Applications

Significantly, Palm has improved the T3's and the Tungsten E's core applications and Personal information management software. There is now a new agenda view that shows future appointments and daily tasks, as well as color-coded calendar options, similar to what third party applications, such as Agendas, have been offering for years with icons.

As for scheduling, users can now beam multiple appointments with a single command, schedule events that last past midnight and view location details. Additional contact data includes support for more multiple contact addresses, more phone numbers and email addresses, instant-messaging IDs, Web site addresses and birthdays.

Other features include repeating tasks and alarms for easier scheduling of Tasks for recurring assignments and chores, as well as larger memos and notes, something Palm users have long waited for.

The bundled Documents to Go 6 Professional Edition from DataViz delivers native Excel and Word document support, which means you can directly view and edit those types of files on your handheld, such as those that arrive in email as attachments and are transferred from a PC.

Other preloaded applications include the latest version of Kinoma Video and Palm Photos. The handhelds also feature IBM's WebSphere Micro Environment for running J2ME applications. Kinoma Producer lets you convert AVI, DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, and Quicktime video for viewing with the Kinoma Player on the handhelds.

Battery life on the device is fair, but could have been better. We found that the T3 delivered about 3.5 hours of usage out of a charge. It must be the extra large and bright display, 64MB of RAM and powerful processor that keeps it from performing better. This is the weakest part of an otherwise top flight PDA.