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Tungsten is palmOne's line of business and professional PDAs, as distinct from the company's Zire consumer handhelds as it is from its Treo line of smartphones and presumably the upcoming Mobile Manager series. The new Tungsten E2 is an upgrade to the most popular handheld of all time, the mid-range Tungsten E.

The E2 is a classic Palm handheld with Graffiti handwriting input and no physical keyboard. It offers the usual Palm advantages of elegant industrial design, small size, light weight, and oodles and oodles of available applications—though it no longer has such huge lead on the Pocket PC in that last category. E2 also has the usual Palm disadvantages: inferior multimedia capabilities, less processing power and non-standard PIM (personal information manager) applets.

Although the E2 is much more powerful than its predecessor with a better screen and a few new features, most notably Bluetooth connectivity, there is nothing startlingly new here.

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If you're in the market for a smartphone, this is almost certainly not the product for you. That said, it is possible to use the E2 to collect e-mail and browse the Web if you already have a data-capable Bluetooth phone. But then, if you already have a data-capable Bluetooth phone, chances are you'll use it to collect e-mail and browse the Web, so why would you need the E2?


Back View

Enhancements
The most important improvements are aimed more at helping the E2 compete with other PDA platforms in terms of multimedia support. The screen—the usual square touch sensitive LCD familiar to Palm users—has the same technical specifications as the Tungsten E's screen (320 x 320-pixel Transflective TFT with 65,000-plus colors) but palmOne says it's brighter with better color saturation.

Flash memory capacity, 32MB (26MB useable) is the same as for the earlier model, and like the E, the E2 has a Secure Digital expansion card slot for adding memory and peripherals. The E2's 200MHz Intel XScale processor is definitely a significant improvement over the E's 126MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 311 ARM chip—though it's still a far cry from the 400 to 500MHz or more powerful processors in many Pocket PCs. As with

The Tungsten E2 implements non-volatile RAM (also known as NVFS memory) like the Treo 650 and Tungsten T5 This means you won't lose all your data in the event of a complete power drain, as the memory acts just like a flash card.

The Tungsten E2 also uses the same Multi-Connector (palmOne's most recent "universal" connector) as the handheld company’s other newer devices. Consequently, you should be able to use many of the same peripherals across all these models.


Multi-Connector

At 4.5 x 3.1 x 0.6 inches and 4.7 ounces the new PDA is a little bit heavier and wider than the 4.5 x 3.1 x 0.5-inch and 4.6-ounce earlier model. Even though there is no cradle, you can buy one as an add-on, which you couldn't do with the previous model.

Multimedia
The improvements over the earlier model do make the E2 a better multimedia device, but don't bring it up to anything like the caliber of a Pocket PC. Still images look very sharp and clear on its screen, but that's about as far as it goes. As a video and music player, it leaves something to be desired.

For starters, given that the E2 only comes with 26MB of useable storage, you'll definitely need to buy an SD card if you intend to tote videos around or use the E2 as an MP3 player.

One thing Palm does well, at least for the most part, is getting media files from your desktop hard drive to the device. In the Palm Desktop, all you do is select Media, click the Add Media button, use the pop-up file browser to find a video (or music file or image) on your hard drive and click OK. A thumbnail for the file appears in the Palm Desktop file window and will be synched to the E2 the next time you HotSync (synchronizing your Palm device with a desktop computer).

Palm desktop automatically reformats videos to work on the E2 screen. It's impressive that it supports most popular video formats, including .avi and .wmv (Windows video), .mov and .qt (Apple QuickTime), .mpg and .mpeg (Motion Picture Experts Group) and .asf (Advanced Streaming Format). However, in our tests, attempts to load two different .MOV (Apple QuickTime) files from two different sources consistently resulted in the Palm Desktop crashing.


Palm Desktop

Evaluating the performance of a device for playing videos always risks being unfair because so much depends on format, bit rate, color palette and size of the original file. When playing high-quality .avi clips, video motion was fairly smooth and individual frames looked clear and sharp, but there was break-up in sequences with rapid motion.

The E2 uses a PDA version of RealPlayer for music playing through headphones or the tiny integrated speaker. This version of RealPlayer supports only MP3 and RealPlayer AAC files. Evaluating music playing performance is also dodgy, since so much of it is in the ear of the beholder. It's also difficult to do side-by-side comparisons.

I tested the E2's music playing capabilities using fairly high-quality 192-Kbps MP3 rips, listening on very good hi-fi stereo headphones. This should have stacked the odds in the E2's favor.

To my ears, though, the sound was much to bright, almost to the point of harshness. That said, users accustomed to listening to 128-Kbps MP3s on tiny portable MP3 players equipped with earbud head phones may be more tolerant.

Bluetooth
The Bluetooth capabilities also proved less useful than we would have thought. One thing that worked fairly well was using Bluetooth to synchronize with a desktop PC. (Our test PC was equipped with a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.)


Tungsten E2 with Flip Cover

Setup was fairly simple using E2's Wizard program. But Bluetooth synching is a minor convenience at best. Yet how difficult is it to plug in the USB cable? USB is also a much faster medium than Bluetooth for exchanging data.

You can also use Bluetooth to connect the E2 to the Internet either over a mobile network by pairing it with a data-capable Bluetooth phone, or over a wired network coupling it with a desktop or laptop PC connected to the Net. We didn't have a Bluetooth phone with which to test the first proposition. Attempts to pair the device with the same desktop PC for purposes of accessing the Internet failed.

Palm technical support referred us to a third-party site that offered suggestions on how to do this: It involves getting Internet Connection Sharing working. The site said it was theoretically possible to do this with the Microsoft Bluetooth connection, but it involved programming. At that point my eyes glazed over.

Software
The Palm personal information management applications, while not portable versions of the ones you use on your desktop, are more than adequate. And they can now be synchronized with Outlook.

With DataViz Documents To Go 7.0 Professional Edition, which ships with the product, you can sync Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to and from your E2 to view and edit them on the handheld. The product ships with some other potentially useful applications, including VersaMail, an e-mail client, Web Pro for browsing the Internet, eReader for reading e-books and AudiblePlayer for listening to online downloadable audio books from the company of the same name.

The Tungsten E2 is a slick little PDA and the price, $250, is more than reasonable. Just don't expect it to be something it isn't.

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Merchants: Where to buy Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld Products
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