A brilliant middle of the road choice!
Excellent value for money, huge range of apps., intuitive interface, excellent color screen, lightweight and compact.
Poor internal speaker (Who cares?? Get headphones.)
Posted Jul 15, 2005 - The palmOne Tungsten E2 is a superb PDA for those who require a wide range of functions beyond a basic calendar and contacts, but who are not looking for a ‘techie-extravaganza’ that will blow the socks off even the most jaded geeks. Having said that, the E2 is wicked cool and will raise eyebrows out of most technically adept members of the general public, while still leaving the user with an intuitive enough interface to understand in only a few minutes. One of the things that put me off a PDA for years was the need to learn that bizarre method of communication know as ‘graffiti’, which, for the uninitiated, is the method of writing characters on the PDA screen to enter data. Put simply, I hate graffiti…and luckily, you do not ever have to use it with new palmOne units. There is a convenient ‘keyboard’ option on screen that allows you to tap in letters using the stylus. Alternatively, you can also buy a wireless keyboard that permits simpler data entry. The built in functions are great: the standard ‘tasks’, ‘calendar’ and ‘contacts’ are easy to use and the addition of an SD slot allows for adding a huge range of third party programs and for carrying loads of data. The standard package now includes DataViz Documents to Go which permits (almost) flawless transfer of even huge and complex Word and Excel documents. I use this routinely. There is also Adobe Acrobat Reader for PalmOS. The Real Player is also great and can be played while working on other applications, but get external headphones as the built-in speaker is hopeless. It seems that holding a charge was an issue with the E model. Well, the gurus at palmOne seem to have cracked this one for the E2 as I go for almost two weeks without charging, and the flash memory is excellent, loosing nothing even if power runs out. Oh, and it charges in about thirty minutes! In short, this was a tremendous purchase, and I am perhaps most pleased with the ‘value for money’ factor, as the unit has most of the functions I need from a laptop and cost about a 15% as much including accessories, and this is not even mentioning that the thing fits comfortably in my pocket, even inside the leather case I bought (also recommended).
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