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Palm Rebounds With Tungsten C

The Tungsten C sports a 1500mAh lithium ion/polymer battery. With light wireless use--e-mail access, Web surfing four to eight times a day--and energy-saving settings on, a charge lasted me two to four days. In rundown tests with backlight on and continuous Wi-Fi usage, battery life was three to five hours. Rundown tests using continuous non-Wi-Fi tasks, such as video/ audio playback, gave me six to eight hours of use--all this despite the inclusion of a blazingly fast 400-MHz Intel XScale PXA255 processor, which provided better performance in Web browsing and video playback than any other PDA.




Tungsten C

click to enlarge

Palm's transreflective screen on the Tungsten C is incredible: bright and razor sharp, usable both inside and outside. I thought the screen on the Tungsten T was good, but the Tungsten C totally blows it and most of the competition away, including the Dell Axim X5 and iPaq h1910.

The Tungsten C's Wi-Fi setup wizard, as well as basic VPN setup to a Linux PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) box, were intuitive. Wireless range is limited to 50 to 75 feet indoors, perhaps due to the limited antenna size and placement. I had no trouble accessing POP3/IMAP e-mail with Versamail 2.5, and Web browsing via the new proxy-less Web Browser 2.0, though Web surfing using any 320x320 screen is painful.

Good
• Brilliant screen
• 64 MB of RAM
• Blazingly fast
• Good battery life for Wi-Fi PDA
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