The unit sspecifications state that it offers a very good 10 hours of talk and 200 hours of standby time for its Lithium Ion battery. During testing, we found that those number are not far off at all. Carriers one can use the Tungsten W with include AT&T Wireless, Rogers AT&T Wireless in Canada, and Orange France. Of course, you need to pay for data service on top of regular phone service. These plans can range anywhere from $20 to $40 or more.
In terms of the Tungsten W's phone quality, we found it to be adequate when looked at in terms of all the other features that it offers, but have reservations about using it as our only cellphone, as you must use the headset, so you can't put the device to your ear like a regular phone. We would have also liked to have been able to use a different dialing method than just having to use the on-screen buttons, which smudged the display a little. Additional phone features that the Tungsten W provides includes being able to dial directly from the Address Book, call forwarding, speed dialing, caller ID, conferencing, and the ability do other things on your handheld when speaking on the phone.
For email, the Tungsten W offers Palm's VersaMail client application for POP3, IMAP, Exchange, Yahoo, Hotmail and more, with an AOL access application available for free directly from Palm. VersaMail allows you to access up to eight accounts from the device and save attachments to an SD card. Corporate solutions are also available. We've been using VersaMail both on a Tungsten C and the Tungsten W for awhile now and find it to be an excellent email solution.
As for Web access, the bundled browser, Web Browser Pro provides a very good user experience with support for multiple Internet standards, including HTML, WML, cHTML, xHTML, SSL, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets. While we like the more recent version of the Palm Web Browser on the Tungsten C a little better, this one performs more than adequately. One thing the Tungsten W version of the Palm Web Browser has over the newer edition is that text is wrapped so it fits onto the small PDA screen. With the Tungsten C version, you have to scroll back and forward to read. Typically, it took from 20 seconds to a minute to load a page with some but not an extensive amount of graphics. Those with a lot of graphics tended to take more time.
Web Browser Pro In Action
