My Palm Tungsten E2 died. Man. That bums me out. I don’t know what I’ll replace it with. Possibly paper and pencil.

I bought it in September 2005 because my CLIÉ died.

When I bought the E2, I needed something to put my Hebrew vocab flash-cards on. The best Biblical language flash card program is Mini-Flash. (A great company with an excellent product, outstanding support, and reduced prices! Beat that! The only downside is that the spreadsheet-to-flash-card deck converter is windows-only. But the library of downloadable flash-card decks is excellent, and just keeps getting better.)

I also needed something to keep my schedule and address book on, and never did find one. (See here.)

A big part of the problem was Apple’s, since they provided sync services that didn’t work for me. But Mark/Space’s Missing Sync partially solved that problem. (It isn’t my favorite application — very modal, you’d think it originated on Windows — but it was a workmanlike effort, and their tech support is pretty good. I never did get it to sync events and contacts correctly — not bidirectionally, at least — but it did a fine job of overwriting the data on the palm. Since I mostly entered contacts and events on the mac, that was good enough.)

But mostly the problem was Palm‘s. They let Mac buyers know what they thought of them right away, by providing the Palm Desktop for Mac, which stunk. The windows version wasn’t half bad, and Windows didn’t offer anything half as good as iCal and AddressBook. The standard for the Mac was higher, because of the better apps and both the desktop support and the sync experience was worse. But the real tip-off is this: Notice that I bought the E2 in 2005, more than 2 years ago. It’s still shipping. Can you think of any other technical gadget where that would be true? Compare to, for example, the iPod. Also the price hasn’t gone down appreciably in that time.