My old Palm Tungsten T3 is on its last legs.  Or, more accurately, its battery is on its last legs.  It’s mostly my fault, as I tend to keep it in the cradle all the time, which encourages battery memory and increasingly diminishing charge capacity.  Right now it won’t last more than a day away from the cradle. 

Even when it was working well, though, I wasn’t that impressed with the T3 (at least compared to my ancient Vx).

I had difficulty finding a hard case for it that wasn’t too bulky to carry.  The Vx was good in this respect, since I had a good clam-shell case that fit well in my pocket.  The T3’s case was significantly thicker as it somehow had to allow for the top of the T3 to slide up and down without hitting anything.  I gave up on the hard case and sold it to someone else who had a T3 and just used the leather flip cover.  The problem I’d find is that this didn’t protect against the buttons on the side getting pressed in my pocket, so in several instances I’d pull it out to find it in voice memo mode, or worse, frozen hard.  I’d have to reset it by pressing the stylus in the hole on the back (fortunately it never lost any data, though, since I didn’t have to invoke the full cold reset procedure).

So now I’m trying to figure out where I want to go from here.  As I see it, my options are:

• Buy a replacement battery and perform risky open-Palm surgery to try to revive the T3
• Buy a full-featured replacement
• Limp along until August when I can get an upgrade to a smart phone with Verizon
• Get a cheapo bottom-of-the-line model that just does appointments and address book (i.e. the Z22).

The battery replacement option might just keep it alive for a while, but eventually I’m probably going to need a new one.  Looking at replacement models, though, I see just a few current Palm models, as well as some PocketPC models (mostly HP/Compaq).  But I think the writing is on the wall for the PalmOS, so I suppose it’s time to consider the PocketPC.  At the same time, though, I’m having a hard time with the prices I’m seeing (i.e. $299-$499 for iPaq’s).

And while I’m also tempted by some of the smart phones, I’m also having a hard time justifying to myself the $79.99 monthly fee for the associated data/voice plan with Verizon.  The other problem with the smart phones is that is would seem hard to use the PDA/email functions while also talking, unless you use a Bluetooth headset (which I find dorky and annoying; most ear pieces interfere with my glasses).  Further, I don’t really *need* email or most data functions.  What I really need is calendaring and contact management.

For now I guess I’m going to continue to muddle through, since I can’t make up my mind.  Although every now and then I check to see if there’s something on eBay that’s not too expensive that might do what I need.  But at some point soon I’m going to have to come to a conclusion, since my T3 is pretty much useless for travel, since it dies within about 12 hours of leaving its cradle.