Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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781 of 793 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It is great for many things, and not so great for a few, April 22, 2005
Ignore most of the complaints about this model and Palm in general. Remember what you want a Palm for: storing information in an easy-to-access manner. For most people, it isn't supposed to be a mini laptop. It doesn't matter if the specs haven't changed much over the years. How much has a DayRunner improved in the past couple of decades? Some innovations make sense, sure. I've had several PDAs over the past few years because of specific things I wanted (rechargable battery, color screen, wireless access, etc.). Now I have a E2 (for the Bluetooth, screen, design, and ease of use). But at the end of the day, my usage has stayed pretty constant. I want good PIM applications (personal information management) on a small device with a good screen and battery life and the ability to check my email. That's all I want, and the E2 gives me that. Sure, Palm could wow us with innovations, but I really can't figure out what they could introduce that would be a "must-have" feature. Competing Windows Mobile devices don't offer anything particularly better either (unless you want a jack of all trades device that isn't particularly good at anything. In other words, if you want a PDA, this one is great. Here's why:
1. For most of the things that anyone does with a Palm, it works great. In other words, the PIM features work great, and the direct synchronization with Outlook is fantastic (and a new feature only on the past few Palm devices).
2. The hardware and "fit" of the device is great. This is the latest in the "Palm V" model and it shows. No gimmicks, just a good device fit and design wise.
3. The Bluetooth feature is great, if you need/want it. Setting up PC Bluetooth sync is easy if you follow the manual and the wizard on the device. Using it with a phone is a much greater challenge due to the few phones supported directly by Palm. Check first to see if yours is. If not, there might be a work-around, but prepare yourself for a few hours on the internet trying to find one.
4. The fact that the memory doesn't get erased when the power runs out will be really helpful if you're prone to forgetting to charge your devices.
The bad:
1. Versamail is incredibly difficult to work with. By far it has taken me the longest time to find out that I can't use it to sync with Outlook as planned (this is because you can't directly Hotsync IMAP accounts with SSL security, nor can you sync an IMAP account to Outlook, points buried in Palm's website).
2. As mentioned, getting Bluetooth to work with an unsupported phone is a real pain and not the most reliable connection ever invented.
3. Yeah, yeah, it shows fingerprints, should have a power indicator light, and a cradle would have been nice. A little too much cost-cutting, I think.
Overall, I'm very happy with the E2. It does what I want and probably more than what most people desire (most people probably don't need Bluetooth on a PDA). If you don't care about Bluetooth or the non-volatile memory on the E2, get the Tungsten E and save yourself $50.
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80 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An odd, disappointing update to Palm's workhorse model..., April 24, 2005
There is a reason, sadly, why sales of PDA's have shrunk each of the past few years -- a crushing lack of imagination and innovation -- while rival gadgets competing for valuable pocket space, like Apple's iPod, have taken up the slack and have seen booming sales as a result.
The Tungsten E was a breakthrough in its time, a beautiful piece of engineering with a high-quality color screen and a rock-bottom price of 199 clams. Its main drawbacks -- it's paltry 32MB Ram and it's lack of built-in wireless capabilities -- could be fixed with add-on cards.
But two years is a long-time in electronics land. Since then, Apple released the iPod mini, which will store the contacts most people use Palms for, plus hold 4GB worth of tunes, for the same price. It's also far smaller than a Palm.
Meanwhile, folks who want the more sophisticated functions that a Palm can deliver -- like medical imaging etc. for docs, photos, sophisticated calculator, email and web surfing on the go -- found the Tungsten E outclassed by Blackberry's, upgraded cell phones, Palm's own Treo and the like.
So it was odd, and frankly disappointing, to get a look at the new, pricier Tungsten E2. I'd love to see the market research that suggested they could raise prices with a minimal feature upgrade while the competish has been eating their lunch. After a two-year wait, they didn't even increase the 32 MB memory. They merely made it non-volatile flash (something they should have done long, long ago). At a time when Apple is selling a 1GB shuffle for $149 and flash memory is dirt cheap, it's mind-boggling why Palm would choose to link the E2's fabulous hi-res screen to low-rent memory.
As for what you still don't get: There is no phone, no camera, no thumbpad, no WiFi. This is close to a pure PDA, though it can display pictures and double as a poor-man's MP3 player.
The added bluetooth -- odd why they went that route instead of the far more common WiFi -- does nothing unless you have a compatible bluetooth phone or computer.
As with the E, the E2 still is a great design. Clean, simple, portable, shirt-pocketable. No keyboard, but I've never been a thumbpad fan.
MS Office functions are also included -- Word, Outlook, Powerpoint. Why you would use them, however, is a bit bizarre to me. Who wants to spend the time coding in a Powerpoint presentation with a stylus? Yet, if this is important to you, it's here. And having your email with you can be a plus...
