Palm Tungsten T > Reviews (10)

The palm Tungsten T was the next step from the Palm M105 for me. It is Simply a PDA and doesnt have any of the functions of a phone.

The Techie bit.

• Memory (standard): 4 MB flash, 16 MB SDRAM (14 MB actual storage capacity)
• Reflective TFT color screen with brightness control and support for more than 65,000 colors
• Display size: 2.5 x 2.5 inches
• Resolution: 320 x 320 pixels
• ARM-based Texas Instrument OMAP1510 processor
• Integrated Bluetooth Radio and Antenna
• Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard Expansion Slot

Comes with Palm Tungsten T handheld, stylus, protective cover, USB HotSync cradle, power supply (120 VAC), installation CD with user manuals, Software Essentials CDWhat you can buy to add to it

• Blue tooth connectivity for your pc/laptop/mobile phone.
• Camera
• Extra multimedia and memory cards
• Emergency battery powered recharger
• Extra cradles for hotsyncing away from your PC
• Hundreds of thousands of aditional software products.

It is a much faster piece of technology than the lower range zires or m100 series with a greater range of uses due to the hugely increased memory capacity. The rechargable battery gives you around 12 hours of working time. This is plenty as long as you remember to charge your handheld on a daily basis. It is possible to download software that allows you to minimise energy expenditure and gives you greater control over the brightness and volume than is built into the operating system.

For me, an avarage user with a medium range of office uses it is fine. The speed of use is good and the memory is adequate for my needs (oh and the game graphics are terrific) My husband, a software professional who uses it for a range of serious office control activities the memory is proving insufficient. He is finding that he needs the more powerful ranges that are available in order to power development tools and more extensive graphic interfaces with his regular PC's

It is possible to purchase a Bluetooth dongle that will allow your handheld to connect to your pc to surf the internet (you can sit in bed and look at your email should you so wish) and when your range of software downloads becomes too great for the harddrive on your handheld you can purchase aditional memory cards. It is worth remembering that you cannot relocate basic functions to memory cards however. This causes a fatal exception in the unit and fries your data.

The cameras that are available for the Tungsten T are not for serious applications. The image size is small and the quality of graphic is poor, much like the earlier camera phones. However you can download images from your PC and use them for wall paper and other embelishments as you would with any PC. These graphics are of extremely high quality and the huge range of colours supported gives a good account of scanned photographs.

So far we have not found a protective case that you can leave on when you hotsync the unit.
The slide out grafiti panel is annoying. When it is in a protective metal case the clunk click mechanism is not as smooth as i would like.

However with many of the cases you can buy for this item it is possible to open it without removing the case. It is also possible to download a programme that allows you to write grafiti directly onto the screen. This has proved one of the more impressively useful applications we've found.

Possibly the greatest advantage with this model is the huge repertoir of applications you can download to personalise your handheld. You can prime this machine to do pretty much anything you need from revision, organising your day and calculating your calories to following the stock markets, nagging you to perform daily tasks and reading books. One of our favourite downloads is a compact mind mapping tool which communicates with a more comprehensive version for PC.

Bearing in mind that this is now in the £150 bracket this unit represents excellent value for money. It could well be your new best freind However if you are a computer professional or for some reason need to store high volumes of information on the hard drive there are bigger and better machines on the market that will almost certainly be of more use than the Tungsten T.