Palm's Power Play.(Palm's Tungsten C)(Product/Service Evaluation)

Reluctant to stray too far from what's worked in the past, Palm Inc. has tended to make only incremental improvements to its devices. This strategy has led to functionality and power deficits between Palm's devices and those running Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system--particularly in the sort of high-end devices that cater to enterprise customers.

With the release last week of the $499 Tungsten C, Palm has moved aggressively to bridge this gap. And eWEEK Labs' tests show that it has done so without discarding the solid design and good battery life that marked previous Palm successes.

The Tungsten C's most striking feature is its integrated support for 802.11b wireless networking--among the best we've seen on any mobile device. A Wi-Fi Setup utility stepped us through the process of configuring a wireless link, first scanning for available networks and then enabling us to set up a connection to an unscanned access point. We tested the Tungsten C with both Wired Equivalent Privacy-encrypted and nonprotected networks.

Now that Palm offers three Palm OS 5-based devices, which join those available from Sony Corp., we expect to begin seeing more applications that take advantage of the improved performance of the new platform.

The Tungsten C is powered by an Intel Corp. 400MHz PXA255 processor and 64MB of RAM. (Earlier Palm systems supported no more than 16MB of RAM.) This increased muscle was most noticeable when we performed more than one operation at once, such as listening to MP3s while dealing a new game of solitaire or while using the virtual private network client that comes bundled with the Tungsten C.