PalmOne has been a strong leader in developing Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs for the business class for quite some time. The company, rather obviously, is a global leader in PDAs and provides almost all accessories to support their products. This includes accessories from necessary software to hard cases and much more. Recently, PalmOne made the announcement to introduce a more value class PDA to the market, Tungsten E2. The Tungsten E2 is originally developed from its predecessor, the regular E version and carries more or less the same feature set. Although the differences between the two are far and between, could this be the right PDA for you?

Photo Courtesy: PalmOne 

As you can tell from the picture, the Tungsten E2 boasts a variety of sleek layout with professional color-scheme and a 320x320 high-resolution screen. It measures 4.5" in height, 3.1" in width and .59" in thickness. This should give you a brief idea of what to expect from the PDA. To further add to the portability factor, the E2 weighs a mediocre 4.7 ounces that include both the PDA itself as well as the stylus.

The quick navigation buttons for calendar, contacts, tasks, and notepad are all situated right underneath the screen, towards the bottom of the PDA.

The Tungsten E2 operates on a PalmOS Garnet v5.4 operating system with Intel’s 200MHz Xscale microprocessor, which is specially designed for mobile devices like PDAs. The color screen is 320x320 in size with support for 65,000 colors for the most realistic experience with images and video. The E2 features 32MB of onboard memory and SD, SDIO, multimedia expansion cards that are sold separately. It also has a five-way navigator button for quick navigation through the software-end. Since, PalmOne has added support for audio and video playback capabilities on the Tungsten E2, there’s a headphones jack located at the back of the unit.

Perhaps the most important feature added to the E2 is its wireless Bluetooth functionality. The previous E version did not had this capability, which helps the E2 stand out, as wireless standards among portable products are rapidly becoming a standard. The Tungsten E2 will only synchronize with Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Mac OX X from v10.2.6 to 10.3.

As far as the software is concerned, the Tungsten E2 comes with Favorites, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Note Pad, Memos, Calculator, World Clock and Expense for general purpose usage. For multimedia activities, PalmOne will include RealPlayer for MP3 and Real Audio 2 formats and PalmOne Media for photo and video playback. The PDA also includes a browser as well as the Bluetooth Manger to mange the wireless connectivity options.

In the package, you will find the PDA, Stylus, Flip Cover, USB Sync Cable with Multi-connector, Power Adapter, Manuals and the Graffiti 2 sticker.

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