Upgrade: Palm Tungsten E to PalmOne Tungsten E2

Even though I’ve only had my Palm Tungsten E (TE) for little over 2 months (it’s my second PDA purchased from eBay), with the release of the PalmOne Tungsten E2 (TE2) I felt it was time to upgrade.

Mobile Email

Why? You might ask. Well, my primary use for a PDA is for mobile email access. Together with my Nokia 6230 and SnapperMail it makes a pretty powerful portable email solution allowing me to read and compose emails across multiple POP accounts.

The TE carried out its role perfectly fine, but depending on the circumstances, keeping the infrared ports on both the units lined up wasn’t always easy without a stable, flat surface. It’s times like that when a wireless, non-line of sight method of communication is preferable such as BlueTooth.

Unfortunately, the TE is only equipped with a built-in infrared option so there was no taking advantage of the Nokia’s BlueTooth functionality.

Longer Life

The second main reason for my decision to upgrade was for the reported improved battery life of the TE2. I’ve no doubt that for ‘normal’ usage, the TE’s battery life is sufficient as long as you’re not using it for a total duration of more than a couple of hours a day. For more serious use and for when your business starts to depend upon it being operational you either need to start considering portable power sources, limiting usage or not straying far from a mains outlet.

My average day with the TE would use up more than half of it’s power reserves although I rarely allow it to drop below 50% of total capacity

Don’t Judge A Book…

Although the TE and TE2 look almost identical, it’s obvious that there are some significant differences beneath the casing of the TE2 including:

• Improved screen display with an extra 2,000 colours (like you’d notice the difference between 63,000 and 65,000 colours)
• 200MHz Intel XScale processor as opposed to the TE’s 129Mhz Texas Instruments (you probably won’t notice much difference in day-to-day use).
• BlueTooth built-in and an infra-red port whereas the TE only has an infra-red port built-in.
• Massively improved battery life - I’ve not run it down completely to get a timing, but it’s lasting a lot longer than the TE
• Palm OS Garnet 5.4 instead of Palm OS 5.2.1 (doesn’t sound like much, but it can affect software compatibility)
• Non-volatile memory! This means that even if the battery were to drain completely the data held in the memory would be maintained. Drain the battery on a TE and you’d better hope you’ve got a recent backup somewhere because you would have lost all of your data.
• Improved software such as Documents To Go 7.0, Blazer 4.0 web browser and built-in encryption that smacks of TealLock even down to the tamper-proof, self-destruct mode (very Mission Impossible).

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