Currently I use a Palm Tungsten T5. In the past I have had a Handspring, Clie, and Tungsten T. In particular I purchased the T5 because of the Bluetooth feature. That is, it talks to my cell phone, a Sony-Ericsson T616. Transfering the entire address book back, and forth is a piece of cake.
There is a major update. I am an experienced user, upgrading from a previous PDA (Tungsten T), and I had trouble. Well... Trouble may be too strong a word. But it was not as simple as previous hardware upgrades.
First, the T5 is based on different technology from the T. Both use Palm OS5, but there are differences that caused the T5 to have trouble when upgrading. In the past, including the upgrade from the Clie with OS4 to the T with OS5, upgrading PDAs was a simple matter of installing the CD stuff, and doing a Hotsync. With the T5 there were a couple of hiccups. For example, there may be bits, and pieces of software left over from previous PDAs, and in the past this has never bothered my new PDA, but there were bits from the Handspring upgrade process, Hackmaster hacks, and so on that brought the T5 to its knees. I don't know what happened previously, but my guess is that the other PDAs just ignored them.
Second, here's what I recommend. Follow Palm's advice and upgrade by creating a new user, exporting all data from the old user, and importing it into the new user. This works extremely well with one caveat. The databases in the new user's Palm Desktop must have the destination categories created prior to the import process, or it all goes in 'unfiled.' However, there is a major upgrade/patch. I suggest following this sequence of actions:
NOTE: You can do seven different kinds of reset.
NOTE: There is a glitch of some kind with the Quick Install application. It doesn't seem to want to release from memory after it finishes. A symptom of this will be a synchronization getting hung in the middle of installing a file. You can manually kill the Quick Install process using the Windows Task Manager, and you'll have to unplug the T5, and cancel the Hotsync before trying again. You may even need a soft reset.
NOTE: In your user's Palm directory under the Program Files directory, all your files from your previous PDA can be found in their old backup location. You can reinstall them from there, including their database files. E.G.
In my case I ended up with the following user directories:
C:\Program Files\Palm\BarnettC
C:\Program Files\Palm\BarnettC0
C:\Program Files\Palm\BarnettC1
Clie, T, T5 respectively. Each directory contains a Backup
directory, and each Backup
directory contains
the .PRC, and .PDB files from my respective PDAs. Notice that the Palm Desktop
created numbered directories, so you can safely rename a user, and he still
uses the directory he always did.
I hope this helps someone. It took me a lot longer than it ought to get here. Thanks PalmOne :-P