Palm Tungsten E

07 Oct 2003 07:59

With a high-resolution colour screen, a sleek design, an expansion card slot, and a £149 (inc. VAT) price tag, the Tungsten E will hit the handheld sweet spot for many mobile professionals and consumers.

Design

The Tungsten E's silver and black design is reminiscent of that of Palm's earlier M500-series handhelds. But while those units suffered from lacklustre displays, the E's sharp, high-resolution 320 by 320-pixel screen is the same version found on the Zire 71, and it's on a par with Sony's best efforts. A sturdy, detachable flip cover serves as a screen protector.

Features

The 7.9cm wide by 11.4cm deep by 1.2cm high device is powered by a zippy 126MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 311 ARM processor, has 32MB of internal memory (28.3MB of which is free for storage), and runs Palm OS 5.2.1. The expansion slot is SDIO compatible, opening the door to forthcoming accessories such as cameras and wireless adapters. An AC adapter is included for recharging the internal lithium-ion battery. Additionally, a USB cable (there's no cradle) and Palm Desktop Software are provided to synchronise the Tungsten E with your Mac or PC.

The robust software package includes the standard organiser applications, plus updated Contact and Calendar applications, which provide enhanced features and improved Outlook synchronisation support. You'll also find separate programs for creating small databases, reading Acrobat files and e-books, and viewing digital photos. A world clock, Real One Mobile player (for listening to MP3 and RealAudio files) and Kinoma Player and Producer (for converting and viewing movie clips) ship with the unit, and the Tungsten E can even run J2ME Java applications. Last but not least, Palm throws in Documents To Go Professional Edition, which allows you to view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the device.

Performance

As for performance, our review unit worked well with Kinoma video files, and MP3s played smoothly. Battery life was decent; in our standard test, we were able to run an MPEG-4 file in a loop for 3 hours and 30 minutes. With normal usage patterns, Palm says the Tungsten E should go for about a week before having to recharge.

To take advantage of the multimedia features, you'll need to buy 128MB of SD or MMC media (for two hours of music files). It's also worth noting that Palm is serving up several new accessories for all its handhelds, including a wireless keyboard that smartly interfaces with the IR port. Whether you choose this Palm over a similarly priced Pocket PC handheld is a matter of operating system preference. This handheld's lack of a built-in camera, keyboard or wireless module keeps it just shy of an Editors' Choice, but any way you look at it, the Tungsten E is an excellent bargain.

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