PDA’s have come a long long way since I used a Palm 100 in the early 90’s – they had rather dodgy software and hot synch connections, a black and white screen and minimal applications. Still, it was a little revolution in its own right back then. The one I upgraded to was the Palm V which was really quite similar, but more robust and reliable; but still reliant on the cumbersome “grafitti” stylus-writing unless you bought a little keyboard to go with it.

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Microsoft Windows 2000/NT4.0, Microsoft Windows 98/ME, Microsoft Windows XP, Apple MacOS 9.1 or later, Apple MacOS X 10.1.2 or later Apple MacOS X 10.2.6

The display is transflective and 16-bit (i.e. 64k colours) which is really excellent – it means that light hitting it from any angle causes minimum problems and clarity of view is high. I can’t emphasis enough how important this is – it stops that nasty feeling you get (when it’s too late) as you realise you have been squinting at something fuzzy for too long! Apparently I have TFT active matrix to thank for this – but I’d be lying if I claimed to know exactly what that means!

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I found this out the hard way – when I was out and about needing some numbers, so as soon as I got back to my desk I was on the phone to technical support – and sadly this is a “known” issue that not much can be done about at the moment. Don’t let it put you off too much though, because if you are like me it should be easy enough to re-jig your contacts so the list of categories is reduced.

There is good paper support in the box with the PDA covering Photos, Music and Videos which is straight-forward and easy to use. There is also much more detailed written support which is on the Installation CD - I found this less straightforward than the booklet and wished that they had picked out the most perinent issues for me rather than leave me scrolling through so much data. However, begrudgingly, I did manage to find everything I needed to know.

So we are finally onto the bit about what you have to play with – hoorah! Well, as you would expect there are icons on the main page for:

There are also hundreds of bits of freeware and games etc on www.palm.co.uk to keep you entertained.

There aren’t too many accessories around for the T3 yet, I imagine that this is because it is so new on the market. It’s worth checking out the tiny compatible keyboard that comes with it though. The only other thing is that it comes with just a leather flap that flops over the face of the machine but doesn’t encase it in any way. This could be a problem if you dropped it so you may want to take a look at some sturdier cases.

This is not the most expensive PDA on the market but it competes very favourably to my husband’s new iPAQ (erm technically known as the HP iPAQ Pocket PC H1940) in terms of quality and resolution and is about the same in terms of software and flexibility. They are also rather similar on the pricing front.

If I had the option to have all the functionality and design of the T3 and yet still have software that I was used to, then I would grab it with both hands. As ever there is a play off - some other PDAs literally use Word, Outlook etc as their software but all Palm ones have their own software which is compatible but different. This hasn't caused me any problems whatever, but if just makes me feel slightly uncomfortable if things are to go wrong in the future.

My final thought is this: whenever I go to a meeting with people I haven’t met before somebody will inevitably swoop on my T3 before long to have a little play, and they are always amazed at the variety of things it can do – but more importantly, they think it’s a very good looking toy!