I'll start by saying that Palm's 400 mhz Tungsten C ($399 US) is a far cry from the old Palm Vx I used briefly years ago. Not only is the Tungsten C blazingly fast (far faster than most other PDA's), but its color screen is bright and clear, even when displaying uploaded photos from a recent trip to Tokyo, and shows plenty of detail.
The exceptional processing speed means that large images, applications and documents are opened instantly, and complicated spreadsheets are recalculated in the blink of an eye! The Tungsten C has also been upgraded from previous Palm's to 64 MB of memory. While this probably won't impress the Pocket PC crowd, it's great news for Palm lovers who were disappointed by previous Palm's 16 MB of memory. A big chunk is taken up for system processing memory, but the 51 MB that's left is still three times more than previous Palm's.
We love the mini keyboard and found that after a couple of days of use you adapt to the small size and can actually end up thumb-typing quite quickly. We found this much faster and easier than the old graffiti styles (although graffiti can be used on the Tungsten as well).
At 4.8 by 3.1 by .65 inches, and 6.3 ounces in weight, the Tungsten C is an average-sized handheld. The screen is 320 by 320 pixels and can display 65 thousand colors. The Tungsten C was the first model from Palm to use a transflective screen instead of a reflective screen, which means that the screen will look better and be clearer indoors (outdoors the screen is useable but not as clear and crisp looking).
As if all of the above wasn't enough to make the Tungsten newsworthy, we haven't even mentioned it's #1 feature: it's wireless! The Tungsten has built-in 802.11b, so you can surf the Internet or check your email from anywhere that there's a wireless signal. We mainly used this feature in the office, as it took quite a while to set up, although nowadays there are many Wi-Fi locations, including airports, coffee shops and bookstores.
For more information on the Palm Tungsten C, visit www.PalmOne.com
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