The Tungsten E became a stalwart of the Palmone range in recent years and now the new Palmone Tungsten E2 is with us to update the popular device and bring it up to 2005 spec.

At 7.8cm by 11.4cm by 1.5cm; 133g the  metallic dark silver Tungsten E2 is sleek and shapely and ideal for sliding into a shirt pocket and not making its presence felt and yet when you do decide to reveal you computing companion it will do nothing but improve your techie image.

The 3.7" screen is bigger than the outgoing E2's and although the screen is the same 320 x320 resolution and 65,536 colours it does seem clearer and definitely brighter to the eye making it a more useable proposition and more suited to multimedia applications.

We had hoped for the T5's taskbar to make it to the Tungsten E2 but sadly we have to make do with 4 customisable shortcut keys which get you to the most commonly used applications and the 5 way navigation pad is simple and comfortable to use.

Based around a 200MHz Intel XScale processor the E2 the guys at Palmone are really trying to get the maximum performance out of the device as our review will show but there is a big of a lag or pause when opening some applications which just hints that this PDA could do with a little more power.

What do you get for your hard earned cash? well for a start there is an internal 32mb memory of which about 26mb is available to you, plenty for addresses and phone numbers but not that good for MP3 files and other multimedia formats. So on top of the Tungsten E2 there is an SD / MMC card expansion slot enabling up to 1gb of additional memory slide into your E2, no card is provided with the device but they are cheap enough.

Connectivity is the big difference between the E2 and the outgoing E, we now have Bluetooth 1.1 connection and the ability to use the in built utility to pair with mobile phones and other PDA's or computers. We managed to pair with a Sony Ericsson mobile and an iMate SP3i to test the connection with reliable transmission speeds up to 1mbit per second, though this Bluetooth connection you can gain access to the internet for email and web surfing.

The more traditional connection methods are still to be found with infa red and also a revised USB connection enabling the now famous Palm hot sync to extract and exchange data with office applications like MS outlook. Sadly Palmone do not supply a cradle with this model which meant our shiny test model laid flat on the desk with the lead up its backside, not exactly high tech or that secure.

The battery life on the new PalmOne E2 is claimed to be a huge leap over the older E series, for one the company claims that it will better and Ipod (3rd generation) in MP3 replay, a bold claim indeed and one we had to put to the test. With a play list loaded it was a long overnight run and the eventual death of the replay at around 9am that prove an astonishing 11hr life when playing back MP3 files with the screen turned off.

So with a good SD or MMC card attached your Tungsten E2 could well be a suitable MP3 player substitute, it produces a good quality sound and didn't' stutter or falter on MP3 replay during our tests, the interface isn't Ipod quality and perhaps that's a trade off of a multifunction device rather than a dedicated Mp3 player.

This kind of battery life makes the Palmone Tungsten E2 one of the leading devices for those who are constantly on the move, used normally and not as an MP3 player you could be looking at 1 - 2 weeks use without needing to charge.

The Tungsten E2 uses the latest Palm OS 5.4, which includes DataViz's Documents To Go 7.0, this is a pretty cool bit of software that allows the palm device to read both excel and word documents that are most likely to reside on your host PC.

Other Software on the E2 is much as we had expected with web blazer 4.0, real player, Kinoma video player, palm reader and the most used application Solitaire! of course most Palm users will download one of the many thousands of applications available to enhance the device.

Overall this is a mid life upgrade, more than a facelift but not a step change in direction and then again why should Palmone change direction this PDA does what it says on the tin without Windows bloatware, perhaps WiFi would have been nice but the omission of the networking standard is the only blot on the E2's school report.

The Palmone Tungsten E2 is compatible with

• PC running Windows 2000 or XP with one available USB port
or
• Mac OS X, version 10.2.6 to 10.3

Published - 16/04/2005

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