At least judging by my experience with the Tungsten E so far, Palm has really done it again. The durn thing Just Works(tm) and will do just wonderfully as PDA, just like my trusty old Palm IIIx.
It’s still a real CHORE to get it working with Debian Woody (well, with Debian stable everything always has to be a chore), but Mandrake cooker (soon to be 9.2) handles it just fine. I’m beginning to like Mandrake more and more; this probably has to do with the fact that I’m getting lazier and lazier and prefer to have my Linux machines just work. One problem of synching with Linux is of course that things like Kinoma Movie Producer (you need this to pre-process film clips before being able to view them on the palm), DataViz DocumentsToGo and the Acrobat Reader for Palm pre-processor don’t work…
I went out to A-Tembo and bought a 128MB Dane-Elec Secure Digital Card for the Tungsten. It now has more storage than I know what to do with. One more problem: copying data to the SD card via the Tungsten is slooooow. I think I’m going to treat myself with the super-slick Dane-Elec ZMate SD/MMC USB reader. It’s not that expensive and it of course doubles as a kind of a USB memory key. It seems to work in Linux.
If I had known 15 years ago that I would one day walk around carrying a cigarette-tin sized computer with a 126MHz CPU, a total of 160MB ram and a colour screen, I would probably have gone orbital.