Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld
by Palm
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Category: CE
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: PalmAudio: English (Original Language)
Release Date: 2009-11-30
Platform: Mac OS X, Palm OS
Model: E2
Color: Gray
Product features:
- 320x320 Transflective TFT color display with touchscreen, supports more than 65,000 colors
- Built-in Bluetooth technology for connecting to compatible wireless devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, and printers
- Powerful, yet affordable, with 32 MB of memory (26 MB actual storage capacity)
- Create and edit Word, Excel, Adobe PDF, and PowerPoint compatible files
- Supports SD, SDIO and MultiMediaCard expansion-cards to add extra memory, features or content
- PalmOne Universal Charging Kit
- PalmOne Sega Classics Card
- iConcepts Universal PDA Starter Kit
- Navman GPS m Series for Palm m125, m130, m500, m505 and m515 series handhelds
- Targus PA870U Universal Wireless Keyboard
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld
Customer Review: So close, but not a winner....Palm is letting customers down
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Description of Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld
TungstenE2 HandheldDigital Cameras & Photo Categories
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