A Palm is not as palmone claim a multimedia device, it doesn't have the flair of a Pocket PC or the sexy GUI that so personifies windows and Microsoft, instead the palm is a workman like OS more akin to Linux than any MS code. That said with every new palm some of the video / audio extras are being provided and the latest Palmone Tungsten T5 we have on review is the most obvious embodiment of that evolution.

The first time we set eyes on a palm it was a kind of pocket calculator with a monochrome green backlit screen hardly attractive to a gadgeteer used to expensive desktop PC's and MP3 players, but the Tungsten T5 is a world away from those early devices. Styled more like a conventional PDA the unit feels well built with only a hint of corner cutting in the rather sober design, the screen dominates the facia with four application buttons and the familiar navbutton nested on the bottom edge.

Sadly the power button is likely to be the first thing you touch and its possibly the worst thing about the physical T5 experience, its just too recessed into the unit and feels like a unstable jelly, not only that but you have to hold it for a while before the device powers up. Once alive your misgivings about the last tactile experience are wiped away by the fantastic 320 x 480 TFT reflective hybrid screen, this makes the most of the ambient light and that provided by the Palm T5's battery to produce one of the best PDA images we've seen to date.

Audio however is the poor relation and this is what still holds the tungsten T5 back from being a true multimedia device, MP3 replay works but the built in speaker is very poor indeed and so you have to resort to using the headphone socket but even that produces a less than impressive sonic experience.

Other than the poor audio quality the main ingredient that most PDA's lack to be a sudo MP3 player is here in bundles and that memory, the Tungsten T5 has bundles of it, 256mb to be exact of which 225mb are available to the user in various partitions, of course most PDA memory is volatile leaving the possibility of data loss, but palmone have opted for all flash memory eliminating the problem and giving the T5 a big selling point alongside its 416 MHz XScale processor.

To expand memory further there is also an SD / SIDO slot, the SD works great but the SIDO would just not work with a sandisk wifi card and a little googling soon finds many upset palm punters who are all hoping a new release will fix this soon.

Those who have used palm OS devices before will be expecting the word hot sync to appear soon, but the T5 is a little different, sure palmone still can't bring themselves to offer a cradle (tight or what?) but they do provide a very tenacious and grippy USB lead. The way the T5 works with storage is to mount in "drive mode" this makes the storage look like a USB drive to a host PC allowing drag and drop of files and no need to hot sync, one downside to this approach is that when the T5 enters this mode it can only act as a drive and no other operation is possible.

Living with the improved palm OS 5.4 nicknames garnet is a good experience, the T5 does away with the virtual home button and dedicates one of the 4 application buttons to act as a favourites selector, a press of this pulls up an on screen display of 8 applications / files or even URL's that you have chosen. This is cool but the other 3 pages of favourites are just numerically ordered and if you want to move things around it has to be done through a menu instead of drag and drop.

The palm applications keep getting better too, the latest browser blazer 4.0 is about as good as any other internet browser on PDA's but the email app Versa Mail V 2.7.1 is possibly the best portable email package we've used and you can only hope that this make it onto the Treo mobile phone range soon.

Battery life is average but healthy, in our normal test of playing MP3's solidly with the backlight on we managed 4 hours 30 minutes on a full charge, charging can be via the power adaptor or on a trickle charge when connect via USB to a host PC. A small niggle here is the lack of any indicator lamp for charging status, indeed the only way you can tell if a charge is in progress is to power up the device, nice!

Connectivity is limited to Bluetooth, which proved a huge struggle to hook up to our laptop running a TDK Bluetooth plus card, even when connection was established (after much head bashing) it still proved flaky and Palm have not provided any WiFi which at this end of the market is a required feature.

Overall the Tungsten T5 is a good package and a real evolution from those early device and still a marked improvement from the T3, but for £279 it up against some pretty stiff competition who have a more rounded multimedia package with WiFi as standard. The Tungsten T5 can still be a winner for PalmOne but it will be a case of preaching to the converted.

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