Product Reviews

The Palm Tungsten T is the first product in Palm's new professional range of handheld devices. It features a number of improvements over its predecessors in the Palm V and Palm m500 series, but the most significant are the debut of Palm OS 5 and a new Texas Instruments OMAP1510 processor.

The combination of operating system and processor makes for a significantly more powerful device, with noticeable speed improvements in just about every application. Searching large Address Books and other database files is much faster.

Aside from the new operating system and processor improvements, this model has several advantages over its predecessors. The colour screen now has a resolution of 320 x 320 pixels, and this, together with redesigned icons, makes the whole display appear crisper and more pleasing to the eye. Display quality was an area where Palm had lagged far behind Sony, whose Clie devices had higher-resolution screens. Not any more, the display quality of the Tungsten T is a match for any Clie.

Another feature debuting on the Tungsten T is integrated Bluetooth functionality. This feature has been well executed with hardware and software combining to make it easy to connect wirelessly to another Palm, a mobile phone or your Mac. We found setting up the Tungsten T to send SMS messages through our GPRS mobile phone very easy, and configuring it to use the phone as a modem for Web surfing and email was only slightly more complicated, although actually getting a connection defeated us. There are a number of applications included on the accompanying CD designed to utilise Bluetooth, such as a chat application called BlueChat, and BlueBoard, a program that allows you to share sketches with other Bluetooth-connected Palm users.

Photo finish

There's a wealth of other software on the CD, including DataViz's Documents to Go, Acrobat Reader, MobileDB, Palm VersaMail, Palm WAP Browser, and

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Palm Web Browser Pro. The inclusion of ArcSoft's PhotoBase means you can view photographs on the Tungsten T as well.

The design of the Tungsten T is the best we've seen on any Palm. Its gunmetal grey finish gives it a sleek, professional look. And a new slider, which covers the Graffiti area, can be slid down when you need to enter data. This means that when the slider is closed, the Tungsten T is shorter than previous Palms. A five-way (up, down, left, right, select) circular navigator makes scrolling through and moving around documents and menus easy to do with one hand.

Like the Palm m515, the Tungsten T has a slot into which either a Secure Digital (SD) card or MultiMediaCard (MMC) can be inserted. Now that you don't have to use it for a Bluetooth card, you can, for example, add more storage and use it to store JPEGs, which can be viewed using PhotoBase.

A new Voice Recorder feature takes advantage of the built-in microphone and speaker, and there's a stereo headphone jack for private listening. The Voice Recorder can be accessed from the touch of a button on the side of the device. Pressing and holding the button switches on the Tungsten T, opens Voice Recorder and starts recording. With the addition of music software and a high-capacity SD card, the Tungsten T becomes a very capable personal music player. Likewise, third-party software allowed us to view a trailer of the latest James Bond film, Die Another Day, on the Palm's display.

As has become the norm, HotSyncing and battery charging are carried out using the supplied cradle. We were able to set up the Tungsten T to HotSync contacts and calendars with the beta version of iSync. You can also HotSync via Bluetooth. Integration with iSync is reasonable, but needs polish, which will hopefully be applied before the final release of iSync 1.0.

Screen saver

There are some additional nice touches; the clip-on perspex screen cover allows you to operate the Tungsten T using the five-way navigator while the cover is in place, and the stylus pops-up from inside the device rather than attaching to the side.

The Palm Tungsten T is a triumph. It's clear that the company has carefully researched the needs of its customers and though about how to make significant improvements to its line-up.

The result is the best Palm device yet. The Tungsten T is everything a handheld device should be: small, light, attractive to look at, powerful and very capable. At £340, it's also excellent value for money.