PPP - TungstenT

.Much too late ... but still ...

.The TungstenT screen

.The TungstenT mainboard

.What's left to say?

.
.

Much too late ... but still ...
.
I didn't do a review in ages, I just didn't find the time. When I got my TungstenT, I was really ambitious to do a review immediately. I started taking it apart, took all the pictures, postprocessed them even right away and then ... well, my professional customers just have the priority, sorry. Now, nearly one year later (I did the images in Dec. 2002), it seems ridiculous to do a review for a device that's already replaced by its successors (the T2, T3, E). But from your kind feedbacks, I know that the high-res images of the units and the 'electronic guts' is the reason for 99% of you to visit my site. Now these images are making alot of work and they were all ready. So here you go: A review without much of a review, but alot of nice pictures :) ... enjoy.

I think I don't have to mention all the obvious features of the TungstenT, foremost of course the telescopic case and finally a high resolution color screen with 320x320 from Palm. For me, it was clear since I owned a PalmV, that I never want to return to a much bigger form factor. And I personally still consider the PalmV as the most stylish PDA so far. Of course its technology is outdated meanwhile. So my next 'every-day' Palm was an m505 which nearly was the perfect PalmV replacement and I was quite happy with it. But in the meantime, Sony really pushed the Palm platform - 480x320 crystal clear color screens, WLAN, Bluetooth, digital camera - it's hard to list all the gadgets Sony offered in their PDAs. But as much as all these features are intriguing a geek like me, for my taste they were just too big and too heavy. Jeez! Who wants to carry an NZ90 in his pocket? So I had to be happy with my old m505, even if it was hard <g>. And then Palm rescued me with the TungstenT! Finally a high-resolution PDA that had my desired form factor. And Bluetooth was built-in too, a perfect match for my Bluetooth enabled mobile. The faster CPU is welcome too of course, although I personally have to say, that OS5 is no big deal for me. Most of the time I really use a PDA for my 'personal information management' and that worked fine already with older OSes. But that's of course an unfair statement, because the improved hardware just needs a better OS, even if the user wouldn't feel alot of it. So OS development just has to go and sure enough you wouldn't want to wait for an old OS to handle your brandnew 512MB SD-card, let alone the Bluetooth stack or the high-res screen.

Now, since I announced a review with lesser words and alot of images, let's finally look at the TungstenT. As always, clicking on a small images reveals the high-res version. For the 'maniacs' among you, I even included 2 super-high-res images of the mainboard (4000x3500 pixels). But be warned, each one is a 2MB download, roughly.
.

All images on this site are available in highres, just click on the image.

.
Maybe one more word about the sliding mechanism (and for that remark, I even had to wait a year to use the TungstenT long enough <g>): The idea of a collapsable case is nice, however, the mechanical solution is not the best. When my Tungsten was new, it worked quite well. But after about 6 months, the mechanism 'weakened' and the case is collapsing much too easy now. I even got my fingers caught a few times - nasty! A really good solution would have been a kind of lock switch which you could use when you place the unit in the cradle or at other times, you want to use the unit for a longer time in its opened state. I the moment, you really have to take care whenever its opened where you grab it, where you push it and how you hold it. Additionally, considering the reserved room in the bottom of the case when its opened, the TungstenT could have been quite a bit thinner, if Palm had built it normally long. In general you can say, the space needed for that mechanism (thickness and length too) is not worth the result. IMHO, the electronics of the TungstenT had fit in an m505 case which had a perfect form factor without the fiddling of opening and closing it all the time. Now there is meanwhile the TungstenE, but it misses Bluetooth ...
.

..
.

.
Disassembling the TungstenT is a bit tricky, please understand, that I can't give a complete instruction here. If you really have to open it, start with the 2 tiny holes in the back, left and right of the serial number tag. With 2 paper clips or similar tools, you have to press through both holes simultaniously to unlock the sliding mechnism. But be careful! The sliding part is connected to the main unit with a very delicate plastic flat cable that's glued to the bottom of the case. You have to detach that cable also, before you can open the actual case. As I said, don't do it, if you can avoid it ... :). On the images above, you can see how a disassembled case looks like, however, the mainboard is still assembled above (or rather below) the screen.
.

