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The Palm Tungsten|w
Phone, Email, Web, and PDA: How Did I Ever Get By Without This?
by Lou Wallace
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 | | The Palm Tungsten|w |
About eight years ago the publication I edited ran a cover story on the future of computing. Our creative director and I came up with an image of a handheld computer with a large color display, which had a camera, cell phone, virtual keyboard and some VCR style controls for playing video. It was a fun speculative editorial piece, yet it really was what we thought computers would be like in 10 or 12 years, or at the very least what we wanted them to be.
Since then notebook computers and PDAs have become faster and smaller, and cell phones are adding PDA features and taking pictures. And they are merging into a single device much sooner then most people thought would happen.
The Palm Tungsten|w ($549) is the first color Palm product to integrate a cell phone, and it does it with style and a high degree of functionality. Take a look at this feature set:
· Palm OS® 4.1.1
· GSM™/GPRS Voice and Data (using AT&T)
· A 16 bit, 65,000 colors 320 x 320 reflective TFT display
· 33 MHz Motorola Dragonball VZ processor
· 16MB SDRAM
· Infrared (IR) Port
· Expansion Card Slot
· Built-in Keyboard
· Ten hour talk time battery, longer on standby or PDA mode
· Hot Sync to PC/Mac desktops
An impressive list of features, but the question for me was would it meet my specific needs? I needed a PDA that would give me email access wherever I was using my existing email account, that doubled as a cell phone, and that would run the client contact manager and database we use in the office, ACT 6.0. And I wanted to use a real keyboard, not some handwriting recognition feature. After looking at a number of possibilities, I decided on the Tungsten|w.
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It’s A PDA
 Most people use their PDA for scheduling and address books, but what I needed was one that could handle the client contact system we use here. Act 6.0 was what we had standardized on, and a quick check with them showed they supported both Palm and Pocket PC systems (ACT! for Palm OS, $69.95). I discovered quickly that with the 16MB of SDRAM I can’t keep every one of the thousands of entries I have here on my office system on the Tungsten, but I can keep the thousand or so most recently contacted clients and all the contact history for them. Since I synchronize with the main database everyday it’s always up to date, and limiting the total records increases overall Act for Palm performance.
I expanded the available storage with the Palm 128MB Expansion Card Plus ($89.95). This is static memory, and you can run applications and larger datasets from it, although it slows things down to run from this instead of the dynamic RAM. The expansion card included some useful utilities for file management (FilePoint), image viewing (PhotoBase), clocks, etc. All useful, but the Secure Digital memory/storage is the key aspect. With it, the Tungsten can handle much larger and more robust application databases.
For those times when I need access to Word or Excel files I also bought Quickoffice - Excel & Word (Cutting Edge Software, $29.95). These give you basic word processing and spreadsheet features that are file-compatible Microsoft office applications. The upgrade Quickoffice Pro includes PowerPoint and charting features.
All in all, I give the PDA aspects of the Tungsten a solid A.
Source: DMO
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