Here's a basic product guide:
Mono Palm Zire -- Bargain basement model with 7.2 MB of Ram, upgraded from hobbled 2 MB original model. About 100 smackers. Often offered free as bundle deals with new computers. Good starter model for the price, but designed to leave you wanting more. Includes rechargeable battery. Memory can not be upgraded. Horribly skimpy black-on-grey screen.
Tungsten T2+, etc.: Deluxe models that feature, in some cases, larger screens/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/thumbpads with dropdown graffiti screens. All unnecessary features in my book, especially given their much higher prices.
Zire 72: Similar to E2, but with a low-rent camera attached.
Treos: These models should be seriously considered if you are a thumbpad fan, or if you want your PDA to also be your phone. But let's face it, how many people can afford spending several hundred smackers on a PDA?
BTW, when comparing, I've found you can generally ignore the speed of the processor. For most Palm functions, the reaction time is near instantaneous, or at most a second or two lag.
As for PocketPCs, some of them are now very attractively priced and are worth checking out. I've yet to use one extensively, so I'll stick to what I know -- Palms are simple, easy to use and almost guaranteed to improve your productivity. It's like having a backup for your brain. And who doesn't need that?
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53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
So close, but not a winner....Palm is letting customers down, March 29, 2006
I bought my first Palm years ago, the classic PalmPilot III. It still works reliably, and never lost the contents of its memory. Hotsync always worked great, and only the slowly deteriorating digitizer function (it got drifty and would not stay calibrated) entice me to look for a new version.
Palm's website has a product recommending feature, and after I plugged in my expectations, it came up with the Tungsten E2. I was happy that I could buy it for less than $200, and it came with lots of nice software.
I intitially could not get the Palm Desktop to install, because I still had the older version on my computer, and this caused an odd error message that had nothing to do with previous software versions. I could not find a way to email tech support through the Palm website, so I took a guess and emailed support@palm.com. I got a reply in less than 24 hours, with advice to make sure earlier software versions were not installed. Good for them that they got back relatively quickly, and good also that they gave me the right answer the first time. Bad that the software was unable to recognize an earlier version and respond with a prompt or other warning (as most software installer utilities will do).
The E2 itself seems very nice, and the ease of use and nice display made me quite happy at first. I am worried about the non-replaceable rechargeable battery, since it seems that when that starts to lose its ability to hold a full charge, the unit will have to be thrown away...never had that worry with the old Palm III, which used replaceable alkalines! At least most modern rechargables have long useable life spans....
Then the annoyances started. Just as soon as I had decided this was a keeper, and had chucked the packaging material (the retailer will not take it back without the plastic vacuum pack, even if it was destroyed in order to extricate the E2 in the first place), I noticed a very serious bug in the operating system (OS). The FIND function will not find more than 8 contacts, even if many more contacts match the search criteria. At first I thought they limited it to only 8, but remembering the identical function on the old Palm III, I could not believe this. Further checking showed that the screen says that it is able to 'find more?' if I tap a button, and when I do so it indicates that it is displaying additional matches, but it really just shows the first 8 matches again. This is a critical fault in a function that is really necessary for the PDA's primary purpose...that of storing and retrieving many contacts.
I was tipped off, by the E2 forum in the Palm website, that this was a well known problem (wish I had checked this before buying), but also that there were other amazing bugs. One of these is the built-in calculator, which comes up with some real far out answers when using the % key. For example, 200 + 5% is 2.05? How about 210!!!!!
Palm makes it as hard as possible to contact tech support and customer service, but I worked at it and finally had a so-called Level 2 tech support person on the line (from India, it sounded like, and they called me at 10:30 at night). They readily acknowledged the problems, but stated that Palm had designed the E2 without flash-upgradable OS, and with so many having been made, Palm decided to simply not take them back...can't fix the problem cheaply with a download, so ignore the problem and let the customer twist in the wind.
The tech support person gave me a phone number and expediting code, which got me through to Palm corporate headquarters and a manager in customer relations. He plainly stated that the E2 did not have any bugs, since the things I was bringing up were actually designed that way, and as such were design features, not faults. No argument I made could get him to admit that this was a problem. When I pressed him for help and said his 'company line' was clear BS, he stated that the problems had gone as far as the CEO of Palm, who had decreed that the company would not admit a fault and would not fix, take back or in any other way remedy the problems. He said the company position is that the E2 is a 'low end' product, and cannot be expected to work as well as the more expensive products in their line!
Well I cannot return my E2, cannot afford to throw it away and buy a more expensive one, and I do need a PDA that runs Palm OS applications. My solution was to spend another $40 and buy two after-market programs, a scientific calculator application and the IntelligentFind application. Both work fine, and unless the E2 starts to have problems turning on (as many have complained about), I suppose it will do a decent job until I grow tired of it in a few years.
But, the real rub is that Palm used to be a fine company with a high quality, well thought out and manufactured product of high reliablilty. They are now simply a maker of a consumer commodity, rather like $5 calculators, and their service and support are about as good as one would expect from that scenario. It is sad.
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