Reg review Back in 2002, the Tungsten T's unique slider mechanism, which tucked the PDA's text-entry area behind a slide-up five-way navigation control, seemed a radical step forward from the tablet form-factor of old. PalmOne was pitching the device at executives and, it reckoned, executives spend more time looking at their information than typing it in. The slider allowed the T to become a compact data display device without sacrificing the ability to enter new information.

Come the era of big-screen devices, however, and the slider started to seem redundant. The Tungsten T3's 320 x 480 display is magnificent, but it defeats the object of having one if you need to open the slider every time you want to see it at its best, especially if you didn't use your PDA for data-entry. If you did, the slider just got in the way each time, as the Tungsten E showed.

Enter the T3's successor, the T5, and it's immediately clear PalmOne has learned from both the T3 and the E, ditching the former's slider and adopting the latter's case design to produce what is not only its best PDA to date, but one that doesn't hide its glory.

Yes, the 320 x 480 display is back, augmented by Palm OS 5.4's much-improved and alpha channel-blended graphics. The screen's resolution is the same as previous Tungstens, but the colour is visibly better. Sitting it alongside an E, I hadn't realised how off-white the older displays were. Not so the T5.

Like the T3, the T5 has a virtual Graffiti text-entry area, popping up from the bottom of the screen whenever you need it - or whenever you run an app that thinks it's working with a 320 x 320 screen. Present again is the icon bar along the bottom of the screen, offering quick access to the application launcher, find facility, menu bar, the Graffiti panel, a switch to flip the display between landscape and portrait mode, and the Bluetooth settings. The latter has been upgraded from a wireless on/off switch, to a network connection chooser, finally providing a quick way of linking up to a mobile phone - the list of handsets needs updating, mind you - and initiating an Internet connection without having to visit several separate Preferences panels.

The virtual Home button is redundant now, PalmOne having set one of the four hard-wired application buttons alongside the navigation control to work the same way. But pressing it repeatedly now no longer cycles through the application categories but flips between the launcher and PalmOne's new alternative, Favorites. You get eight icons to the full screen, but rather than limit you to applications, you can also add URLs and documents.

Like the entries in Windows' Start menu, each item is represented by a shortcut, so it can be given an alternative name that better explains its function. VersaMail, for example, can be retitled to the more prosaic 'E-mail', Media to 'Photos and Videos'. It's a good idea, and one that will make the T5 easier to use for the less technically-minded. It's also handy for IT departments who want to offer mobile workers an single, clear interface.

Favorites has its flaws: reordering list entries has to be done through a menu item using drag and drop - why not do that on the list itself? And the application provides four pages of icons, number one to four, to add more than eight entries. I'd rather PalmOne had implemented Categories, or come up with something more novel, like the UI on Tapwave's Zodiac.

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Favorites' support for documents and web links ties in with the T5's second key new app, Files. Again, this has a dedicated application button. It's PalmOne's Finder or Windows Explorer, providing a listing of folders and files stored on the device. As Favorites also shows, PalmOne is aware that users want to access their information as files, not just as entries in an application's database.

And here we come to the T5's central feature. It's not the big screen (nice though that is) nor is it the device's big, 256MB memory (ditto). It's the partitioning of that memory into a regular Palm OS random access memory storage soup - 55MB of it - and a separate, hard disk-style 160MB storage space. This is a major step forward that paves the way for true HDD-based PDAs that are ready to compete with all the world's iPods and Portable Media Centers. Incidentally, the missing 41MB from the 256MB is a third partition that acts as the T5's ROM.

Storage, no matter how much of there is, is useless if the data is wiped when the power's lost, so PalmOne has equipped the T5 with Flash memory. Even the RAM area is Flash, as is the ROM space - though protected from accidental erasure - ensuring that if you forget to keep your PDA fully charged, or, like me, you go away for four weeks and leave it behind, you won't lose your data. However, unlike a hard drive, a hard reset will wipe not only the T5's 'RAM' but that 160MB Flash drive too.

There's a penalty to using Flash: application access times seem slower than before, a fact highlighted by the T5's benchmarks. But it marks the point at which HotSyncing to back up your information no longer becomes a necessity but something to do to keep PIM databases aligned. If you don't need to that, you can chuck the HotSync cradle into the back of a cupboard.

Well, you could if PalmOne supplied one. The T5 may be PalmOne's top-of-the-line model, but it doesn't come with a cradle. Instead, you get a neat, slimline HotSync cable.

There's another issue with Flash: it's longevity. Flash chips are rated by the number of times each cell can be written to before become unreliable. The T5's Flash is probably good for 100,000 writes. For a storage bank, that could mean years of use; for more rapidly changing system memory, a lot less. The last thing PalmOne wants are class action suits from T5 owners whose devices start crashing after a few years, so hopefully they will last beyond the working life of the device, just as the irremovable batteries in PalmOne PDAs do.

