I’m having second thoughts about getting a palmOne Tungsten E as My Very First PDA.
Now I will concede you tend to get a distorted idea of the quality of hardware (or software) when browsing online forums because posts complaining about problems tend to outnumber posts gushing about how the product works flawlessly and as advertised.
But I find it interesting that there are a couple of T|E owners (1, 2, 3) who’ve gone through three or four units in the 10 months the model has been available. I suppose that’s encouraging in the sense that T|E owners are sufficiently impressed by it to get another unit and it’s alarming in the sense that the model seems to have serious enough flaws to warrant replacement.
(The negative reviews on Amazon are particularly dismaying. I’m suspicious of some of the reviews, though. One reviewer claimed [screencap] to have removed the batteries from his T|E after having problems and that’s fishy because the model has a single battery and replacing it requires a soldering iron.)
Aside from the screen buzzing problem I mentioned earlier, there are reports (1, 2, 3) of the navigator button being flawed and furthermore, the model seems to have a data corruption problem (1, 2) when syncing data with some third-party apps.
The database problem doesn’t bother me since it’s highly unlikely I’ll be using any third-party database applications. (I doubt I’ll be relying on the T|E’s PIM functionality all that much.)
The hardware problems, on the other hand, do worry me. However, I’m encouraged by the fact palmOne Malaysia is offering a one year warranty—oddly, palmOne USA is only offering a 90 day warranty—and replacing a defective unit seems relatively straightforward.
I could opt to wait for the rumoured follow-up to the T|E. According to scuttlebutt, the T|E2 will have a 320×480 screen and it will include Bluetooth connectivity. Is there anything to the rumour? I think so. The T|E2 rumour popped up at the same time as the Zire 31 rumour and the latter was released four months later. Will Palm release the T|E2 in October? It would mark the one year anniversary of the T|E and the current T|E promotion—an attempt to sweeten the deal to get rid of existing stock?—ends in September.
I’ll mull things over the next few days before making up my mind. This is going to set me back 200 or so dollars and I want to be sure before I plunk down the moolah.
