The Palm is Dead, Long Live the Palm!

My Palm Tungsten T3 died a mysterious death about 8 months ago. It froze...it wouldn't sync....it wouldn't reset....no amount of documented rescusciation brought it back to life. So it sat on my desk in the computer room, collecting layer after layer of dust.

Every so often, I'd walk by and turn it on to see, if by some strange miracle, it would spontaneously wake up. I was tempted to disassemble it just for fun, but I was aware that it had a built-in battery and probably a powerful capacitor. So I just let it be. It sat next to the retired Sony Clie that my wife used to use.

8 months later, after purchasing a used Sony UX-50, and then having that die a sticky death (it got covered in some syrupy, sticky mess that made it completely unusable), I was stll left without a PDA.

That is until yesterday.

I performed my montly ritual of vacuuming and noticed the corpse of the T3 lying off of its cradle where I had left it. I dropped it back into its cradle and the green LED popped on, and the Palm start up screen blinked on. What???? Yep, after 8 months of hibernation my T3 awoke. It looked like it had gone through a hard reset or the battery drained completely, flushing it of its RAM contents.

I cautiously synchronized it with my MacBook Pro which I maintained a copy of the Palm Desktop contents and the non-Universal Binary HotSync and it was back to its old self.

Since I'm doing the household finances now, I even bought a copy of Pocket Quicken to help me keep track of purchases. Kind of a small token of my appreciation for waking up after 8 months of slumber.

I'm still cautiously optimistic...I've no idea what caused it to go nite-nite for 8 months and the 4 tiny screws on each side of the PDA are still missing, so it could be a short-lived life...who knows.

On a slight tangent, this is the only Palm I've ever truly liked. There are no other newer or current Palm PDAs that have the compact form factor where I can have the 160 x 160 square screen and expand it by sliding the unit open to make it more rectangular. I enjoy the fact that I can use Graffiti anywhere on the screen and love the small compactness of it and allows me to use it one-handed. It's sad to think that if this dies again, I won't be able to find any PDA that fits my needs.

For the time being though, it's good to have my good friend back.