Palm Makes a Pocket PC A new
handheld for people with bad handwriting. By
Paul Boutin Posted Monday, May 5, 2003, at
3:25 PM PT
Tungsten C
I've always hated the
PalmPilot. Its hotshot handwriting-recognition software seems programmed to
reject mine. Scribbling into Palm's stylus-driven Graffiti interface evokes
painful memories of grade-school penmanship class, where teachers quipped that I
was sure to become a doctor with handwriting like that.
But the company's new Tungsten C, which goes on sale worldwide today, is at
last a Palm for Webheads who can't write. More important than the 400 MHz Intel
CPU inside (my last PC wasn't that fast), the lower end of its faceplace sports
a tiny thumb keyboard akin to the Blackberry PDAs toted by Unix systems administrators, Silicon
Valley capitalists, and Capitol Hill staffers. You can still use a stylus if you
want, but why bother? After years of frustration with Graffiti, learning to
thumb a one-eighth scale keyboard?punctuated with an occasional stab of the
stylus?took about 30 seconds. It felt like mastering the Matrix.
Tungsten C is a buzz item among gadget hounds, but for a different reason:
It's the first Palm with Wi-Fi. Geeks go gaga for 802.11, and Palm employees are
no exception. The current issue of Wired tells the story of the pirate network set up at
Palm under management's nose three years ago. It's hard to explain Wi-Fi's
druglike allure to those who haven't been hooked, but try to keep people from
grabbing the Tungsten C thing out of your hand at Starbucks. It's the Palm the
programmers, not the marketers, must have dreamed up. Friday-night hacker
friends in faraway cities replied to my thumb-typed e-mails to tell me how
jealous they were.
Part of the C's sex appeal is sheer speed. Wi-Fi delivers screaming
downloads, 10 times faster than Palm's previous wireless service. It's harder to
find places to get online, but once you do, clocking a steady 600 kilobits per
second is no problem. Manipulating all that data can be a struggle, though.
Palm's e-mail client is fine, but the browser is just OK. Web sites often appear
onscreen in a confusing jumble of overlapping text and graphics?even on pages
that pass the World Wide Web
Consortium's standards tests. Many pages are presented wider than the
screen, requiring awkward back-and-forth scrolling to read them. You wouldn't
give up your laptop, but for catching up on BoingBoing while out of the office, the Tungsten C works fine.
You can use it to download AOL Instant Messenger and a zillion Palm apps through
VersionTracker. WiFinder has tools for finding Wi-Fi hotspots as you
travel.
The one drawback is the price. At $499, it's close to Pocket PC money. That
prompteda fellow Starbucks table-squatter to whip out his iPAQ
h5455, which costs about $200 more, for a feature-by-feature showdown. A full
rundown would fill a phone book, but the capabilities we cared most about were
almost comically similar:
HP iPAQ h5455
Palm Tungsten C
CPU
400 MHz
400 MHz
Battery life (tested)
4 hours
4 hours
Memory
64 MB
64 MB
Screen
240x320 pixels
320x320 pixels (on a smaller screen)
Browser
Flaky
Likewise
Microsoft Outlook
Yes
No
Microsoft Office tools
Word, Excel
Word, Excel, PowerPoint
On the final comparison?reading and editing MS Office files?it was tough to
declare a winner. Some reviewers prefer Palm's software, but the Tungsten choked
on annotated Word docs from my editor, spewing characters all over the screen.
One guy's r?sum? came up full of wacky characters on the Palm, but mine did the
same on the Pocket PC. Neither handheld always got it right?test each one with
your own files before buying.
Bystanders to our PDA drag race kept asking questions like, "It's nice, but
who is it for?" Palm spokespeople say they expect to sell the Tungsten C
primarily to employees at Wi-Fi equipped corporate campuses?like their own.
After watching my geek buddies gush over it, I can simplify that. There is now a
Pocket PC for people who don't do Microsoft.
