the portable solution, updated

The Palm T|X is a keeper. I'm updating this post so that it might help others who are searching for what I needed [a portable file access/editing/uploading system when a laptop isn't really required]. Other blog posts all over the web were what saved my butt and led me to my solution, so I am returning the favor.

Thanks to everyone for their commenty feedback on my mobile solution challenge! We're working with this baby right now. Palm t|x. It's lean on built-in memory, but takes up to a 2gb sd card [and I love sd cards -- both my cameras use them]. It came with a wireless keyboard [!] in the box, has built-in wifi and bluetooth and displays in landscape with one click. $399 at Best Buy, $329 at Tigerdirect.ca.

In order to get it to mount on my desktop like another drive so I could drag files onto it, I needed this -- the Missing Sync utility. Handy as hell, $39, and it syncs my iCal and other native mac scheduling/address/task tools, rather than having to use the palm desktop. Which has not changed since I last used it in 1998. Gak. How lame.

The Missing Sync is, without question, the single most essential utility I purchased. Worth every penny.

Another brilliant solution was found here, at Green Dragon software. DragonEdit. It's an HTML editor written meticulously by [I think] a guy while he was at college. I found the forums starting in 2002 when he started working on it and I think the current release just came out this year. Shareware definitely worth paying for. It has integrated FTP, but I can't get it to work.

Instead, I use VFSFTP, which works beautifully. $9.95.

A few notes:
- I bought an older 2gb SD card, and wondered if it would slow down my internet connectivity, etc. Absolutely not. With a good wifi connection, the Palm t|x is as fast as my home high-speed internet.
- I bought the hard case for the unit, and it's solid as a rock and worth the money. Way cheaper in the US, so find it there if you can.
- Battery life? Excellent.
- E-mail -- built in Versa Mail works great with all my popmail accounts, and has built-in settings for services like gMail.
- Acrobat for Palm seems to work best when you set the conversions to fit the documents to the device. I had crashes when I tried to convert them full size.
- want to blog? use this.
- want to connect to your home wifi? you'll probably need to add your Palm's IP address to your allowed devices if you've got it password protected. once hub did that, I could get on at home no trouble. [just using the password wasn't enough]