Larry Garfield takes a look at the latest and greatest from Palm. The Tungsten T is everything one would expect from Palm, both the good and the bad. You could say it exemplifies Palm to a, well, T.
Years in the waiting, the move of the Palm OS platform from Motorola Dragonball processors to processors based on the ARM architecture is finally beginning. The newest version of the Palm OS, version 5.0, is Phase One in the migration to the new architecture, rewriting the "bottom half" of the OS to the new hardware. Phase Two, rewriting the "top half" of the OS to fully take advantage of the new features of the hardware, will be coming later in Palm OS 6. But that's not stopping licensees from building fancy new devices to take the new processors to their limits.
Though not the first licensee to begin shipping a Palm OS 5 device, Palm has still set several Firsts with its new Tungsten T, aka the m550. (The low-end Palm Zire was subtitled m150.) It's an impressive little device, and when we say little, we mean it.
Design
The typical argument in favor of virtual handwriting areas is that 90% of the time, a user needs to retrieve or read information, not write something, so don't waste that potential screen space with a dedicated writing area. Palm came up with a different answer: don't waste that space on the device at all.
 | The sliding front panel is the Tungsten T’s most obvious feature.
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The Tungsten T's most immediately noticeable feature is its sliding front panel, a first for a Palm OS device. The handheld slides in half, the bottom part of the device sliding up to cover the Graffiti area in "Compact" mode and sliding down to reveal a standard, silk-screened writing area. When in compact mode, the Tungsten T measures 101 x 77 x 15 mm (HWD), making it the shortest Palm OS device to date. When opened, it extends to 121 mm.
The casing itself is a dark gray brushed metal. The construction of the whole device feels very sturdy, and looks clean and elegant. That is not surprising given Palm's past successes in the design aesthetics department with the Palm V, m500, and Palm Zire. Unfortunately, all of that metal makes the device a bit heavier than it would appear from the size, weighing in at 158 grams. That puts it towards the high end of weight, about the same as the Sony CLIE PEG-NR70v.
Palm has also finally moved to higher-resolution screens, using the new PalmSource High-Density screen API. In particular, the Tungsten T has a 320x320 16-bit TFT display. The screen itself is, in a word, gorgeous. Colors are bright and vivid, and the backlight is very bright. At first we had it set down to only 33% and thought it was at full. At full backlight, the Tungsten T is substantially brighter than the Sony CLIE PEG-NR70v, with an overall warmer feel to it. The CLIE, however, has slightly better color fidelity with difficult-to-reproduce reds. Otherwise, however, the Tungsten T's screen is the best we've seen on a Palm OS device.
In another Palm OS first, the Tungsten T has dropped the traditional rocker switch for a 5-way D-Pad, which Palm calls the "5-way Navigator". The up and down directions are the same as the old Page Up / Page Down buttons, while the left and right directions generate new events for programs to use. The Select dot-button in the center generates the traditional select event. The four standard application buttons are present, albeit a bit small, and slightly domed to make them easy to hit. We found them fairly easy for playing games, though larger, dimpled buttons would have been easier.
The power button is on the top left face of the device, and protrudes slightly, just enough to make it easy to hit deliberately without hitting it by accident. Ironically, it's easier to hit with the handheld in the right hand, as most lefties will have it, than in the left. On the left side of the device is a headphone jack and voice recorder button. Pressing and holding the voice recorder button opens up a recorder dialog and starts recording through a high-quality microphone next to the button. Recording is done using standard wav format, and recordings can be saved to RAM or to a storage card. Playback quality was very good, capturing this reviewer's voice disturbingly well with little static. We'll come back to the voice recorder a little later.
Normally we would only mention the stylus in passing, but the Tungsten T's stylus is a rather novel design. A normal stylus would be too long for the compact size of the Tungsten T, so Palm includes a shortened stylus that is almost the exact length of the device itself when in Compact mode. However, pressing the top of the stylus causes it to extend about an extra centimeter to a normal length. It also allows it to extend far enough from the top of the case to be easily removed, and then reinserting the stylus and pressing gently compacts it again. The stylus itself is a well-sized all-metal design with black plastic tip and tail. There is no reset pin, but the tip is extra-small and the reset hole in back is slightly larger, allowing the tip to function as a reset pin. Our only issue is that with certain sized hands, the edge of the telescoping area can scrape against the hand, which is uncomfortable.
 | In Compact mode, the Tungsten T is the shortest Palm OS device to date. It also has a great screen.
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Connectivity
The Tungsten T also sets another first as the first Palm OS device to have Bluetooth 1.1 support integrated into the device. Out of the box, it supports the Dial-up Networking profile for connecting to the Internet through a GSM/GPRS mobile phone. It also includes support for Bluetooth HotSync as well as printing via select models of Bluetooth-enabled Hewlett-Packard printers. According to Palm, the firmware of the device can be upgraded to add additional profiles later through downloads, but Palm has yet to release any such upgrades. If another Bluetooth device is nearby, all of the PIM apps now support sending records by not only Bluetooth but also Infrared, SMS, and e-mail.
The Tungsten T does have a single SDIO-compatible Secure Digital card slot on the top of the device, right beneath the Infrared port. The IR port is a standard strength port, not a long-range model. It also includes the Palm Universal Connector for USB HotSync or accessories.
The Universal Connector specification defines both the connector itself and two clips in the back of the device to allow for sled-type accessories, and the Tungsten T is designed to handle both of those. The sliding portion of the case extends most of the way up the back, and includes the two connector clips. That way, accessories can remain connected when the device is open or closed, a very clean and elegant design. Any accessory that properly uses the Universal Connector specification should be, according to Palm, both physically and electrically compatible with the Tungsten T, although new OS 5-specific drivers will be needed.
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