Customer Reviews

Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld

5 star:		(144)
4 star:		(96)
3 star:		(37)
2 star:		(44)
1 star:		(102)

 

 

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.

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?

This is my first organizer ever. I'm totally impressed. After reading some of the reviews here I was scared to put my money on any of these things. Seems like someone had complained about every model out there. This one had at least above average reviews, and I liked the fact that fewer people complain about the soft boot issue.
Now it's two months later and I can't imagine living without it. I'm a college teacher, with lots of faculty meetings to track, plus a freelance business, and the usual dentist and car appointments. I used to keep a paper "to do" list in my shirt pocket, but it doesn't ring if I forget to scan it several times a day. In short, my life is so busy that I was beginning to drop appointments.

I'm happy to report that this tungsten e2 syncs perfectly with Microsoft Outlook 2002. There are a few minor anomalies, but nothing that is a deal breaker. I was disturbed at first to discover that the thing is never really off. I would have liked to be able to totally turn it off when I had no appointments coming up, to save juice. However I've found that this is a none issue. It runs for at least 4 days, sometimes a week and a half before needing a charge.

The operating system seems quite solid. It locks up maybe once every 2 to 3 weeks, but that requires just a tap of a pen on the reset button on the back, and it comes back all happy in a couple seconds. When I was installing third party software every couple days it would lock up more frequently, but I've got everything I need now, and things have settled down.

I don't use it for email, or for surfing the net. I have a laptop for that, and I didn't want to pay an extra hundred for the wifi card.

The coolest thing about this e2 is the calendar and alarm, the tasks list, and the contacts. With the hot buttons on the front to access these vital functions, this thing never leaves my person. I even take it climbing in my backpack. Never know when I might want to make a note about something, or meet a new friend and exchange phone numbers.
After I bought it and realized how useful it was, I was tempted to exchange it for the treo, which has all this, plus a phone...until I found out that you have to pay at least $50 a month to the phone service to make the internet stuff work. Scratch that! I love this thing. It's perfect for my needs. I did buy the 2 year replacement policy from circuit city. $30 seemed like a small price to pay for peace of mind.

The software you can get for Palms is amazing. Here is my list of essential software:
Uninstall Manager - Northglide
BDicty 5.9 Pro - dictionary, thesaurus and conjugator
Pocket Tunes from Normsoft (it is compatible with the "plays for sure" windows media player files. I can play free downloadable audio books from the library.)
Tide Tool 2.2 - toolworks dot com (if you live near saltwater, a must have)
MessageEase V.5 - faster than graffiti for entering text, and it's free!
AvantGo - captures websites off the net when synced, view them on the commute later. - free!

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.

I've been using my Tungsten E2 for about one month now, and I'm very pleased. I've owned the Tungsten E and Zire 71 models, and the Tungsten E2 is definitely an improvement. The screen looks very good, and it is even readable in direct sunlight. The battery life has been excellent, and the Bluetooth works great. I really think the Tungsten E2 remains an excellent value for those who want lots of functionality but do not require 802.11 wireless or a larger screen (i.e. the TX model). I use mine heavily, and I've not experienced any problems so far. The only thing I don't like about this model is that I can't charge the device via USB. I don't like having to carry the large AC adapter with me when I travel. I miss being able to charge my Zire 71 via the USB cable, whether it was connected to my laptop or the car adapter which came with my USB sync cable. Aside from this one complaint though, I highly recommend this device--even in light of the two new models Palm recently released (the TX and Z22 models). Of course, if you don't mind spending the extra money, go for the TX model. Otherwise, I think the price and features of the Tungsten E2 make it an excellent value.

I've been a palm user for many years, from Zire to Tungsten E and then E2. I was impressed by the cost and the new features of E2. However one fine day, 4 months after its purchase, it hung up during hotsync and even the soft and the hard reset aren't working. It totally died, and I've no idea what caused it.
I would not recommend Tungsten E or E2 to anyone who wants to keep it for sometime, as their operating systems are vulnerable and thats the reason palm only gives a 90 day warranty on them, compared to 1 year for Tungsten T5 and TX.
Its small 32MB memory is too small for any professional user, so invest a little more and get the more high end models.

I've had my E2 for around 7 months and it just suddenly wouldn't turn on. There was no warning, it had worked fine the day before, there weren't any battery problems and NONE of the possible trouble shooting suggestions would work. It is completely dead and no data are accessible.

