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    Palm Pilot Fun,  tfurrows (sdf.org),  5/15/2018
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I'm composing this on a Tungsten T3 that I picked up 
recently at a thrift shop in Columbia, MO. The PDA was in 
perfect condition, with a flat-dead battery. It came with an 
aluminum case and a folding keyboard. For $10 I couldn't 
pass it up.

Yesterday, the replacement battery that I ordered from 
Amazon for $15 arrived. It was about a 10min install, 
without any real difficulty.

The keyboard is nice. It's a Think Outside Palm "Ultra Thin 
Keyboard" model P10900U, wired connection. Finding a driver 
for it was somewhat difficult, but only because I was 
searching a bit too literally; when I went ahead and tried 
out a general driver from Think Outside, it worked just 
fine. The same driver apparently supports their wireless 
keyboards as well.

The keyboard is wonderful. I have it on my lap, sitting on 
the couch. It's wide enough, and sturdy enough, to use in 
that fashion. Such is not always the case with tiny 
keyboards (many can't span the gap between legs to sit on a 
lap.) Some old reviews online complained about the necessity 
to hold a function key for numbers, but so far I haven't 
found that to be much of an issue at all. Yes, it's an extra 
step, but it's not difficult, nor would it be hard to get 
used ot.

The PDA is pleasant. It's a shame that this unit represents 
the end of the era, because the features were just starting 
to get interesting. My first palm pilot was a Palm IIIe, the 
clear model. I had the original Palm after that as well, 
plus a host of other PalmOS devices. This one compares quite 
favorably with all of them.

(I do realize that I'm writing a review for Gopher on an 
aged device. I might be slightly insane, but it doesn't 
hurt.)

I'm not terribly fond of the sliding form factor. If it were 
a bit tougher, it would be OK, but I find it difficult to 
use the device and keep it from sliding shut. Also, 
on-and-off the touch screen doesn't quite work properly when 
the slider is shut. Perhaps it's not in as perfect condition 
as it looks. If I shut it gently, it seems to work. That's 
OK.

When I saw the PDA w/keyboard at the thrift store, I 
purchased them because I enjoy having odd things to write 
on. I have an Alphasmart Dana as well, and it serves as a 
nice change when I want to write on something less 
distracting. I plan on using this in a similar fashion. I 
have a few other things, and I'll get more, that serve the 
same purpose for me.

Certainly, this review is not at all complete. I haven't 
talked about battery life or other applications, etc. I will 
say, syncing with jpilot is a piece of cake. Finding 
software is a pain in the neck in 2018. But, I've got SiEd 
for text files (a full screen version would be nice) and 
that's about all I need. I could do with a better text 
editor, but it's certainly not urgent.

Next, I need to write about thrift stores in central 
Missouri. Things are different here...

*****

An update after getting this from the Palm to my SDF shell 
to post on gopher. The process was simple enough: 1) sync 
and backup the palm pilot via jpilot; 2) locate the pdb file 
in the ~/.jpilot folder; 3) convert the pdb file to text 
with a pdb2txt project I found on google code; 4) copy and 
past it in.

At some point, I'll drop the pdb2txt source on my SDF gopher 
hole, as well as the keyboard driver, for easy reference.