I have been a happy user of a Palm m500 for seven years or so. I loved its simplicity and the efficiency by which appointments, ToDo items and short memos could be entered into it. It served me extremely well. However a couple of years ago it started acting up, ocassionally not responding to screen input anymore. It took me a while to find out that it was the battery that was the culprit. For some reason it had swollen up, putting additional pressure on the touch sensitive screen. I ordered a replacement battery from somewhere and things were okay again. Until a couple of weeks ago, when the same problem resurfaced. So I picked up  a second hand Palm T|X and I love it! I did need to patch the Palm T|X to support the old and trusted Graffiti instead of the newer Graffiti 2 as the latter requires more strokes to enter data. But with this patch it works beautifully.

I did consider buying an iPhone 3G as the combination of a phone together with a good calendar application that easily syncs with my Mac is very compelling. However having played a bit with both the iPhone 3G of my brother and a friend of mine I find it to be too slow to be practical. There’s is a noticeable delay switching between one application and another. Enough of a delay to annoy me, and that’s when playing with it, let alone when using it in anger. I need my PDA to be fast. When I need to enter an appointment I must be able to do that instantaneously and effectively. The iPhone 3G’s slowness and the onscreen keyboard prevent that.

Another serious concern I had was Apple’s ambiguous policy regarding certain applications for its App Store. As a developer myself it pained me to see independent and ambitious developers financially hurt due to Apple’s whimsical and unmotivated decisions. Nor do I like Apple to decide for me what applications I can and cannot use; Nullriver’s Netshare being the prime example.

Another concern, or actually an issue, with the iPhone is that Apple limits my choice of a telecom provider in The Netherlands to one! As it turns out that one is not my current provider.

Last but not least is the price. What is the sense in throwing away a perfectly good phone, switch telecom providers, get a ridiculously expensive subscription plan for two years, while I can get all I need for fraction of the price by buying a second hand Palm T|X? Well there isn’t!