I couldn't get it to sync or charge from either the AC charger or USB trickle charge. When I went on Palm One forum, it became evident that over 50 other E2 users have had this problem and Palm isn't responding. This is my second Palm PDA and I'm done with Palm sadly. I'd say buyer beware. If you have questions about this, check out the Palm One forum for possible problems before buying!

I've have owned a Palm since the introduction of the Palm 2 way back when. The only still-working Palm I replaced, was my very first, the Palm 2. The other five I have purchased since have all failed in some unrecoverable way forcing me to buy a replacment long before I was ready.

It's been relatively easy in the past to justify purchasing another. After all, I have all my contacts in the address book and all my critical information stored in Splash ID. What else am I to do, right?

Well, I am now officially completely fed up. My Palm's, including the Palm E2, seem to have an uncanny way of malfunctioning just after the meager warranty period expires. The unit no longer stays calibrated. In fact, the calibration seems to be all over the map. Sometimes I'll tap the screen with the stylus and the the Palm will recognize it an inch or so below where I tapped. If the mis-calibration would stay consistant, I suppose you might be able to limp along. The problem is it wonders all over the map. Palm has no solution other than sending it in for a costly repair.

No thanks Mr. Palm pilot guys . . . you have taken the last cent you will ever get from me !! I'M MAD AS HELL AND i'M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE !

And that's all I have to say about that . . .

Overall, I find the E2 a joy to use. The screen is beautiful, the processor is fast and the casing looks expensive. Furthermore, the Bluetooth hotsync works effectively so I never need to use the cable again. I have a light weight computer, Apple Powerbook G4 12", so I do not think it is necessary to have a PDA loaded with functions, which are often too complex to use and too expensive to buy. The E2, like the original idea of the Palm Pilot, is designed to replace the address book, memo pads, that we must carry, plus a few new tricks in a light and relatively inexpensive package. The downside of this is the lack of a good carring case with a belt clip. The E2 does come with a piece of rubber to cover its screen but this does not offer protection if you need to carry it with you all the time, which is something that a PDA supposed to do. I have this for about one month and so far there is no quality control issue as yet. I do find the screen a little numb and not as sensitive as my old Palm III but I can live with that. In summary, I still highly recommend it.

This is a follow-up after two months of usage. I must say that I am a little dissapointed with the reliability. Oflate whenever I open Docs To Go, it freezes and I've to perform a soft reset. I've also been having problems with the Digitizer. If the problems keep at this rate, I am not sure I'll ever buy a Palm again. Will keep you all posted if there are more issues. *Sigh*
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I had a m515 a couple of years ago when it crashed and never woke up. I somewhat apprehensively decided to get this Tungsten E2 mainly because it has non-volatile memory and so here I am.

First about the case itself: It is a solid case with a solid look of steel and I suspect that this is for a reason along with the fact that they got rid of the cradle systems. Traditional Palm PDAs did come with a cradle and they did have quite a bit of issues with the SUDS (Sudden USB Death Syndrome). The steel finish is elegant but it does leave smudges which is managable. For whatever reason they decided to leave this finish, personally it is fine with me. I don't get it when people complain that they are dissapointed when there is no cradle. Good thing I don't have to lug a cradle while travelling and if not will have to buy a travel charger.

Compared to the previous m515 I've had, this is a steal for $249. The interface is very good and I really like the crisp display. All in all, looks like they took the best of the Tungsten E model and improved it. It took a bit of time figuring out to play mp3s using the Realplayer. I had to format my SD Card using FAT instead of the FAT32 file system. After this step, adding and removing songs was a breeze. I must say that I am totally blown by the music quality. Agreed that the built-in speaker isn't meant for this but on a headphone it is awesome.

The operation speed is pretty good and a 10 hr battery life doesn't hurt at all (mighty impressive). Haven't played around with Bluetooth yet and it's dissapointing that if I need wireless, I've to shell out another 100 bucks for it. For now, I am satisfied with the base version and I don't think I'll go for wireless anyway. Additional SD Card would probably be a good idea if one needs more songs on the go.

Bottomline is that this is a decent PDA for the price (which is bound to go down shortly) and if you know the limitations and capabilities and don't have high expectations you'll be satified. Just keep your fingers crossed if your unit goes bad and is out of warranty (Palm support has been legendary in being terrible).

Hopefully we don't have to deal with it.