Palm Tungsten C
The Tungsten C offers WiFi at an exceptionally good price.The Tungsten C resembles Palm's legacy PDAs in a visual sense, and it's one of only two PDAs in our roundup to come with an integrated keyboard. There are two catches with the Tungsten's keyboard, however. Firstly, it's very small, and relies on a function button to access characters that you may need continually -- most notably, all of the numerical characters. Secondly, the existence of the keyboard means there's no Graffiti area, although you can set the screen to accept Graffiti input instead. This isn't perfect; if Graffiti failed to recognise our test character it often just scribbled on the screen.
The Tungsten C sports the current PDA heavyweight champ, the Intel PXA255 400MHz XScale processor; that's the same beast that powers the Dell Axim and HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5450. The main difference, of course, is that the Tungsten C isn't attempting to run Pocket PC 2002/2003; it's running Palm's considerably more streamlined Palm OS 5, which should in theory give the processor more headroom for future applications; for the moment, however, there's not a lot of perceptible difference outside of very heavy multimedia applications.
On the subject of applications, Palm's made pretty sure that the Tungsten C can be used for just about any PDA capable task right out of the box. These range from simple world clocks to Avantgo's web retrieval software to Acrobat reader and Kinoma Video player. As usual with most modern Palm PDAs, you get a copy of the useful Palm Desktop software for PC-based manipulation of your mobile data.
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PDAs
Introduction 1. Dell Axim X5 2. HP iPAQ h1910 3. HP iPAQ h5450 4. Palm Tungsten C 5. Palm Zire 71 6. Sony CLIE PEG-SJ22 7. Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 8. Toshiba e350 9. Toshiba e750 Editor's choice |
Palm's always sold itself on battery life, and while the figures that vendors give are often suspect -- especially if you're intermittently using WiFi -- we've seen battery figures around the 7 hour mark in previous tests. That's well above anything that a Pocket PC device can currently manage without the use of additional batteries.
We reckon that the Tungsten C does just about everything right; it's got solid battery life, a mostly future-proof specification and wireless connectivity in a package that comes in at AU$999. The line between the three models competing for our high-end Editor's choice was very thin indeed, and if the Palm's attempts at connecting to our wireless LAN had been successful, it could well have come out on top. As it is, it's still highly recommended and certainly the best Palm PDA you can get.
Palm Tungsten C
Company: Palm Australia
Price: AU$999
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 302 959
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I am interested only in limited features in a PDA like the Phonebook, Birthday or Anniversary date storages etc. etc.
So which pDA do you recommend me to have that should have some high Battery backup and long-life warranty?