Palm believes in wireless. That's why it keeps trying to build wireless-data devices for the mass market. Larry Garfield looks at their fourth attempt and decides Palm has gotten it right... mostly.
Palm has been a big fan of wireless data for a long time. Its Palm VII was the first wireless data handheld for the mass market. Although the Palm VII and its successors the VIIx and i705 never sold especially well, Palm has not given up on the idea of always-on, always-online mobile devices. This time, however, they've moved from slow pager networks to the faster and more flexible GSM/GPRS network with the Palm Tungsten W. More than just heir apparent to Palm's continued push at the corporate and power mobile user, the Tungsten w is a good device in its own right. However, some of its components are a bit dated, and we find ourselves looking at the Tungsten W as a hint of what is to come.
 | The Tungsten W is Palm's fourth wireless data device
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Design
The Tungsten W feels a bit large compared to some of the other thin-is-in devices, but in fact it is no larger than the extended Tungsten T. It measures 12.1 x 7.79 x 1.65 cm, and weighs 184 grams. Most of that extra weight is due to the battery. More on that later. The casing itself is a smooth gray plastic, with very smooth, sloping design.
The Tungsten W's screen is a 320x320 16-bit color TFT, of the same design as on the Tungsten T. It's not quite as bright as the Tungsten T, but it is still easily bright enough for regular use. It uses the PalmSource High-Density screen API, which is standard on all Palm OS 5 devices now as well. Colors are vivid and clear, as they should be, and the refresh rate is good with no ghosting.
The Tungsten W is the first Palm-branded device to forego a Graffiti area in favor of a thumbboard. The keys are in a QWERTY layout in three even rows, and every button is oval-shaped and slanted to the right, a layout licensed from Research In Motion. While it's not bad, frankly Palm could have done better than to license RIM's design. We find square or round keys easier to use, such as those found on the Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 or Sharp Zaurus. Another problem with the keyboard is that it lacks directional arrows, and in most applications the 5-way NavPad (see below) is not mapped to text directional characters. That makes writing long pieces of text a hassle, as moving about the text requires using the stylus or a fingernail. The key travel is good, and the keys have a good tactile feel to them.
A fourth row of keys includes a Blue Function key, Shift/Caps Lock, spacebar, Shortcut, and Home keys. The Home button is a single-press, as it should be, and the Menu button is Fn+Shortcut, an interesting and fairly good placement. Find is Fn+Caps. The top row of letters doubles as number keys, while nearly all other keys double for some punctuation charcter. There are still a few unusual characters that are not available via the keyboard by default. Unlike the novel character-list system of the Treo keyboards, Fn+Spacebar calls up an on-screen keyboard that allows access to all alphanumeric and symbolic characters. All the keys can also be individually remapped to any layout the user wishes, though layouts cannot be easily saved and shared. The shift and function keys are "sticky", that is, pressing and releasing the key will keep the shift function active for the next keystroke. Two-thumb typing is possible, but the slanted keys and non-staggered layout caught us hitting the wrong keys periodically. It's a good keyboard, but not stellar.
Beneath the keyboard are the usual four application buttons, which on the Tungsten W by default map to Date Book, Address Book, VersaMail, and "AT&T Wireless applications". The latter is a simple graphical menu with five items, Phone, SMS, Web, WAP, and Office Online. All are self-explanatory except for Office Online, which is an AT&T Wireless-specific service. All buttons are round and a bit small, but perfectly usable. The spacing is a bit wide for gaming, but that is not likely to be a common use for this model. Instead of a rocker, the Tungsten W features a smaller version of the superb Tungsten 5-way Navigator D-Pad found on the Tungsten T. We really hope that this NavPad makes it into every Palm OS device as soon as possible.
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