Speaking of batteries, the use of Flash means that unused sectors can be powered down to conserve the battery's charge. The T5 appears to have a large battery in any case, but I found it retains power much longer than my Tungsten E does, despite having Bluetooth turned on permanently and used frequently.

Some reports have suggested the T5's will trickle-charge over a USB 2.0 connection, but it didn't appear to do so for me. Certainly, when connected, the battery icon didn't say it was charging.

The reason I didn't mention downloading content earlier as a reason to HotSync is because PalmOne has essentially done away with that too. Spotting the growing use of USB Flash disks, it has rigged the T5 to work in the same way. it's not automatic - you have to run an app called Drive Mode - but the result is the same: the T5's internal drive area, plus any SD or MMC card you've got installed, mounts on your computer. It's far better than the old HotSync approach to downloading apps - just hook up the cable, run Drive Mode and drag your JPEGs, MP3s and .PRC files across.

Again, there are flaws. Mounting the T5 on a Mac allows Mac OS X's Finder to add its metafiles to the PDA's storage, but unlike Mark/Space's Missing Sync, which has offered this PDA mounting facility for some time, when you close the connection, Drive Mode doesn't erase at the .DS_store and other such files for you. I'd thoroughly recommend Missing Sync to all Mac owners who use Palm PDAs.

Photo and video content is ably handled by PalmOne's updated Media app, now providing tools to annotate pictures. Whole albums can be beamed or sent to other devices. Which begs the question: why, in this day and age, does the Palm OS maintain a distinction between 'beaming' (sending by infra-red) and 'sending (sending by any other means)? These are distinct features in Media and other Palm OS apps, but it's high time beaming was just an other option on Send... menus.

Audio playback comes courtesy of RealPlayer 1.6, with audio boosted by the T5's better acoustics, which provide a bassier, beefier sound.

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Not that the PDA's performance is beefier. Running Laurent Duveau's Speedy 4.0, the T5 generated a score of 1852, below the T3's 1899. Running the same test again, this time with the screen in landscape mode, yielded 1415 to the T3's 1034. Speedy's score is an aggregate of three tests, focusing on the CPU, memory and graphics, respectively. Sure enough, the T5's processor and memory scores were much the same in either mode but while the graphics test completed in 0.27s in portrait, it took 0.52s in landscape mode.

That result is confirmed by our Kinoma Player 2.0 video test, in which the test movie ran flat out at 156.4fps in portrait mode, but only 91.7fps in landscape mode. But that's still better than the 82.9fps our Tungsten E scored. However, it's not as fast as the Zire 72.

One reason is the T5's use of Flash memory, which has a slower access speeds as SDRAM. The 72's Speedy memory test took 0.12s to complete; the T5 took 0.17s. You can see it in the start up process: the Tungsten E starts up from a warm restart in 7s. The T5 takes 34s. That doesn't sound much, but it feels like an age when you're waiting to get to your data.

But it's important not to get hung up on performance numbers. By their nature, PDAs are less performance-sensitive than, say, PCs are. Crucially, the T5 feels responsive when it's running. Only application launching feels slower than I'm used to - but not sufficiently so to be an irritation. And applications load much faster the second time they're run, provided you haven't reset the machine in the meantime.

Does the T5 irritate in other ways? Well, the power switch has to be pushed and held rather than quickly tapped. There's no voice recording facility. And PalmOne has reinvented its PDAs' interface to other devices again. Having a clear interface spec. helps encourage third-party peripheral makers - just look at the Palm add-on market, and what's happening in the iPod world - but PalmOne won't have endeared itself to any such makers by telling them there's a new format to support now. Existing PDA users with older peripherals won't be too happy about it either.

It's certainly hard to see what benefit the Multi-Connector offers over the Universal Connector beyond - presumably - support for faster data rates. But did PalmOne really need to change the connector completely to achieve that?

Verdict

The T5 is a big step forward in PDA design. The big internal memory, the way it's partitioned as traditional Palm OS storage and as a solid-state drive, along with new tools to manage that capacity and connect more smoothly to host computers show PalmOne once again leading the development of the handheld. The T5 paves the way for some very capable PDAs going forward.

For now, it's fast and let's not forget that gorgeous 320 x 480 display. It's got Bluetooth for mobile phone connectivity, plus a well-coded wizard that'll get you connected to a GPRS link from almost any network anywhere in the world. And there's no slider to get in the way. That alone would make me consider upgrading from the T3, and I certainly wouldn't get a T3 now, despite the price cut. The T3's key benefits were speed and screen-size - the T5 has both and more besides.

Once again, PalmOne's annual Tungsten T update has seen the introduction of a very strong product that keeps the it ahead of the game. ®

PalmOne Tungsten T5
Rating	85%
Pros	— Whopping 215MB of user-available RAM, configured as a 160MB Flash disk and 55MB of regular memory; the 320 x 480 display; well-integrated software.
Cons	— Could be faster; no Wi-Fi
Price	$399/£279/€419
More info	The PalmOne Tungsten T5 website (http://www.palmone.com/us/products/handhelds/tungsten-t5//)

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