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My name is Davey Winder and I'm an early adopter.

The "Gadget Guy" returns, on the twelve-step programme to recovery from gadget addiction, with his "Confessions of an Early Adopter"

There, I've admitted it.

My life would be much simpler were I an ordinary consumer who waits for prices to drop and standards to rise before flexing the plastic. But there's not much I can do about it now seeing as I bought the Palm Tungsten T3 as soon as stock hit the Expansys website, other than report on the lucky dip that is the latest attempt at Sony bashing to emerge from the womb of the itself reborn PalmOne production line.

Don't get me wrong, I love my T3. It is everything that my Sony Clie NZ90 isn't: small, light, shiny. It even has a slider thingy to feed my Star Trek fantasy.

The T3 does share something in common with the bulky beast that is the NZ90 though: teething trouble. In fact, it outshines the Sony quite remarkably in this respect. Whereas Sony could only build in some problems with battery life when using the integrated 2 megapixel camera and flash, PalmOne have gone for the triple whammy of memory card destruction, screen brightness fluctuation and processing grunt reduction.

Let's start with the first to surface, the memory card problem.

Bits & Bolts Software was the first to bring this to the attention via an announcement on their website on the 2nd of October. This was soon followed by a plethora of similar complaints that erupted across the PDA community forums online as the early adopters got hold of the T3.

Essentially it seems that there may be a problem with the slot driver that can cause SanDisk manufactured SD cards of 256Mb or more in size to fry when written to.

Numerous people are reporting the problem, made worse by the fact that SanDisk make cards for a myriad of brands (you need to use the Card Info software, or a tool such as Palm Insider Pro, to determine the manufacturer). I am lucky, my 256Mb SD card is made by Panasonic, carries the Integral brand and was one of the cheapest available when I bought it alongside my T3 at Expansys.

To add to the confusion, not everyone with SanDisk cards is seeing them destroyed by their T3. Certainly those who do would appear to be getting FAT file system driver errors, whereby the T3 cannot access certain bad sectors on the SD card - despite the SD card being fine before use in the T3 of course.

Data loss and corruption are not great selling points for a high end PDA. The usual passing on of blame will happen; with SanDisk saying it is a PalmOne thing, and vice versa. The fact that they have already posted a slot driver update for the Tungsten E, released at the same time as the T3, would suggest that PalmOne recognise there is a problem that needs sorting here.

If you are experiencing SD card apocalypse then contact PalmOne (www.palmone.com) through their online support system with memory card make, serial number and last action performed before disaster struck.

Problem number two is less easy to deal with and I suspect will come down to individual perceptions as well as individual batches of PDAs. It is best illustrated by looking at the photograph of two T3's taken side by side, in the dark, as shown at the Bargain PDA site where you will see the significant extra brightness of one unit.

Needless to say that numerous others have reported this phenomena online now, although one does have to question the thought of geeks examining screen brightness in the dark. I have better things to do, and my T3 is bright enough, the white looks white and not yellow or blue so that's good enough for me.

What isn't good enough is the final problem in this triumvirate, the slowing down of the T3 to 75% of its original 400MHz speed after a couple of power offs. It's true, and effects everyone I've spoken to so far. What's more you can easily verify it by using any speed benchmarking utility.

Luckily developer Robert Hildinger worked out what was causing the problem, ahead of PalmOne (shame on them) and has made a fix available by the name of T3 Optimizer which works as a system prefs panel option.

So exactly what is it that causes a drop of 25% processing speed after a power cycle? According to Hildinger it is caused by the audio hardware of the T3 being left in a weird state that generates around 30,000 interrupts per second.

Here's what Hildinger has to say about the matter: "I detected this by modifying my previous timer ARMlet to detect and record those instances where it's main loop had obviously been interrupted by another process. After a reset, this ARMlet would run for about 2.5 seconds and report back 250 interruptions, which is exactly what one would expect given that we know that in the absence of any user input or peripheral access that the OS is interrupted 100 times per second for the tick counter. After a power cycle, this same ARMlet would report around 120,000 interruptions - clearly a very marked difference".

He eventually narrowed it down to the I2S Controller, which after a reset but before a power cycle generated no interrupts. After a power cycle it started generating those 30,000 interrupts per second that slowed the CPU down.

You could open the voice memo app and record a short memo after each power cycle, or do a warm reset, but why should you? Thankfully the T3 Optimizer fix works, and works well, restoring my T3 back to full speed without any apparent side effects.

Interestingly though, Hildinger raises the question of whether the SD card problems are somehow linked to spurious interrupts causing corruption during a VFS write operation. Food for thought for PalmOne, and if it does turn out to be the case then maybe we will be seeing a 'recall' situation in the near future.

Personally I wouldn't hold my breath, nor would I advise anyone to buy a T3 just yet - at least not until the lucky dip barrel has been shaken around a little more to favour the end user.