Thursday, September 27, 2007
That's it! I've had it!! (The saga of the Palm Pilot continues...)
I am so done with Palm Zire 31!!! I have spent countless hours and who knows how much money trying to get the damn thing to work, only to have it die within 48 hours. I've swapped batteries, mother boards, and screens, all in the hopes of getting a working machine. This last attempt worked long enough to put the case back on, and then it froze again. I now have a collection of what my big brother calls UED (useless electronic devices). Now I'll be saving my pennies for a higher quality device, or hold out until tax refund time, whichever comes first.
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I have a Palm TX that works reasonably well . . . most of the time. It is also more expensive than the Zire 31 by a bunch. It's not all chocolate and roses, though. The batteries aren't replacable and lately it's taken to sometimes not turning on without a restart.
That's not the big irritation, though. Right now the big irritation is that Palm has not seen fit to come out with Palm Pilot drivers that will work with 64-bit versions of Vista, which is what I have on my desk at work. This means I can't sync my TX when I'm in the office. Luckily I have a laptop running XP at home that I can use to sync with my company calendar; still, it's pretty annoying.
But that's not the BIGGEST irritation with the TX. The lack of Vista drivers is just symptomatic of the fact that Palm seems to be deeply, truly, profoundly disinterested in maintaining their product line. In fact as far as I can tell they are focusing entirely on the Treo, which now runs some version of Microsoft's Windows Mobile system rather than PalmOS. PalmOS hasn't had an upgrade in something like four or five years.
Don't get me wrong, I like my TX. It does what I want it to -- play games, carry my scriptures, play my MP3s on the bus to and from work, and tell me when to go to the doctor. But when it finally dies I will finally be forced to bid farewell to the Palm platform.
My transition to Windows Mobile should be fairly smooth. I will be getting a new phone next month when my T-Mobile contract comes around again. I'll most likely end up with a Windows Mobile-based smartphone that will have drivers for Vista and XP (and maybe Linux if someone has hacked some up). Which will be fine, but it will be the end of an era. I'm still playing games on the Palm that I've had since something like 2000. (It will also mean shelling out the bucks to buy Windows Mobile versions of those games. What, you think I'm going to walk around with no access to Astraware Sudoku?)
I've noticed that Palm is pretty much worthless, especially on their website. Don't bother asking them for help, especially on tech support, because you won't get it.
I managed to get one working for Steve. He's had a lot of fun with it. He likes the game CD I bought after I bought my original unit.
I'm thinking I may upgrade my cell phone to a more useful unit. I have a camera phone right now, but it's a Trac Fone and pretty limited as to what I do with it. I guess you get what you pay for.
Has he got any good games? I have some I'll share. :)
We've got a whole CD full. Battleship, PacMan, Tetris Wannabe, sega titles, and a whole bunch of others. I think there's a Donkey Kong, hexagon, and a few others. Steve particularly likes the chess game.
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