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紐約時報對TT5的評價

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發表於 2004-11-15 21:16 |只看該作者 |倒序瀏覽

最近想買PDA, 正在考慮 TT3, TT5或 TH55
正好看到紐約時報對 TT5的評價
作者對TT5似乎蠻失望的......

=========New York Times criticizes PalmOne Tungsten T5========

A Palmtop's Curious Subtraction

By DAVID POGUE

IN 1996, excitement over the original Palm Pilot kept gadget freaks
awake at night. The tiniest change in a new model sent them into a
tizzy of discussion and anticipation. But for the last year or so,
what has been new in palmtops? A slightly faster processor. A price
cut. "Speeds and feeds." Yawn.

In fact, the most recent design breakthrough came in 2002, when Palm
released a collapsible palmtop called the Tungsten. Its big idea was
to be small in your pocket; when you got down to work, you could tug
the case's sliding halves apart to expose another inch of screen
space.

With their superbright screens, fast processors and gorgeous looks,
the Tungsten family, including the inevitable T2 and T3, sold well to
business people. But if you examine their successor, the handsome new
T5, you may wonder what in tarnation is going on over at the company
now called PalmOne.

First of all, what happened to the T4? Answer: There never was one.
Turns out the word "four" sounds like the word for death in some Asian
languages. (Now that would be a big seller. "New from the U.S.A.: the
beautiful new Tungsten Death!")

The next question is harder to answer: Why did PalmOne drop so many
nice features present in the earlier Tungsten models?

For example, incredibly, PalmOne eliminated the Tungsten's signature
feature: the collapsing body. The T5's design is based on that of the
Tungsten E, a popular lower-priced model clad in some kind of
I-can't-believe-it's-not-metal plastic. As a result, the T5 (now 4.8
by 3.1 by 0.61 inches) is over a half-inch longer than the T3, and its
elongated screen is fully exposed all the time. PalmOne claims that
shoppers, viewing the compact T3 in its box on store shelves, weren't
even aware that it could be stretched to reveal the supertall screen.
But that's a failure in the design of the packaging, not of the
palmtop. One look at the shelves at Toys "R" Us might have taught the
designers just how much action and transformation could be depicted on
a product's box.

The screen is still 320 by 480 pixels, the highest resolution of any
palmtop, and you can still rotate it 90 degrees for ease in reading
spreadsheets and Web pages. But the T3's screen was sensational:
bright and paper white. On the T5, the screen is only excellent; it
provides a dingier background and dimmer colors. Maybe "vivid" means
something bad in Chinese, too.

The T3's voice recorder is gone, too. No longer do you get the tiny
burst of satisfaction from barking into a shiny gadget, "Note to self:
Fax the Sanders proposal, stat."

PalmOne even chopped out the vibrating alarm and the flashing L.E.D. -
not such a swift move, considering that business people are the
Tungsten's target audience. T5 owners will have to subject the entire
conference room to the same birdcall chirp alarm that has been with
Palm ever since the original Pilot, apologizing and fumbling to turn
the thing off.

You don't even get a charging-synching cradle (although you can buy
one for $50). You're supposed to connect your Palm to your Mac or PC
using a cable instead, which isn't as convenient or as good-looking.
That's a fair compromise on the entry-level Palms. But on the
top-of-the-line model?
PalmOne, the maker, has even eliminated what four years ago it
foolishly named the Universal Connector. (It was an attempt to satisfy
frustrated Palm aficionados whose add-ons - keyboards, modems and the
like - were rendered useless as Palm came up with a new connector for
each new palmtop model.) The new connector conducts more information -
music, for example - and will also be used on the company's
cellphones, like the new Treo 650. But that's not much consolation if
it doesn't fit your accessories.

It's odd, too, that even at $400, the T5 offers Bluetooth (for
short-range communication with cellphones and laptops) but not Wi-Fi
(for getting online wirelessly in airports, coffee shops and so on).
You would expect Wi-Fi on a high-end palmtop these days. You can add
it in the form of a $130 add-on card, but that's cheating.

Having read this much, then, you might conclude that the T5 is an
unmitigated disaster when compared with its predecessor, and that
maybe it should have been called the T4 after all.

Yet for all its steps backward, the T5 offers one huge leap forward: a
design idea so fresh, so clever and so useful, it may offset all of
those trimmed features put together.

Ready or not, here it comes: This palmtop is also a flash drive.
A flash drive, of course, is a tiny stick of memory that you can carry
around on your keychain or in your pocket. When you plug it into the
U.S.B. connector of any Mac, PC or Linux machine, it shows up on the
screen as a miniature hard drive, ready for drag-and-drop file
transfers. There's no software to install, no drivers required and no
technical expertise necessary.

PalmOne has built a 160-megabyte flash drive right into the T5. As
long as you have its U.S.B. cable with you, you can plug this palmtop
into any computer for full access to your files. And that's without
having to install any software on that computer first. (There's even a
new program on the palmtop that displays its contents as files and
folders, the way they would appear on the Mac or the Windows desktop,
for ease of manipulation and for taking inventory.)

In some cases, you can open, play or edit your stored files, including
pictures, movies, MP3 songs and even Microsoft Office documents, right
on the T5. Thanks to the amazing, built-in Documents to Go, you can
view PowerPoint presentations, and edit original Word and Excel files
with no loss of formatting, right on the T5 - something that
Microsoft's PocketPC palmtops, oddly enough, still can't do. (In a
nice touch, the T5 keeps playing music, either through headphones or
the built-in speaker, while you do other work.)
But the flash drive can also carry files that the palmtop itself can't
open, turning the machine into a handy data bucket for carting
projects between home and work.

On top of that 160 megabytes, the T5 has 55 megabytes of free memory
for you to fill up with, for example, any of the 10,000 add-on palmtop
programs. That's one of the huge perks of owning a palmtop - all those
restaurant tip calculators, Scrabble games, medical databases and so
on.

There's something special about this memory chunk, too: for the first
time in palmtop history, it isn't wiped out when your battery dies.
Your calendar, address book and other programs will still be intact
when the aliens pull your T5 from the rubble a hundred years from now
(assuming they brought along the proper charging cable from Alpha
Centauri, of course).

All told, that's 215 megabytes of memory available for your use, more
than any other palmtop on the market. It's enough for you to carry
around several CD's worth of music, for example, without having to buy
an external memory card.
Still torn? At least you have a choice. The true Palmaholic is quick
to point out that you can trick out a T3 (still available at $350) to
duplicate the T5's flash-drive trick; all you need is a shareware
program from www.softick.com and an S.D. memory card, which PalmOne is
providing free with purchase.

In that case, the T3 would seem pretty tempting, feature-wise. You'd
miss out on the T5's perma-memory feature, its slightly faster
processor (416 megahertz), its handsome leatherish flip cover, its
tall, chrome, noncollapsing stylus and its subtle software
enhancements (like a new Favorites screen that lists your 12 favorite
programs or documents). But you'd keep the cradle, the voice recorder,
the brighter screen, the vibrating alert and $50.

So, with the T5, PalmOne giveth, and PalmOne cutteth corners. If you
choose a T5, you'll gain one gigantic, brilliant, workflow-boosting
feature, but you'll lose six others (collapsible body, brighter
screen, vibrating alarm, Universal Connector, voice recorder, charging
cradle). Call it the very new math of PalmOne:

T5 = T3 + 1 - 6.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/0 ... uits/04stat.html?th