Tungsten E13 October 2003 The year was 2001. After breaking the screen on my HP Jornada 548 that spring, summer found me still using the aging Handspring Visor Deluxe as my "daily driver" PDA. I hungered for an upgrade, but was torn between the Sony Clié N710C and the new Palm m505. The Palm was small, sleek and ran the new PalmOS 4.0, while the Sony was thicker, ran PalmOS 3.51 and used more expensive Memory Stick media. But the Sony had two features the m505 lacked: a high-resolution screen and the ability to play MP3s. In the end, I went with the Sony, only to ditch it months later for another HP Jornada. I've often wondered what would have happened if I'd taken the other road. Friends of mine went with the m505 and a few still use theirs. I've always loved the thin, sleek form factor of the Palm V and it's descendents (it's a twinge on the wide side, but nothing's perfect). None of the devices I've used in the last two years equaled that slim elegance. The more things change... When Palm released the Tungsten lines, a lot of users cried out for a hi-res, ARM-powered update to the m515. The Tungsten T and Tungsten C were thicker than the venerable Palm V-inspired m500 series, if the T was a bit shorter. No one really bought the idea that the height of the device was the critical factor, not the thickness. Even battery-crunching PDA fanatics like me end up carrying the devices in pockets much of the time, and having carried a sleeved iPAQ in Dockers for a few months, let me tell you: thinner is better. Palm's third round of Tungstens included yet another version of the T and a new line, the Tungsten E. The E is Everything Palm users have asked for. It's slim, light, bright, musical and powerful. I picked one up less than a week after I put it up on the shelf at the store. The Tungsten E comes in plastic bubble packaging like the low end Zires rather than a cardboard box. Personally, I like this, since it's easier to see the actual unit and you don't have as much to lug home. The thinner packaging is made possible in part because the Tungsten E doesn't come with a cradle, or even the connector to use with a cradle. The bottom end of the E sports a standard USB "mini-B" type connector and a round DC power port. The port is a standard 5 volt/1 amp port, the same one used by many Samsung cell phones. While I'm sure the E will sell in sufficient numbers to spawn a line of chargers of its own, for now you can pick up chargers for the Samsung A460/A500 and use them with the E. I've got a Belkin car charger that works great. I use the car charger whenever possible, but I have to say that reports of poor battery life on the E are greatly exaggerated. I wasn't too impressed myself at first, but after setting the IR keyboard driver to auto-disable after five minutes of inactivity significantly improved my battery life. I get about 5.5-6 hours now, similar to other color devices with 900mAH batteries. The first really big pro of the Tungsten E is the size. While you could see that it's larger than the classic Palm V with a pair of calipers, it's close enough to look and feel Palm V-sized. The bottom edge doesn't taper the same way, but this is still a very pocketable device. Between this and my Microsoft Smartphone, I can walk around and look completely normal for the first time in years. No more unsightly bulges in my pants! (Get your mind out of the gutter; this is a family website.) The screen on the Tungsten E is the same bright, vibrant screen used in the Zire 71 and Tungstens T2 and C. It's 320x320 with a hard silk-screened Graffiti area. I've said before I like the hard Graffiti area because if you know the Command stroke mnemonics for PalmOS, you can navigate faster with Graffiti than tapping on buttons and icons and menus. Like the other Palm transflective screens, this one doesn't allow you to actually turn the backlight off, and the minimum brightness is almost blinding for trying to read in bed. I'm using a shareware program called Energy Dimmer that allows both the complete turn off of the backlight and named profiles for quickly setting the brightness to common environments (25% for Home, 50% for Work, etc.). Unlike many transflective screens, the Palm transflectives look great in direct sunlight, almost as readable as pure reflective screens. One area Palm has consistently lost out to Sony is in audio, particularly audio volume. My Zire 71, for all its wiles, was nearly impossible to hear while walking around through busy city streets. I love listening to Audible, and it was a pain to have to carry around things like a Boostaroo amplifier just to hear the book over the road noise in the car. With the Tungsten E, this is no longer an issue. Max volume on the E is deafening, with Audible being quite comfortable at only a couple notches above minimum. Bass response through the headphones is adequate, and music sounds great in Aeroplayer. The E is a no-compromise device for audiophiles. The buttons on the front of the Tungsten E are flat, and flush with the case. They have a matte finish that contrasts visually with the glossy sheen of the aluminum/zinc alloy casing, but they're not easy to press by feel alone. They have a good tactile feedback, but you do need to look at them to press them accurately. The five-way directional pad is better than some I've used, but I miss the joystick on the Zire 71. The Tungsten E's d-pad is a rounded off, horizontal rectangle with an easy to hit select button in the center. Select, up, left and right are easy to hit, but down seems to take a little usage to "break in". It was very stiff and hard to click when I first got my E, but after many hours reading in iSilo and Palm Reader, it seems to have lightened up a bit. Like the Zire 71, there are no side controls on the Tungsten E, just the four application buttons and the d-pad. The biggest reason I ditched my Zire 71 to get the E was memory. The Zire's 16MB was cramped at best, and I ended up using PowerRun to run just about everything I could from the storage card. While the 64MB of the Tungsten C and T3 was tempting, the 32MB in the E is plenty. I can keep most of my applications in RAM, where they start quicker and work more reliably. I still use PowerRun for games, but I have no fears of running out of RAM for the time being. Speaking of storage cards, there's been some word of trouble with large SD cards on the new Tungstens. Cards larger than 256MB have ended up corrupted in the T3, requiring reformatting to use the card again. Sandisk