Product Reviews

While industry pundits have berated PalmOne for not including the next-generation operating system, Palm OS 6, with the Tungsten T5, we're quietly relieved. Palm OS 6 won't synchronise with the Mac, and while third-party developers have announced tools to facilitate this, the fact that the T5 runs Palm OS 5.4 makes life easier.

The Mac experience is identical to previous models, with the Palm Desktop and Hot Sync manager suite taking care of synchronising data between your PDA and Mac. The desktop equivalents of the diary, address book and notes manager are beginning to look dated, but many Mac users will probably choose to use either iSync or synchronise with Entourage instead.

The device itself is decently specified, but lacks the innovation that characterised earlier models. The 416MHz ARM processor gives it plenty of grunt; even juggling multi-megabyte presentations is handled with relative ease.

Although the case is identical in all but colour to the entry-level Tungsten E, the T5 features a 'soft' Graffiti area, which can be hidden (in those applications which support it) to provide more screen space. The screen can also be rotated into a highly useful landscape mode, although the supplied web browser only operates in a

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square format.

Bluetooth is included, making it simple in theory to link to other Bluetooth-enabled devices. The T5 includes a number of setup wizards, which make the process easier, but the list of officially supported mobile phones is woefully small. Unfortunately, manual setup is a headache. Bluetooth syncing is supported.

Frustratingly, there's no Wi-Fi, which limits this model's flexibility and, in a device costing £330, makes for a poor-value solution. It can be added later with an adaptor that slots into the space for an SD card, though.

The big news is the 256MB of storage. Actually, there's really only 215MB available, as the quarter gigabyte is split into a 55MB partition for the traditional Palm portion, plus the leftover to use as storage. The clever bit is that when you connect your Palm to a Mac or PC and enable Drive Mode, this internal storage shows up on the desktop, regardless of whether or not the host computer has Palm software installed; any added SD or MMC cards also mount. You can copy files to and from this storage space, and there's a companion piece of software on the T5 that allows for Finder-like file management.

The T5 comes with Documents to Go Professional Edition 7, and it can display graphics natively and play MP3s using RealPlayer. However, it doesn't offer any integration with iLife.

It's battery life is good - quoted at a week for normal use - but even if the battery does go completely flat, the non-volatile memory ensures your data is safe.

The T5 lacks the panache of the recently discounted T3 or the value of the £128 Tungsten E. Unless Bluetooth is vital, buy the E, add a 256MB SD card for £23, and buy a $40 copy of Missing Sync to have it mount on the desktop. Otherwise, plump for Sony's rival PEG-TH55, which also features 802.11b wireless networking.