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One month ago palmOne followed up its most popular PDA, the over 2.5 million strong Tungsten E, with the Tungsten E2. Like all the company's handhelds since the launch of the Tungsten C in 2003, the new PDA does not integrate Wi-Fi. Nor would the device work with the vendor's WLAN Secure Digital (SD) card at the time of release.

That situation changes today with palmOne's announcement of a Tungsten E2 driver for the Wi-Fi expansion card. With the peripheral, Tungsten E2 users can now connect to hotspots and other access points as far as 300 feet away at up to the 802.11b wireless standard of 11Mbps. Other handhelds compatible with the Wi-Fi card include the Tungsten T3, Tungsten T5 and Zire 72.

PalmOne lists the Wi-Fi card for $99, but you can find it for less online.

Tungsten E2
Although the new mid-range handheld looks very similar to the earlier model, it adds several important improvements.

The Tungsten E2 has a 200 MHz XScale processor compared to the 126 MHz Texas Instruments CPU of the Tungsten E. It is built on Palm OS Garnet 5.4, as with most other Palm devices today. 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.

The Tungsten E2 also uses the same Multi-Connector (palmOne's most recent "universal" connector) as the handheld company’s other newer devices—the Treo 650 and Tungsten T5. Consequently, you should be able to use many of the same peripherals across all three models.

The Tungsten E2 implements non-volatile RAM (also known as NVFS memory) like the Treo 650 and Tungsten T5 as well. 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. It only has 32 MB of RAM (26 MB available to the user), however, which is on the low side for a PDA nowadays. There's an SDIO enabled Secure Digital (SD) slot for memory and peripheral expansion.

To help support its brighter screen and other features the E2 uses what palmOne asserts is a much more powerful battery than its predecessor. The company says the battery delivers twice the performance of the previous model's, with 10 to 12 hours of MP3 playback when the screen is shutdown, for instance.

Obviously, video and audio players, plus an image viewer are shipped with the Tungsten E2.

PalmOne add Bluetooth to the series Tungsten E series with the Tungsten E2. Bluetooth is a personal are networking technology that allows you to connect wirelessly to printers and PCs, for example, within a short distance.

Software includes the company’s VersaMail e-mail client and Web Pro browser for the Internet. To view and edit native Microsoft Office applications (Word, Exel, and PowerPoint), palmOne bundles DataViz's Documents to GO 7.0 Professional Edition. Users can transfer these files to and from the desktop.

The Tungsten E2 sells for $249, placing it $50 above the Tungsten E in palmOne’s mobile device hierarchy.

For more on the Tungsten E2, see our recent review.