Now that I’ve sold my Dell Axim — for a considerable loss, unfortunately — I’m happy to indicate what I found so utterly intolerable about it. For comparison, I’ll use my much-beloved Palm T|X that I bought as a replacement.
First: The Axim wasn’t terribly portable. That’s particularly important to me since my primary computer is a slim and light laptop with a five hour battery. So my handheld must be uber-portable to be of value to me, since I can easily upgrade to full functionality with my laptop.
The Axim itself was larger and heavier than the Palm T|X. It felt bulky and unwieldy. It didn’t have the minimal side-flip cover standard on the Palm, but instead came in a humongous padded case. When I searched online, I couldn’t find a minimal case of the kind I like, i.e. like the Palm. That’s not a trivial issue for me: space in my bags is always at a premium, precisely because I hate to haul around more than absolutely necessary. So I’m downright offended at the prospect of allotting extra inches for an mongo case for a handheld.
As if all that’s not bad enough, the problem of bulkiness was seriously compounded by the power supply. It was massive: it had a thick, inflexible cord and large converter in the middle. Frankly, it wasn’t much better than my laptop cord — and I already regard that as unbearably bulky.
Even worse, the USB connector required for syncing wouldn’t charge the Axim: a power supply was required. So if I was traveling, I’d have to bring the power supply for the Axim, not just the USB cable. In contrast, my Palm T|X does charge through the computer. I have a lovely little zip cable to do that — and if I want the capacity to charge from the wall, I only need to bring my small iPod USB charger.
Second: The Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system was a nightmare. It was unbearably slow: I’d often have to wait five seconds or more to do something basic like open up my tasks or calendar. I’ve never experienced anything like that on the Palm.
Moreover, although I’m always quick to adopt new interfaces, I found Windows Mobile to be an incomprehensible labyrinth. It was simply impossible to remember where to find settings and even programs, since they weren’t all grouped together as in the Palm.
Also, I expected the integration with Windows, particularly Outlook, to be significantly better than it was. That was a disappointment. The Palm does fine on that score, however. In general, Palm has much more software available for it.
Overall, I can’t possibly express how happy I am to be back with Palm. Unlike the Axim, my new T|X does all that I ask of it — with ease.
