Palm's handheld/mobile phone combo is generally well designed, but there are a few deficiencies that prevent it from being an outright winner.

Design

This being a connected device, two design features stand out. The first is a cover on the back of the device under which your SIM sits. The positioning of this prevents the Tungsten W having a removable battery, which we'd like to have seen. The second is the antenna which protrudes slightly from the top of the casing. This detracts from the overall neatness of the hardware's looks, but is unavoidable.

Palm has replaced the customary Graffiti area with a thumb keyboard, and it's this that gives the Tungsten W its distinctive look. Three rows of keys are followed by a row of shortcut and function buttons, which itself is followed by further shortcuts and a tiny five-way navigation button that works well, but is too close to the bottom of the casing for ergonomic one-handed use.

The thumb keyboard is pretty easy to use. As always with this type of input mechanism, you need both thumbs to make the most of it. Our main issue is the lack of pound and Euro signs on the keys -- you have to go through a multiple-key-press phase to get to these and some other symbols. Still, if you don't want other keys that are on the keyboard (such as the $ for example), you can remap keys through the general Palm Preference settings very easily.

The hardware weighs 183g and measures 7.8cm wide by 13.8cm tall by 1.7cm thick to the tip of the antenna. Considering that this has to incorporate the communications features and a fairly hefty battery (which provides a claimed ten hours of talktime from a single charge), this isn't too bad. It may well be less overall than carrying a separate handheld and phone -- although if you usually split these devices between two pockets, then combining them in a single unit may make the dimensions and weight more noticeable.

An SD card slot sits on the lower right-hand side of the case for adding memory, and the on/off button has also been positioned here -- this relocation accommodates the antenna's space requirements at the top of the casing, but left-handers might find it awkward. The stylus slots into a space on the right side of the casing. The Tungsten W has a Universal Connector, so existing hardware such as external keyboards that are compatible with this connector type should also work with the Tunsgten W. Incidentally, in the documentation at the company's Web site, Palm promises an 802.11b sled for this connector.

Features

Apart from its voice and data capability, the Tungsten W is a fair stretch away from the cutting edge. It runs on Palm OS version 4.1, and its processor is a Motorola Dragonball VZ running at 33MHz -- a far cry from the much faster ARM-based processors used in the new Zire 71 and Tungsten C, both of which run Palm OS version 5.2. This may matter if you intend to do a lot of data communications, as it may affect the speed with which the Tungsten W can process incoming data and send it to the screen. It certainly makes HotSyncing somewhat slower.

There is 16MB of RAM, of which only 14.8MB is available for applications and data. As a connected device, the Tungsten W could become a repository for emails, Web pages and SMS messages as well as the usual contact and calendar information, and any third-party applications you may require. That 14.8MB could begin to disappear fairly quickly, which may grate when you realise that the newly-announced Tungsten C comes with 64MB.

The display is closer in quality to that of the Tungsten T than of the new Zire 71, being less bright than the latter. It's not ideal in all lighting conditions, but does deliver 320 by 320 pixels.

Palm provides a strong range of applications along with the usual suite, most of it aimed at communications. The desktop software includes a SIM management tool and support for Web Clipping -- something Palm seems to be moving away from, although we're glad to see it still being supported here.

On the ROM comes a WAP browser, a dialler called Mobile that offers a keypad, speed-dial numbers divided into three groups (friends, work and family) and a call history page. It's also possible to speed-dial a voice call from the Palm Address Book. You also get an application for managing SMS messages and VersaMail, an email client with support for multiple accounts over POP and IMAP as well as desktop synchronisation.

The provided Web browser has to be installed to RAM. The same goes for Documents To Go, Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Palm, the Palm Reader and a number of other applications that are provided on a second installation CD. Among these is Jot, a character recognition tool. You can pretty much form letters in your normal writing style using Jot, writing directly onto the screen. The left side of the screen is available for lower-case letters, the right side for numbers, and you write across an imaginary vertical line that bisects the screen to make upper case letters. There are also mechanisms for writing symbols. You can show a marker on the very top of the screen to indicate these divisions if it helps, but this becomes unnecessary very quickly. Jot is impressive.

Performance

The Tungsten W incorporates a tri-band GSM mobile phone with GPRS support. It delivered good-quality voice calls via the included handsfree set: the volume setting goes nice and high, while voice reproduction is clear. This is just as well, as there is no speaker or microphone on the hardware itself, so you can't hold it to your ear to make a call, and are reliant on either having the earpiece permanently in your ear, or having it handy enough to insert when required. We aren't convinced that this will be convenient, but it does point to the fact that Palm sees data rather than voice as more important to the Tungsten W's appeal.

Palm has put considerable thought into getting the software aspects of the Tungsten W right, even to the point of adding application shortcut buttons that can be configured to start your email client and Web/WAP portal software. These are user friendly features, and we like them. Our experiments with data calls went well, and we found VersaMail to be a usable and friendly email client -- one of the best we've tried on a small format device.

The screen let us down a little in some lighting conditions, and we found the ergonomics of having to use the earpiece for all voice calls annoying, although we may get used to this in time. We'd also have liked a speaker and microphone on the hardware, more memory and a removable battery.

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