cards seem the most susceptible to this problem, and some 256MB Sandisks have also fallen prey. I have a 256MB Sandisk in my E, and it seems to be working just fine. Maybe I've got the only good one, but I've had no problems. PalmOne has already released an SDIO update for the E that adds support for most current and many future SDIO devices, and they're actively seeking help tracking down and fixing the SD bug on the new Tungstens. For now, I wouldn't use a 512MB or 1GB SD card in the Tungsten E just to be on the safe side, but it works with smaller SD cards just as well as other VFS-enabled Palms. Not to say my transition to the Tungsten E wasn't without disaster. My problems came when I tried to install the new version of Palm Desktop. The Tungsten E comes with updated PIM applications designed to work better with Microsoft Outlook, and I was excited about using them. In order for them to work, I had to install the new Palm Desktop, which comes with new conduits written by PalmOne for Outlook syncing (rather than using Chapura's PocketMirror). The install wizard did its thing, then informed me that I had to reboot my Windows 98SE system for the changes to take effect. I rebooted. It was the last time my laptop would run Windows 98. When the system tried to start again, it informed me that Explorer.exe could not start because the required DLL file MSVCRT.DLL was missing, and that I needed to reinstall Windows. I broke out my Windows 98 CD, but it's not bootable and there was no way to start the system with CD support to try to reinstall from DOS mode. After trying what non-destructive options I could think of, I finally gave up, reformatted my C drive and installed Windows XP Professional on my archaic Pentium II/233 with 160MB of RAM. To my immense surprise, not only does everything in my system work under XP, but the system itself works better under XP than it did under Windows 98. Palm Desktop works flawlessly with Outlook now and my laptop has a new spring in its step. Still, beware installing the new Palm Desktop if you're running Windows 98 and want to keep it that way. So what made all that hassle worth it? Well, the new PIM applications are quite nice. Date Book, Address Book and To Do List have been renamed Calendar, Contacts and Tasks, respectively, and they've been tweaked to work well with their namesakes in Outlook. Calendar now supports locations, events that span midnight and categories (still limited to 15 until PalmOS 6). Categories can be color-coded, their color showing up as a filled rectangle in the Week and Month views and a colored dot in the Agenda and Day views. The Agenda view has been updated to resemble the Pocket PC Today screen, showing upcoming appointments, tasks and unread email over an optional graphic background. My only gripe is the Agenda view lists appointments through the day after tomorrow, leaving less space to view tasks. I'd rather see just today and tomorrow, or better yet, list just the next x appointments, whenever they may fall. Contacts has more fields, lots of them. There's a dedicated date field for birthdays, which then show up in the calendar. There are snail mail address fields for Home, Work and Other, five instant messaging screen name options (separate from the phone numbers) and nine custom fields, up from four in the old PalmOS devices. The Palm Outlook conduits sync the Palm categories to Outlook, but you still have the limitation of one category per contact, at least until PalmOS 6 comes out next spring. Tasks has a few new features, but I've been waiting for them since 1997. Tasks can now have alarms and repeats. Repeats are smart enough to handle both "every five days" and "five days after I checked it off the last time." This is magic, as far as I'm concerned, and the first time I've seen any PDA that can do this out of the box. Tasks also adds new filters and viewing options, allowing you to see what you really need to do and when. Memos has only one change, other than the name, but it's a substantial one. Memos can now be up to 32k in size. Long time readers may remember that I originally sought to keep these columns brief by limiting them to the 700 words or so that would fit in a memo. I guess that point's moot... Speaking of writing, the Tungsten E includes Documents To Go Professional 6. This gives you Word, Excel and Powerpoint compatibility, and the ability to edit Word .DOC and Excel .XLS files natively. It does support word count (after you install the free update to 6.005), but spell checking requires the $29.99 upgrade to Premium. The E also comes with Versamail 2.6, the latest version of Palm's mail client. Versamail does a great job of syncing with Outlook, including subfolders under Inbox, as well as pulling in POP3 and IMAP4 email. Given that the E has only IR for wireless connectivity, you'll need an IR capable cell phone and a little patience for the latter. Versamail's online features should be more useful in the near future when we should see SDIO Bluetooth and WiFi cards on the market. Unlike Sony Cliés and Pocket PCs, the Tungsten E will sync out of the box with both PCs and Macs. The sleek aluminum/zinc metal of the E even looks good next to a shiny new Powerbook. So overall, how does the Tungsten E stack up? Given everything it can do, it's a steal for $199.99. The E buries the needle in the bang-for-the-buck-ometer. This bright, high-powered descendent of the Palm V will be a big hit for palmOne, and may be the new "it" PDA. We have trouble keeping them in stock at my CompUSA, a problem I expect to continue. And in the other corner... This week Sony also released their new $200 slimline PDA, the Clié TJ-25. Sony needed this one to be a hit, since the more recent Sony offerings have underwhelmed compared to lower-priced or better-performing competition. Unfortunately, the TJ-25 is doomed to flop as hard as the TG-50 and UX-50 before it. For the same price as the Palm Tungsten E (well, $20 less after a Sony mail-in rebate), you get half the RAM (less, actually, given that only 11 of the TJ-25's 16MB is usable), no headphone jack and a screen with a maximum brightness about the same as the Tungsten E at only 33%. Aside from the standard Clié connector on the bottom for charging cables, keyboards, etc., and the Memory Stick Pro slot (assuming you already have an investment in Memory Stick Pro), I don't see any reason to pick this over the Tungsten E. Back to the drawing board, Sony... Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |