PDA News

Palm Tungsten C Review

By Little Sun | Editor in Chief
Date: 11/27/2003

The Tungsten C is an attractive, business-like PDA that closely resembles the Tungsten W minus the antenna. It's made of hard plastic, has an integrated thumb keyboard and sports an understated silver metallic finish. It's easily pocketable and feels solid. It's about the same size as the Tungsten T with slider open.

Horsepower and Battery Life

Tungsten C runs Palm OS 5.2.1 and a 400 MHz Intel XScale PXA255 processor, making it the fastest Palm OS PDA at the moment. This is the same processor that high end Pocket PCs use. While the processor used on other Palm OS 5 PDAs (144 MHz or 200 MHz) has been more than fast enough, the specs should please corporate purchasers. What we have been waiting for is a Palm OS PDA with more than 16 megs of RAM, so the 64 megs of RAM (also the same amount found on high end Pocket PCs) will have most users jumping for joy. Of that 64 megs, 51 are available to the user. Still, 51 megs should be more than enough to store quite a large number of Palm applications and data.

Battery life is excellent for a PDA with built-in WiFi. I don't know how Palm does it, but I used the PDA to work with MS Office Docs, surfed the web for 2 hours, accessed the calendar, contacts and tasks several times during the day, played Pinballz2 and the battery level only dropped about 15%. Palm claims that you can get a full work day of WiFi connectivity from the unit.

Physical Specifications

Just for a size comparison, here is the Tungsten|C shown with a Tungsten|T, Sony CLIÉ NR70V, and because it also has built in 802.11b - I am including the HP iPAQ 5455 in the lineup.

Tungsten T, Tungsten C, iPAQ 5455, NR70V

Stacked up, Tungsten C is the second smallest of this group. Perhaps the most telling example of the C's size, is the fact that it is roughly the same length as the incredibly compact Tungsten|T, when the T's graffiti slider is open.

When in my hand, it feels comfortable, easily graspable, and perhaps as an added bonus - the power button is where my left pinky finger naturally falls - making it easy to hold the C and flick it on or off. My right hand is then free to push buttons, work the nav-pad, or tap on the screen.

Keyboard, Graffiti 2 and Navigation

Because there is no graffiti area on the screen, there are instead dedicated buttons to activate control, menu, home, and shortcuts. The blue button that you can see to the left, is a type of "shift" button that allows you to type the smaller characters (in blue) that appear on each button.

Using the thumb keyboard is quite easy, as it is laid out in a QWERTY pattern that everyone is familiar with. Even though there is a shift key, making capital letters is as simple as holding down the button after you type a letter. All numbers and common pronunciations are accessible by hitting the blue shift key. It takes a little while to get used to the system, but once you get it down, you will most likely amaze yourself with your typing speed.

Display

The Tungsten C and the simultaneously released Zire 71 are the first Palm brand PDAs to have transflective screens. The Tungsten C's screen is bright, nicely color saturated and doesn't have any color bias (no color tint). While not as bright as the best of the transflectives (iPAQ 3900 series and 5450) it is plenty bright enough, and is a bit brighter than the Zire 71. It's head and shoulders above the Tungsten T, which looks dim and has a pinkish color cast in comparison.

WiFi Wireless Networking

The Tungsten C has built-in 802.11b WiFi wireless Ethernet networking. You can use WiFi to access the Internet for web surfing and email along with syncing and printing to printers on an Ethernet network.

I tested it with a few 802.11b access points and it worked well with excellent signal strength (better than some of our notebooks!). It connects fine using WEP and with non-broadcast networks. If for some reason the C fails to connect to an access point (perhaps you have the WEP key entered incorrectly), it may still tell you it's connected. However when you launch the included web browser, it will just sit there for about 30 seconds doing nothing. Your PDA hasn't hung, though you might think so.

Tungsten C comes with the excitingly named "Web Browser" built into ROM. It have Web Browser 2.0.1 with core technology from Access, the same folks who make the venerable, though sometimes cranky, NetFront web browser that comes with the Clie NX and NZ90 models. Web Browser is definitely a great app: it supports side-scrolling, JavaScript, proxies, SSL 3.0 and cookies.

For email, you get Palm's own VersaMail 2.5. It supports up to 8 POP3 and IMAP accounts and has built-in settings for some popular ISPs such as Earthlink, Yahoo, Verizon and Apple's .Mac service. It will work with Exchange servers and supports syncing email with the desktop. It has an auto-retrieve function that allows you to schedule periodic checks for new email.

If you want to print to networked printers, you can do so using the included copy of the ever-popular PrintBoy from Bachmann.

Software Bundle

The Tungsten C comes with Document To Go Pro version 5.03 built into ROM. This is the most popular package for working with Word, PowerPoint and Excel docs on your PDA, and supports the high res display. While it's nice to have the application suite stored in ROM, keep in mind that updates or new versions will have to be installed in RAM.

You'll also get Collingo Meeting for sharing appointments with other Collingo users via WiFi, WorldMate, a really neat and useful app for travelers that lets you view the time, date, weather and more for 5 cities across the world, AOL for Palm, AvantoGo, Handmark Solitaire and more. If you're a gamer, you'll be happy to know the recently released Sega games for the Palm Tungsten T also work on the C.

Palm Desktop is enhanced to support image syncing. I imagine all Palm brand PDAs will ship with this enhancement and the Palm Photo app for the handheld. On the left side of the screen alongside with the Date, Address and etc. icons you'll see a Palm Photos icon. Clicking on this icon will bring up large thumbnails of images stored on your Palm that have been synced to the desktop. You can also use this window to adds photos to your Tunsten. Palm Photos offers some basic image editing functionality as well: you can rotate images 90 degrees, crop them, zoom, adjust for red-eye and automatically adjust brightness, color balance and contrast using the Enhance function. There's even a preview pane, so you can see how images downloaded to Palm Desktop will look on your Tungsten.

Kinoma Videos

The Tungsten C comes with Kinoma Player for Palm and a special version of Kinoma Producer for the desktop. This app allows you to take MPEG-1, Quicktime, AVI and DV videos and turn them into .prc files that the Palm can play. While the files created by Kinoma aren't as high quality as the originals, and show some blockiness, overall they look good and are relatively small in terms of file size.

Audio

Not much to say here: no MP3 player, a mono speaker built into the back, and a headphone jack that can accept the 2.5mm mobile phone style hand's free headset. In fact, you can use the Tungsten W's headset with the Tungsten C. Why bother with the headset jack? In case you want to use Voice Over IP or record voice memos. The C does not have a built-in mic, so you'll need to use a headset to record voice memos.

SD Slot

The Tungsten C has an SD slot that can accommodate SD and MMC memory storage cards as well as SDIO cards such as the Palm Bluetooth card.

Pro: The most powerful Palm OS PDA, bringing us a 400 MHz XScale processor and 64 megs of RAM running Palm OS 5.2.1 with Graffiti 2. User-friendly robust built-in WiFi. The high res transflective display is very good and the software bundle is strong. The PDA is fast and user friendly. Compatible with existing Palm universal connector accessories.

Con: No MP3 player or stereo audio. You must use a headset to record voice notes.

Back to PDA News