The TungstenT screen
.
Of course, I went all the way :). Once the case is open, separating the mainboard from the LCD is no big deal anymore. The LCD looks nearly like all Palm LCDs and you can't tell from outside that it's a high-res screen. It has the typical Palm-size, touch layer is fixed attached and the backlight (or rather frontlight in this case) as well as the low-level controller are included.
.

..
.

(Special high-res 3500x800 image of the LCD controller PCB - 200kB)

.
The integrated controller board on the bottom looks quite densely populated. Unfortunately I couldn't identify the controller and the model number doesn't tell me alot either, so I don't know who's the manufacturer of my LCD. The TungstenT display has not the quality of the Sony LCDs and the reason is, because the TungstenT uses a front lit reflective display, while Sony (except in some old units like the N760) uses transreflective LCDs with backlight. But it would be unfair to say, the Tungsten display is not good. It's just the Sonys (the NX70V for example) that are so extraordinary. The brightness control of the light is done with the usual slider and the brightness range is ok. In bright light conditions you can leave the light off completely and safe energy. I personally stopped doing that unless I'm really short on power. An illuminated color LCD just looks better. The TungstenT display has no active graffiti area (since it has only 320x320 pixels), which is a tolerable design decision. What's really not tolerable is the unlit passive graffiti area. After the m505 had a pleasantly lit graffiti area years before, the TungstenT leaves you scribbling in the dark again - very weak performance, Palm! BTW, the TungstenT2 has a backlit transreflective LCD, so maybe there the illuminated graffiti area is back (and the contrast improved too). From what I read (I had no unit yet), the TungstenT3 has a frontlit LCD again - strange! But with its active Graffiti area on the high-res+ screen (320x480), the illumination of the Graffiti area doesn't make any difference.
.

The TungstenT mainboard
.
The mainboard of the TungstenT is amazing small. On only ~60x60 mm it carries all electronic parts, including space killers like the SD-card slot, the Bluetooth module, the vibration motor and a few connectors. Most of the 'simple' parts are on one side, while the other side carries all the 'intelligence'. There you find a Texas Instruments OMAP1510 CPU, which is based on an improved ARM architecture. 16MB of RAM and 4MB of Flash complete the 'computer' in the TungstenT. For an ARM based PDA, the the TungstenT runs with 144MHz on a relatively slow clock. Sony's NX70V for example is clocked with 200MHz and the XScale based machines (Tungsten C and T3) are running even on 400MHz. But that doesn't mean, the TungstenT is slow. Coming from an OS4.1 Dragonball unit, the TungstenT seems quite fast anyway and for typical PalmOS jobs, it's indeed more than fast enough. And even if the screen resolution improved alot, the TungstenT is still no multimedia machine. The architecture is still quite simple without any exciting co-processors (graphics, MPEG or such). The only special LSI on the board is a stereo audio codec, the TLV320AIC23B, coming also from Texas Instrument. It gives the TungstenT all its new audio features like the voice recorder or stereo MP3 playback (via the headphone jack). It would even support a stereo line-in and line-out path if Palm had found the space for two more stereo plugs (by omitting the slide mechanism for example <g>). Then the TungstenT would have been even a neat little recording machine, considering the SD-card capacities you can get nowadays! But I don't want to play the devil's advocat, so I agree that the mono voice recorder is the most useful function for the daily work. Everything else on the main board is 'usual Palm stuff', like the RS-232 driver, the IrDA transceiver and some power management chips.
.

..
Click on the pictures for 'normal' high-res images, ~500kB each.
Super high-res for broadband users, ~2MB each: IMAGE1 - IMAGE2

What's left to say?
.
Not much, since I did the review for the pictures mainly. Well, a few things are always left:

The TungstenT uses basically the same power management and power source as the m505 (of course that's includes always also the m515). LiIon (or LiPoly) cell, 5V stabilized powersupply, charge logic built-in. The battery performance of the TungtenT is not the best, I get max. 4 hours continuous work. Considering the faster processor and the same size of battery, that was expectable. I mentioned already in earlier reviews, that with the growing complexity of the units and the various features, it becomes more and more difficult to predict the battery life. It make of course a big difference, how you use these devices: Bluetooth on or off? What level of backlight? What applications are you using (power drainer or 'stand-by' apps)? In other words, your milages may vary more and more ...

