In Brief

With the looming exit of Sony from the Palm OS handheld market, there's only one integrated Wi-Fi solution left, the Palm Tungsten C. Fortunately, it's a seamless one that offers excellent performance and compatibility, a powerful application suite, and amazing battery life. The thumb keyboard is perfect for email and Web browsing, and the included photo and video playback applications show off the vivid color screen. The main oversights, perhaps by design, are a stereo headphone jack for audio playback and a built-in microphone for voice recording. Instead, you'll have to make do with a mono audio out and headset mic.

In Depth

The Palm Tungsten C is simply the best Wi-Fi Palm solution around, absent Sony from the market. It boasts a complete set of business-grade applications, and excellent all-round performance, thanks to its robust Intel processor. And battery life is simply amazing, with up to a day of near-constant Wi-Fi access, and several days of normal access. And while we won't get into the Palm versus Pocket PC debate here, the Tungsten C goes a long way to closing the feature gap while coming in at half the price (typically about $300).

The Palm Desktop software comes in both Windows and Mac versions, and includes the usual PIM applications like calendar, address book, and To Do list. Other Palm-branded applications include a photo viewer, email software and a Web browser. There are also numerous third-party applications (more on those later). Below are examples of the Windows and Mac desktop software.

While the software suite is very good, Wi-Fi is the reason to buy the Tungsten C, and getting connected is simple and fast (see the Setup page for more details). Wi-Fi performance is also very good, with a usable signal of 20 to 30 feet through walls and floors. We had no trouble connecting at either hotspots or home and business networks, and both WEP encryption and PPTP VPN are supported, although WPA is not, which may be a problem for some. The Wi-Fi radio is 802.11b only.

Once you've connected to the Internet, you'll want to fire up email and browse the Web. The VersaMail handheld email application is extremely flexible, supporting up to eight POP and/or IMAP accounts, with built-in settings for common ISPs like Earthlink, Yahoo, Verizon and .Mac. You can set it to automatically retrieve email periodically, and get either subject titles only, or partial/full messages. It can sync with the desktop, and works with Exchange servers. Included Chapura Pocket Mirror software syncs with Outlook on the PC. After you've configured your Wi-Fi connection the first time, simply clicking the Get Mail button will turn on Wi-Fi, connect to the network, and retrieve your mail in one operation.

Web browsing on the Palm is what you'd expect with a small screen and a reasonably fast connection. Sites optimized for mobile viewing load immediately, while complex sites with lots of pictures like The New York Times or eBay can take up to a minute to load. You can turn off graphics for faster viewing, and scroll around both horizontally and vertically.

The Tungsten C is also a surprisingly good multimedia player, with the Palm Photo application, and Kinoma software for video playback and production. You drop photos on the desktop into the Palm Photo application, where they are converted into a special Palm format (and reduced in size), run HotSync, then view them in the handheld Photo application. You can even run slideshows. Similarly, the Kinoma Producer desktop software converts MPEG-1, QuickTime, AVI and DV video files into compact movies for playback on the handheld.

There are tons of other included applications that we can't go into here, such as printing, Voice Memo recording, Acrobat Reader, Solitaire, PowerOne Calculator, Colligo Meeting, Graffiti 2, AOL for Palm OS, and AvantGo. But perhaps the most important such app for most people will be DataViz' Documents To Go, which lets you bring over Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), and view and edit them on your Palm. However, you'll need to pay to upgrade to the latest version for full functionality.

Designwise, the Tungsten C is similarly well-equipped. From the bright 64,000-color screen, to the excellent thumb keyboard, 5-way navigation button, and compact case, the Tungsten exudes quality (see the Photo Gallery for more details). There's even an SD/MMC card slot with SDIO compatibility for adding on memory cards, the Palm Backup Card, even an FM radio receiver. Sadly, however, there's no Bluetooth support for the Tungsten C as yet.

The other big omission is a stereo headphone jack, which means you'll have to listen to MP3/WMA audio playback in mono, although there are several good music player apps to choose from. There's also no built-in microphone, so you won't be able to use the include Voice Memo software without the optional headset ($15). See the Cool Tips page for more on this. And we'd have preferred a charging cable that could be used separately from the cradle, for traveling (it's optional). But those are relatively minor drawbacks to an otherwise top-notch PDA that has everything you need to get online at Wi-Fi speeds.