palmOne's latest model tries not to mess with success. Larry Garfield examines the incremental changes in the Tungsten E2.
Since its launch, the palmOne Tungsten E has been the top-selling handheld in North America and among the top sellers world-wide. In the year and a half since its debut, however, technology has continued its steady march and the TE has started to show its age. Enter the Tungsten E2, a modest refresh unit that tries not to mess with success.
If it's not broke, don't fix it
The Tungsten E2 uses the same design as the Tungsten E and Tungsten T5. The silver plastic tablet sits well in the hand at 114 x 78 x 15 mm, only a hair larger than the TE, and is a comfortable 133 grams. A square 320 x 320 16-bit color TFT offers slightly improved visual quality from palmOne's already excellent screen design, although still incorporates only a fixed handwriting area.
The first noticeable improvement of the E2 is the inclusion of palmOne's new Multi-Connector serial port to replace the mini-USB port of its predecessor, a change the company claims was requested by many users in order to support the optional cradle. Other than that, and the barely-noticeable increase in thickness, the E2 is almost indistinguishable from the TE, right down to the directional pad, application buttons, SDIO slot, IR port, headphone jack, and nice metal barrel stylus.
Going wireless
The next notable improvement over the TE is the inclusion of Bluetooth 1.1. The Bluetooth support includes all the standard profiles along with the nice wizard seen on several recent models, starting with the Zire 72. That ranks the E2 as the second cheapest Bluetooth-capable handhelds on the market, at press time beaten only by the Dell Axim X30 Standard. Other connectivity options are standard, including the aforementioned SDIO slot, IR, and Multi-Connector port. Although Wi-Fi is not included, palmOne does claim that, unlike the Treo 650 communicator, the E2 works with their SDIO Wi-Fi card.
Forget me not
The E2 sports a few improvements under the hood as well, including a new 200 MHz processor; low compared to many newer models, but still clippy with most Palm OS business apps, and the same non-volatile memory system palmOne has started using on all of their models to avoid data loss in case the battery runs down. Although containing only 32 MB (26 MB user-available), the chunk size is smaller than on the Treo 650, which - without delving into a lengthy technical explanation - means lost slack space is far less. 26 MB is still a fairly small amount of RAM for a modern handheld, however.
Once again, though, the non-volatile memory comes in very handy for the battery. In our standard play-'till-you-drop music burn down test, the E2 lasted an amazing 17 hours before refusing to keep playing music, even though it still had a tiny bit of power left. While not enough to top the Treo 650, it still beats the pants off of nearly every other handheld in the market, most of which get 6-8 hours in the same test.
You look familiar, have we met?
The E2 includes the current state-of-the-art of palmOne's software suite. That includes palmOne's upgraded PIM suite, media suite (photo/video viewer and RealOne audio player), and web browser in ROM, with VersaMail and Documents To Go available on the included CD. The built-in Launcher also includes the "Favorites" tool debuted on the Tungsten T5 as well. All of that runs on Palm OS "Garnet" 5.4 with the usual Graffiti 2 handwriting software.
The software package for the Tungsten E2 is complete, but unsurprising. Nearly identical offerings are included in the Tungsten T5 and Treo 650, and the media suite hasn't changed much since the Zire 72 a year ago. That's to palmOne's credit, actually. The same suite found on their high-end models is now standard on the low-end, too, making for a solid business device as well as a good media performer. Support for unconverted video formats is still weaker than we'd like, but on the flip side Windows Mobile also only supports WMV.
Availability
The Tungsten E2 is at the time of press shipping in both Europe and North America, selling for $249 USD.
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