The Bluetooth interface is a nice add-on, IMHO even a must-have nowadays. BT is the future of short range communication and it's nice to have a 'prepared' device. With the right mobile (I use an S55 from Siemens with great success) Bluetooth is a gift. Only the fact, that I don't have to keep a seperate phonebook in the phone, because dialing from the Palm now really works comfortably, makes Bluetooth worth to have it (take your Palm from your pocket, leave the phone still where it is - search and dial a number via BT - close your Palm, stow it away and grab your phone from the other pocket just in time with the first ring tone - perfect!). Hotsync via Bluetooth seems a nice feature, but compared to the USB port it is terrible slow! For the right application, when you only want to add an address or appointment in passing, it might be fine. But in the office and considering that you have to charge the unit anyway, the USB cradle is still the first choice. For 'real' remote applications Palm unfortunately picked the wrong Bluetooth module. Its only a class 2 model, reaching max. 10 meter. Considering walls and other obstacles in a normal living or office area, the resulting range is just too poor to use it seriously in other rooms. That's really a pity, since a class 1 module with a nominal range of 100 meter (maybe 30 left in normal buildings) makes it possible to use the device anywhere, unless you live in a castle :). That would open the use for some nice remote applications in conjuction with a BT access point. Of course the class 1 module sucks more power, that might have influenced the decision at Palm.

Talking about the cradle: The universal connector remained the same and so did the cradle. In fact, I never unpacked my TungstenT cradle and used the one from the m505 right away since it was already sitting on my desk, ready connected. Now I swap the two devices to keep the m505 battery alive ...

The 4-way navigation button with its 'enter' key in the middle is my favourite! Together with the nifty search function in the address book for example, it makes searching for a phone number a piece of cake, finally single-handed. Now, if you have also a Bluetooth handsfree kit in your car ... you get my idea :).

All about PalmOS 5, I said in the NX70V review. For sure it's a big step forward and it's necessary for the new processor platforms. But before PalmOS 6 doesn't hit the market finally, the poor ARM kernel doesn't get more than some native code and alot of emulated stuff from the old times. For the average user (and even for the more ambitious one), that OS version discussion is quite academic. Soon enough we'll all have 400MHz CPU power in our pockets and the OS just has to enable that incredible power (it's not that long, we all had no more power on our desks - I still use a 366MHz AMD-K6 notebook from time to time!). Now, on the PalmSource Europe (Munich, Sep. 22nd&23rd, 2003) you should be able to see some OS 6.0 'powered' devices - so I though and visited it. But all units on the conference were running on OS 5.x or older. If there was already an existing OS 6.0, PalmSource left it at home! The only glimpse of the new OS was presented in a session called 'Palm OS 6 Sneak Peek' (last session on the last day, well, somehow you have to make the crowd to stay <g>). It was a demonstration on the well known emulator which crashed only once while David Fedor showed some scalable truetype font and a few other visual gadgets. That was it! But here you go: On PPP exclusively:

Sorry ... but that's how I felt after PalmSource :). But seriously, OS 6 will come with some exciting new features. Probably most important are the announced multithreading, strong memory protection and much better support for communication jobs ('modular communication architecture'). And obviously, PalmOS is going alot more multimedia. Chief Products Officer Larry Slotnick talked about 'spectactular multimedia developments'. Well, let's see. The official publishing date for OS 6 is (so far) the developer conference in the States, February 2004.

Of course nowadays, the 'evolutionary' TungstenT2 and T3 are the better machines. Better screens, faster CPU and more RAM. Unfortunately for old Palm users also with the new Graffiti2. I'll stick with my TungstenT 'Mark 1' for a while longer. With its 170 gram and its form factor together with Bluetooth and silent alarm, it beats most competitors and that's my first priority for a unit I want to carry everywhere (if it had Bluetooth, the TungstenE would be my first choice. Standard case and 130 gram!). The performance is very good, the features are well balanced for a PDA. High resolution color screen, vibration alarm, voice recorder and Bluetooth are key features. A low resolution camera without a flash or a game console in my pocket are not ... as always of course: IMHO :) ...
.