As I said, there really wasn't much agonizing for me- the voice recorder makes it worth a lot more, for my lifestyle. I also share your feelings about Sony- they can't seem to NOT try to impose their own proprietary standards. Is anyone really buying minidisc players?

By the way, one little-published quirk is that the voice recorder will record to a card, and the hotsync moves voice memos to the desktop where they can be played back (as well as on the T, of course), but it won't do both, yet. If you record to the card, the memos are not copied to the desktop... if you care. Might be a file-size issue.

The battery life might be a concern- it is certainly shorter for the color screen (hopefully that's going to change in the next couple of years). Folks on the forums are reporting 4-5 hours of continuous use with the backlight on... much longer (even in real measurement- the cells "recover") for intermittent use, of course. YMMV, it just depends on how you use it. Books, games, and playing music tend to be a drain, of course.

So far, it hasn't been a problem for my lifestyle- I just have a cradle at my home office and one at work, and I use them both. Except for one time, it's never gone below three-quarters charge. However, I'm leaving town shortly for a week, so we'll see how it does on the road. I expect I'll be using it less, but I'm also carrying the following equipment:

http://www.boxwave.com/ (minSync)

and the USB version of:
http://www.seidioonline.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=509&idcategory=599

With these two items and the software CD, I can hotsync to any computer with a USB port, recharge off of a USB port, recharge off of AC or a car lighter. You can see the second website has a 9v battery emergency charger, but since I have a lot of AAA cells in storage, I bought a charger that uses those instead. That gives me 4 possible options for recharging on the road.

I understand that the Palm will preserve data for at least a week AFTER it shuts down for lack of recharging... if the worst happens, I have software automatically backing up the entire contents of the T to the SD card every night, so, even away from all my computers I always have a recent backup of all my data.

The sliding cover seems sturdy enough. Palm says they did some ridiculous testing- I think it was 100,000 cycles. I open mine several times a day, and can detect no difference from when it was new. If you were to drop it, of course, it might be different. Some folks using 3rd-party software manage to use the thing without ever opening it except to reset- I haven't tried to go that way.

I have mixed feelings about integrated flip covers. Since I carry mine in a belt case that has a screen protector anyway, it wouldn't benefit me much. The last one I had was on the Newton, which was impressively sturdy but a perishing nuisance. If your case means that you don't need it, it's always in the way. I much prefer to be able to pull the T one-handed and have it ready to go.


The price is high, but as I said, if you consider it a replacement for a Palm, a digital recorder, and a portable MP3 player, it's not so bad. I won't even consider the possible cost of a dedicated e-book reader, since I think they're as ridiculous as dedicated word processors were.