Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld Reviews
Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld
- 320×320 Transflective TFT color display with touchscreen, supports more than 65,000 colors
- Built-in Bluetooth technology for connecting to compatible wireless devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, and printers
- Powerful, yet affordable, with 32 MB of memory (26 MB actual storage capacity)
- Create and edit Word, Excel, Adobe PDF, and PowerPoint compatible files
- Supports SD, SDIO and MultiMediaCard expansion-cards to add extra memory, features or content
TungstenE2 Handheld
List Price: $ 277.19
Price: $ 220.00
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Mark H. Webster
May 28, 2011perfect for an absent minded professor,
This is my first organizer ever. I’m totally impressed. After reading some of the reviews here I was scared to put my money on any of these things. Seems like someone had complained about every model out there. This one had at least above average reviews, and I liked the fact that fewer people complain about the soft boot issue.
Now it’s two months later and I can’t imagine living without it. I’m a college teacher, with lots of faculty meetings to track, plus a freelance business, and the usual dentist and car appointments. I used to keep a paper “to do” list in my shirt pocket, but it doesn’t ring if I forget to scan it several times a day. In short, my life is so busy that I was beginning to drop appointments.
I’m happy to report that this tungsten e2 syncs perfectly with Microsoft Outlook 2002. There are a few minor anomalies, but nothing that is a deal breaker. I was disturbed at first to discover that the thing is never really off. I would have liked to be able to totally turn it off when I had no appointments coming up, to save juice. However I’ve found that this is a none issue. It runs for at least 4 days, sometimes a week and a half before needing a charge.
The operating system seems quite solid. It locks up maybe once every 2 to 3 weeks, but that requires just a tap of a pen on the reset button on the back, and it comes back all happy in a couple seconds. When I was installing third party software every couple days it would lock up more frequently, but I’ve got everything I need now, and things have settled down.
I don’t use it for email, or for surfing the net. I have a laptop for that, and I didn’t want to pay an extra hundred for the wifi card.
The coolest thing about this e2 is the calendar and alarm, the tasks list, and the contacts. With the hot buttons on the front to access these vital functions, this thing never leaves my person. I even take it climbing in my backpack. Never know when I might want to make a note about something, or meet a new friend and exchange phone numbers.
After I bought it and realized how useful it was, I was tempted to exchange it for the treo, which has all this, plus a phone…until I found out that you have to pay at least $50 a month to the phone service to make the internet stuff work. Scratch that! I love this thing. It’s perfect for my needs. I did buy the 2 year replacement policy from circuit city. $30 seemed like a small price to pay for peace of mind.
The software you can get for Palms is amazing. Here is my list of essential software:
Uninstall Manager – Northglide
BDicty 5.9 Pro – dictionary, thesaurus and conjugator
Pocket Tunes from Normsoft (it is compatible with the “plays for sure” windows media player files. I can play free downloadable audio books from the library.)
Tide Tool 2.2 – toolworks dot com (if you live near saltwater, a must have)
MessageEase V.5 – faster than graffiti for entering text, and it’s free!
AvantGo – captures websites off the net when synced, view them on the commute later. – free!
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|S. Allen
May 28, 2011It is great for many things, and not so great for a few,
Ignore most of the complaints about this model and Palm in general. Remember what you want a Palm for: storing information in an easy-to-access manner. For most people, it isn’t supposed to be a mini laptop. It doesn’t matter if the specs haven’t changed much over the years. How much has a DayRunner improved in the past couple of decades? Some innovations make sense, sure. I’ve had several PDAs over the past few years because of specific things I wanted (rechargable battery, color screen, wireless access, etc.). Now I have a E2 (for the Bluetooth, screen, design, and ease of use). But at the end of the day, my usage has stayed pretty constant. I want good PIM applications (personal information management) on a small device with a good screen and battery life and the ability to check my email. That’s all I want, and the E2 gives me that. Sure, Palm could wow us with innovations, but I really can’t figure out what they could introduce that would be a “must-have” feature. Competing Windows Mobile devices don’t offer anything particularly better either (unless you want a jack of all trades device that isn’t particularly good at anything. In other words, if you want a PDA, this one is great. Here’s why:
1. For most of the things that anyone does with a Palm, it works great. In other words, the PIM features work great, and the direct synchronization with Outlook is fantastic (and a new feature only on the past few Palm devices).
2. The hardware and “fit” of the device is great. This is the latest in the “Palm V” model and it shows. No gimmicks, just a good device fit and design wise.
3. The Bluetooth feature is great, if you need/want it. Setting up PC Bluetooth sync is easy if you follow the manual and the wizard on the device. Using it with a phone is a much greater challenge due to the few phones supported directly by Palm. Check first to see if yours is. If not, there might be a work-around, but prepare yourself for a few hours on the internet trying to find one.
4. The fact that the memory doesn’t get erased when the power runs out will be really helpful if you’re prone to forgetting to charge your devices.
The bad:
1. Versamail is incredibly difficult to work with. By far it has taken me the longest time to find out that I can’t use it to sync with Outlook as planned (this is because you can’t directly Hotsync IMAP accounts with SSL security, nor can you sync an IMAP account to Outlook, points buried in Palm’s website).
2. As mentioned, getting Bluetooth to work with an unsupported phone is a real pain and not the most reliable connection ever invented.
3. Yeah, yeah, it shows fingerprints, should have a power indicator light, and a cradle would have been nice. A little too much cost-cutting, I think.
Overall, I’m very happy with the E2. It does what I want and probably more than what most people desire (most people probably don’t need Bluetooth on a PDA). If you don’t care about Bluetooth or the non-volatile memory on the E2, get the Tungsten E and save yourself $50.
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