I recently picked up a Palm TX with a 2GB SD card. I really wanted something that I could surf the web with, carry around some of my study materials (which are almost exclusively in pdf format), and still have room left over for a few albums. Not a problem at all with this thing... getting everything up and running out of the box was a piece of cake. The user interface was extremely easy to get used to: everything just seems to make sense. Also, I couldn't believe how small this thing was; much smaller than I thought it'd be. So far battery life is also much better than I expected. There were a few problems though, but they ended up being blessings in disguise...
For starters, it didn't come with pdf support right out of the box. Sure, Adobe's pdf software for PalmOS was on the disk that contained the window's desktop app, but it's complete crap. You have to run any pdf you want to view through a converter program on a desktop and then hotsync it onto your Palm. That's way too much work for such a simple task not to mention making online pdfs pretty much unreadable. In order to do so you would have to first download the pdf onto your desktop machine, use the converter program on the pdf, and then hotsync your Palm. Thankfully there is an open source solution called PalmPDF. This is a true pdf viewer built on the popular open source xpdf. It works exteremely well, exactly as you'd expect any true reader to behave. just another example of why open source software is so awesome... xpdf enabling PalmPDF.
Further proof of why OSS is so cool... The TX came with a nice picture viewer / video player, but I can't get the video player to play anything but the sample videos that it shipped with. In their defense though, they probably don't have the codecs built in for most of the stuff I'm trying to watch. Enter The Core Pocket Media Player or TCPMP for short. Awesome open source video, mp3, and vorbis player software; lots of codecs included.
Another essential piece of OSS for the Palm: FileZ. The Palm TX does not come with a file manager. This is more than likely due to the fact that all files on a Palm device are stored in the same base folder. With only 100MB of free internal memory, there isn't a lot you'd really be able to organize anyway. The problem comes when you have a large capacity storage card (say 2GB) that you have a lot of different document types on... FileZ handles filemanager duty very well. As an added bonus, it has an internal preference viewer, it gives you information about your battery, and it lets you know when you last hotsync'd (sp?).
The last piece of OSS for the palm I've discovered, and the one I want to play around with the most right now, is Plucker. This is pretty much an offline rss/html/ebook/text/??? viewer that converts "stuff" into a format that is easily viewable on palm devices. It's extremely open and well documented so playing around with it after I get Linux set up is going to be a lot of fun.
Eventually I'm hoping to be able to capture TV using my ATI AiW 9800 Pro and have it converted into a fairly compact format for TCPMP. This might be a problem because, as said before, ATI aren't cool when it comes to driver support and Linux. Thankfully, there are people working to correct this shortcoming. I'm also really looking forward to this city-wide wifi madison will soon be getting... until then, I'll be plucking away...
god that sounds stupid :P
it's really too bad that this device ships without some very essential (imo) software. I guess I'm glad it didn't do everything they way I wanted out of the box. If it had, I might not have found all these great pieces of software. Then again, maybe the fact that this software is freely available (and so good) is why it didn't come shipped with something similar. Oh well, really no loss here...