Boy Toy

My husband has had an iPod for several years now. He's been wanting a video iPod with a large screen for well over a year now. Unfortunately, Apple has not been forthcoming on the full-screen front. He also hasn't been all that keen on Apple's DRM or file type limitations for video or music.

Since joining a local health club, he's been desiring a portable off-line web reader in addition to having something which can play video so he can entertain himself with it while using a recumbent bicycle. He's been using my old Visor Prism (a gift from my sister when she graduated to a Treo) to read eBooks and such but it's age and smallish screen size limited the ability to perform the tasks he wanted on it.

After doing a bit of research and factoring in everything he wanted, we decided on a Palm TX. The screen is 320 x 480 pixels and you can re-orient it from portrait to landscape depending on which works better for your needs. The screen is really quite gorgeous and looks far better in real life than it does in the picture I took of it (above).

I've only had it for a day and so far have figured out how to at least get some .avi files to play on it using TCPMP and how to do off-line web reading using Plucker. We were going to use wireless to connect it directly and save content off-line using the Palm itself but our wireless situation sort of fell through when we encountered the cable internet disaster I previously wrote about. We may yet go wireless in the future but it'll have to be through my purchasing a new router and setting it up myself using our existing FLETS connection.

At $300, it was a bit expensive for an electronic "toy" but my husband doesn't buy these sorts of things often and never impulsively. In fact, I always encourage him to buy any "toy" he wants because he works so hard and spends so little on himself. So far, he's been very pleased with the TX. It's far closer to an actual hand-held computer than we've had before.

This is another one of those things that we had to get family assistance to buy. Palm doesn't sell direct to Japan and they also do not appear to sell any models in Japan. Their Japanese web site seems to only be a support site.