The Palm Solution's Group recently made a huge splash with the release of the latest additions to its Zire, consumer orientated, and Tungsten, corporate, lines of PDAs with the Zire 71 and the Tungsten C. You might even say that Palm made a comeback of sorts with the advent of these two devices.

While the company continues to dominate a struggling PDA market in sales, Sony on the consumer side with the Palm OS, and a number of vendors, most notably Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, and newcomer Dell, on the corporate and Pocket PC side, have made signicant gains and have been poised to eat away at Palm's market share.

One reason for this is that Palm, once the technology leader, has seemed tentative with its new product releases. Why even a year ago, the highest-end Palm still featured a 33MHz processor and 16MB of RAM, when even the lower-end Pocket PCs had processors in the hundreds of MHz and 32 to 64MB of memory. Though comparing Pocket PCs to Palm OS device is like comparing apples and oranges, as a Palm device requires far less memory and processor power to perform its operations, corporate buyers often make purchases on specifications, so when they see such a huge difference between the specs of a Palm and iPAQ, for instance, they'll often go with the iPAQ. On the multimedia side, Sony and Pocket PC vendors with camera and MP3/stereo enabled PDAs, blew Palm, which had hardly had any multimedia capabilities to speak of, out of the water.

With the release of Palm OS 5, a far more feature rich and multimedia capable operating system, and the creation of two distinct product lines, Palm began to make a concerted effort to change its fortunes. Palm released two PDAs last fall, its first Palm OS 5 handheld, the Tungsten T, and the extremely modest and budget priced, $99, Zire m150. Surprisingly, the Zire with its very basic feature set and lack of expansion, proved to be Palm's biggest seller last winter, as it opened up a whole new market for PDAs.

But this review isn't about the original Zire, which though successful, treaded water technologically, or even the Tungsten W, Palm's first smartphone (GSM/GPRS), which we'll review in the coming weeks, it is about Palm's OS 5 offerings, the new Tungsten C and Zire 71 and the earlier Tungsten T.

Palm's three Palm OS 5 handhelds are very different from each other. The Tungsten T, with its slider design, aims to achieve the same kind of wow factor that the Palm V did when it was released. The Palm V took what had been a box-like and not very sexy product, the PDA, and turned into a sleek device that became a status symbol. The Zire 71 looks more like a traditional Palm PDA, except it contains a lot of cool multimedia features aimed at young professionals. Lastly, the Tungsten C, aimed squarely at the corporate market, is the most powerful Palm OS handheld to date.

Click Here for Our Review of the Zire 71 & Tungsten T

Click Here for Our Review of the Tungsten C - Palm's New Powerhouse