Palm Tungsten W

Palm's Tungsten W was announced last year, but it's taken this long for the product to appear in the UK, and as we went to press a service provider hadn't been confirmed.

It's remarkably similar to Handspring's Treo 270, featuring a colour screen GSM/GPRS telephone and a thumb operated keypad. Unlike the Tungsten T and the Zire 71, it's not an OS 5 device with a fast processor, relying instead on the older Palm OS 4.1 and a 33MHz chip.

And unlike the Treo, there's no built-in microphone and speaker for the telephone functions - you have to use an earpiece, which some may find awkward.

The set-up procedure, as with all Palm OS devices, is simple and straightforward. A Sim card is inserted in the back, and most network details can be downloaded from this, though you need to set up GPRS details in the Connections Preferences, and Wap details in the browser preferences.

Palm envisages selling the W via mobile networks, which will do all this for you, though once we worked out where the different settings were, it wasn't too hard to do.

One grumble we had is that the Sim carrier seems flimsy, and a couple of times the Tungsten W lost contact with our card.

The two right-hand buttons on the bottom change from their usual functions for the W, with the inner becoming mail and the outer launching the Wap browser or, when held down, acting as an on/off switch for the phone module.

There's no instant access button for the phone dialling application, but you can use the five-way navigator key in the address book to select an entry quickly with one hand. Press right and you see a list of numbers and email addresses; mobile numbers appear twice, once for calls and once for SMS. Scroll to the appropriate line, select it, and you're instantly composing an email, texting with SMS or at the dial screen.

In the phone, you can choose profiles, which determine ring tones, vibration settings and call divert - but you can't have different rings for different callers. There are some other minor niggles too.

If you receive an SMS with a phone number in it, you have to highlight the number with the stylus, select copy, then paste it into the dial box in the phone app to call it - that's just too long winded.

On the plus side, there's support for Sim Toolkit information menus, which Orange subscribers will be used to - though if you have the phone loaded with apps, you might have to do a lot of clicking to find the app for the function you want.

But there's one big omission - a web browser. Since the phone has GPRS and a good colour screen - though not as good as some - it seems odd to omit a browser. You'll have to download one yourself, and though there are a few to try - some free - it should really be in the box.

The email app, Versamail, is a re-badged Multimail, which Palm bought a few years ago. It can support multiple email accounts and attachments, and it manages Imap as well as Pop3, which makes it a much better bet for people on the road - though you can't access all your remote Imap folders, unfortunately.

For the rest, the Tungsten W is a competent PalmOS PDA, performing pretty much as you'd expect, although with the omission of Graffiti. There's a copy of Jot on the CD, so you can use that to enable handwriting or use Graffiti or the keypad if you prefer.

The latter is workable with two thumbs, but it's probably very much a matter of personal preference which one you opt for. It would be good, though, if the number keys - which sit on the top Qwerty line - were automatically enabled in the phone app, instead of requiring the shift key to be pressed.

All in all this is a competent PDA, whose fate will be decided by the price the networks put on it. For email on the move, it's a great tool, but we don't think it's such a wonderful replacement for a mobile phone.

And we wish it came with PalmOS 5 and a more modern processor, and, of course, a web browser.

Contact:Palm 0118 927 8700
www.palm.co.uk

Specifications:

• Dragonball VZ 33MHz processor
• 16MB Ram
• 8MB Flash Rom
• PalmOS 4.1.1
• 53 x 53mm 16-bit colour TFT, 320 x 320 pixels
• SD/MMC card slot
• Infrared, Palm universal connector, headset jack
• 181g
• 77 x 122 x 17(w x h x d)
• Palm Desktop, PalmOS, Documents to Go, Versamail, Jot, Acrobat Reader, games
• USB