The Palm Tungsten E is not the top of the Palm range in fact its bigger brother the Tungsten T comes with all the bells and whistles like Wifi connectivity but when evaluating the T, Microsoft powered pocket PC's tend to get the better with their interoperability and ease of use. However back in the middle ground where people who used to have filofaxes live, a pocket PC may seem overkill and indeed over priced, where as this 32mb Palm is the ideal PDA organiser.

Based around a fast 126MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 311 processor it has a 320 x 320 pixel screen with 65k colours which really does give a huge improvement over the Palm M500's it replaces. The Palm Tungsten E is really an organiser and as such it comes equipped with contacts, calendar, to-do lists and many of the office style features you'd throw your filofax away for.

Battery life is all important for a go anywhere PDA, sadly we think the Palm Tungsten E falls short of the mark here as we could only get about 24hours use out of this unit (while on loan) with a reasonable amount of use, Palm claim it will go for 4 days! well maybe if you don't switch it on?

The 32mb is quiet generous for this application and you'd be hard pressed to run out of space just using the standard applications, the supplied hot sync software integrates with MS outlook so that you can keep everything in step, its just one button push to make the sync happen. The sync is via a supplied mini USB cable, no cradle with this budget model sadly you might want to pick one up separately if you want your Tungsten E to sit nicely on your desk.

You can of course download extras like games, applications to allow working with MS word / excel but these do eat your 32mb memory fairly quickly and may push you to use the SD card slot with a 128mb add on, but why not? these cards are dropping in price and storing MP3 files on one would make your Tungsten E into an MP3 player.

Our colleague swears by his Palm Tungsten E and raves about its sub £140 price tag when comparing it with Ipaq pocket PC's at well over £200, "what do they use them for?"" the same as me" he says and he has got a point the Palm has found a niche for those that want a well priced highly specified organiser with a few tricks. Most pocket PC owners never network using the Wifi options or install much extra software to justify the extra expense.

As much as we love our Ipaq's this has been an education, if you want something for a simple task why pay over the odds for features you'll never use, after spending years not understanding the attraction of Palm's we've cracked it now.

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