[the] Code Girl (aka UnrulyGrrl)

So I bit the bullet and bought myself a Palm Tungsten T2 off eBay “for my birthday”. I’ve had it over a month and I really love it. The previous owner beat the hell out of the screen and especially the Grafitti area. Just ordered a replacement screen from PDAParts.com. I’ll be replacing that this weekend.

The T2 is heavier and thicker than my m500 but since it’s a lot shorter, I can deal with that. The battery life is not fantastic, but I expected that. It helps that I use both an under/overclocker and a program that dims the brightness after a set delay. The screen is actually so bright it hurts my eyes and I usually use it at 5% brightness (yes that’s 5%). At night I can lower it to 2%. In the office under flourescent lights, 20% is the most I need.

When connecting it to my Linux pcs, I noticed that it appears under /dev/usb/tts/0 rather than /dev/usb/tts/1 (as the m500 did).

The fonts that it uses are just so nice and smooth looking. Reading ebooks is an even greater pleasure than it already was on my m500.

My biggest problem was this horrible high pitched squeal coming from the screen, even when it was more than an arms length away from my head. Unfortunately this is a problem common to the Tungsten T2, T3 and the E series. I found a thread on Brighthand about surgery to fix it by inserting paper/foil/plastic between the glasstop/digitizer and the LCD. I decided to use plain white office paper. This made the noise completely bearable…I don’t really notice it unless I actually hold the T2 within a few inches of my ear. The T2 was only under warranty by Best Buy, and they wouldve just given me a T3 (which I didnt want) instead of fixing my T2, so I figured I may as well give the fix a shot. The hardest part was getting the slider off — you need to bend a paper clip so that it can press two little holes at once to release the slider. Everything else was a breeze. Thank you Palm for using regular screws and not Torx on the Tungsten models. Otherwise I would’ve been SOL as I have yet to successfully remove a Torx screw from my m5xx series without stripping the heads.

All in all I love my T2. I am thrilled that I can use all the addons that I purchased for my m500 as the Tungsten series also uses the “Universal Connector”.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2004 at 11:21 am and is filed under palm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.