Palm really got it right with its Photos and Video application. You can save pictures and video files from your PC or Mac computer to an SD memory card and then put the card in the TX's SD slot and do everything in the Photos and Video application that you can do with images on the TX's built in memory. The application supports slide shows and albums for organizing your images and videos. You can copy images from internal memory to a SD card and vice versa. It's a perfect little app.

Palm's Pocket Tunes MP3 player works fine once you get your music on the TX. The easiest and fastest way to do this on a PC is by installing the commercial application Rhapsody. I expect that most people will do it this way. The problem, at least for me, is that I find applications like Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes too invasive personally and technically. Not only do robotic hucksters try to sell you stuff based on some strange sense of what you like in music, but the programs take over PC components like your CD/DVD writer so other programs don't work properly with it any more.

There are alternatives for both PCs and Macs such as transferring files to an SD card manually or using Quick Install on the PC or Send to Handheld on a Mac. However all of that is a pain in the neck and very poorly documented, leaving most people with Rhapsody. Sigh.

So after knocking the ways you get music onto a TX, is there anything good I can say about Pocket Tunes? Absolutely, while the TX doesn't come with earbuds, music and podcasts played very nicely through my iPod Nano's earbuds. And, just watching music videos on the device was cool.

I'll pass on discussing the other software that comes with the Palm TX such as the contacts and calendar software. Overall it works fine and is easy to use.

Palm has been showing the TX with some third party software that I didn't have time to evaluate. MobilityGuru will get to it later. A company called "Avvenu" has an application that lets you access files on any computer through their Internet-based service. MobiTV is another app that looks promising. MobiTV is another Internet-based application that lets you watch news, weather, sports and other entertainment programming. I've seen both these application in operation and liked them a lot.

Conclusions

The Palm TX handheld is loaded with excellent hardware features and software. You may have some difficulty initially installing the desktop software for the device and configuring e-mail, but I'll bet you love using the TX after you've finished with those tasks.