Since the Tungsten W became available earlier this year, a number of significant events have taken place, including the advent of Palm's own Tungsten C and its Wi-Fi wireless capability and Palm's announced acquisition of Handspring. In terms of the silver Tungsten C, aside from the different wireless technology, Palm has taken a giant leap forward over the grayish Tungsten W in terms of processor speed and power, memory capacity, display quality and even the operating system, all in a form factor that is very similar to the Tungsten W but without the antenna.

As for the effect of Handspring coming into the Palm fold, it looks like the Palm line will stay in tack, including the Tungsten W, as one part of the company that focuses on data-centric products, while the Handspring part of the company will focus on what Handspring does best, smartphones. Just last week, Handspring introduced its eagerly awaited sequel to the Treo 270 and Treo 300, the completely reconfigured Treo 600, expected to be available this fall.

So where does that leave folks who may be considering the Tungsten W as a wireless solution? In this review, we'll attempt to answer that question.

With the tri-band GSM radio Tungsten W, which also supports GPRS or the General Packet Radio Service, Palm first introduced a QWERTY thumb-keyboard to its product line. The keyboard is comfortable to use and the keys are nicely raised. To type numbers and symbols all one needs to do is hold down a blue function key on the lower left hand side of the keyboard. To capitalize a letter, simply hold that letter down.

Located on the same row as the blue function key is a caps key that also serves as a find key, a space bar key that also serves as a key for additional symbols, a stroke key that also serves as a menu key and the home button. Bellow that row is the navigation button for one-handed operation with the two application buttons on either side. The application buttons include ones for date book, address book, email and wireless functions. The wireless button brings you to the place where you launch the Phone, SMS , Web, WAP and Office Online features of the Tungsten W.

The place to slide the bundled protective cover for the Tungsten W is on the left side of the keyboard while the stylus silo is on the left. The jack for the bundled Nokia style headset is located just above the protective cover slot and the infrared port is to the right of that, while the nub-like antenna resides on the left-side of the top of the device. The Antenna includes a light that blinks green when you have a signal. When Palm first released the Tungsten W, it announced plans for a $40 flip cover that would let you use the device without the headset just like regular phone. As of writing, this hasn't been made available yet.

The power button resides on the lower-right hand side of the device, making it far less likely than with Palms of the past to be accidentally turned on. In the back you've got the recessed reset button and the place for the subscriber identity module (SIM) card to identify your device to a wireless carrier. Unfortunately, unlike with the Tungsten T, the hole that leads to the reset button isn't big enough for the stylus. We liked this feature quite a bit. With the Tungsten W, you need to unscrew the top of the stylus to get to the reset pin -a step backwards.

The handheld's display is very similar to the 320x320 resolution and 65,000 color screen on the Tungsten T, which was the best one available from Palm until it released the Tungsten C. Compare it to the Tungsten C's transreflective display, however, and it literally pales. To adjusts brightness one holds down the blue function key and the key just above it with a little brightness icon on it. This brings up a slider to change the brightness. A check box is also available to enable or disable the handheld's backlight.

The Tungsten W comes with what now seems a paltry 16MB of RAM and 8MB of ROM. Most devices that are hitting the market now include a minimum of 32MB of RAM. After the Tungsten W was released Palm announced it had broken through the 16MB barrier, allowing Palm OS handhelds to go as high as 128MB. For Palm, the first device to take advantage of this was the Tungsten C and its 64MB of RAM.

The Tungsten W has a Secure Digital (SDIO-enabled) slot oddly located towards the back right-side of the Tungsten W by the power button for peripheral and memory expansion. It, of course, also features the Palm Universal Connector, for additional peripheral expansion.


Tungsten W & SD Expansion

The unit weighs a reasonable 6.4 ounces and measures 3.1 x 4.8 x 0.65 inches, a good size to fit comfortably in you hand. Palm went with the dated 33MHz Motorola Dragonball VZ processor to power the device and the now relatively antiquated Palm OS 4.1.1, which was necessary, as you would need Palm OS 5 to leverage a more powerful ARM CPU. The only reason we can think of Palm going with such a weak processor is to maximize the battery life of the device. The Tungsten C, however, which also places a premium on battery life, uses a 400MHz Intel XScale CPU and Palm OS 5.

Since the Tungsten W uses an earlier version of the Palm OS and it no longer has a graffiti writing area, Palm decided to bundle CIC's Jot with the device as a handwriting recognition solution. Jot has since been integrated into Palm OS 5 as Graffiti II. If you're new to the Palm world, Jot and Graffiti II will be easier to use and learn, as the strokes required to write characters and letters are much closer to real writing than with Graffiti. Those who have grown accustomed to Graffiti will have an adjustment to make.

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

Additional software that comes with the Tungsten W includes Documents To Go Professional Edition for Word and Excel document synchronization, ArchSoft's PhotBase, CopyTalk, Handmark's Mobile DB, Avantgo and more.

The $419 Tungsten W is a good yet pricy but not a particular powerful PDA that is adequate for most users. AT&T will take up to $120 off the price of the handheld, depending on which data plan you purchase. As a data centric device it excels, however, giving users a convenient way leverage a number of different methods to stay in touch with and access information. The phone feature is an added bonus but shouldn't be the main point of buying this device. If you're are in the market for Palm OS devices that can better serve as a primary phone than you should be looking at solutions from Handspring, Kyocera and Samsung. However, if the widest possible access to data is you wish, then the Tungsten W is a good choice. Now what we'd like to see is for Palm to come out with a version of the Tungsten W that has the Tungsten C's terrific screen, screaming power and boatload of RAM.