. i'd trade the bluetooth functionality with Wi-Fi though. as mentioned above, you can use the expansion slot to install a Wi-Fi add-in so there's a work-around for this limitation. if you MUST have built-in Wi-Fi, consider the tungsten C. going the other way, if you can live with a more traditional sized screen and bluetooth is not essential, consider the tungsten E and save some money.

i hope this helps you in your buying decision. peace.

I've had my T3 for 7 months now and have nothing but praise for this remarkable gadget.
The 75 applications I've fit into the spacious 64m memory and a 256m SD card include: my check register and shopping list database (Splash Wallet), a world clock with 20 alarms (Megaclock), a complete address book/meeting scheduler/to-do list/calendar (Agendus); an outliner (Bonsai), spreadsheet, word processor, PowerPoint editor (Documents to Go) and relational database (HanDBase); a drawing/painting program appropriate to my 10 years training as an artist (HandPainter); a dictionary and thesaurus (To Go), ebook readers; road maps of Colorado and the New York metropolitan area (Mapopolis); listings of 30,000 movies from the Internet Movie Database -- including main cast,director, and synopsis (on TomeRaider); an MP3 player with my favorite 50 songs; a photo album of 30 pictures; a chess game, submarine game, and Space Invaders clone; an icon editor, a file utility, a backup utility, and a flashlight (PalmLight).
For all that, I still have 40% of the memory free.
For all that, I've never had my T3 crash, whine, play games with my eyesight, or go bump in the night. It does however wake me up in the morning to Reville, but I asked it to do that since it's also my alarm clock.
It has replaced most of the contents of my wallet, two notebooks, and a portable cassette player -- all of which I had lugged around with me for 30 years until I bought the T3.
I like to compare my T3 to a 386 desktop computer I used to own -- the T3 does about about as much, about as well; except now it's attached to my belt.
The only thing I don't like about the T3 is that it's not as sturdy as the original Tungsten-T. The T3 feels noticably fragile.
But after 7 months, I can say: I use it daily. I use it for everything. It's never failed me.