On a tight budget? This palm will satisfy your needs!

The Palm Tungsten E is the first handheld computing device I've owned. I lusted after the higher priced options, but settled with the Tungsten E as a balance of price and features.

I purchased the Tungsten E for two purposes. One was to keep track of some business matters (such as computer inventory at a medium-sized commercial business), and the second was for entertainment when needed.

On the business end of things, the Tungsten E does very well. It ships with a full version of DocumentsToGo, which is incredibly useful as it allows you to create, modify, and view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. This is probably the most useful tool out of all the ones included with this Palm.

The screen allows for easy reading of text, as its image is bright and clear. The screen is of reasonable size for a Palm of this price, and it's my opinion that most of the cost of the unit is sunk into the screen. The screen also makes for decent recreation. The colors are bright in most games and resolution is decent.

On the matter of games, most play reasonably well on this device. However, you're going to run into problems with action games and ones that have a lot of movement on the screen at once. This palm simply wasn't designed to handle the load of these games. Also, when playing graphics-intensive games your battery life will be shortened greatly.

Battery life itself is marginal. I can usually get a full day's intermittent use out of it before it dies. On busy days, I end up plugging it in at lunch, and it's fully charged again 'til I get back.

This device does have the option for MP3 playback using RealPlayer's plugin. You also have to have a blank memory card for media storage. A note- using the hotsync application to transfer songs to the memory card will take FOREVER. I suggest using a card reader to do any large transfers. MP3 quality is poor at best. I suppose it would work for background noise, but it's not meant for serious listening. With headphones, you can tell very obvious artifacts in the music as a result of the Real software downsampling the MP3s. Even with 320kbps MP3s on the card, the quality just isn't there. I couldn't stand the tinny, compressed highs, and that's all there was to it for me. Also, you can continue to work on your Palm while the MP3s are playing in the background. They also have an option to turn the screen off and continue playing, to conserve battery life. It's nice they added the mp3 playback feature, but it's useless to me.

In terms of reliability, the Tungsten E has done very well in my book. It has only crashed on me once, and that was due to me loading a poorly-written piece of software on it... not the fault of the Palm at all. I've used the palm extensively since I purchased it around 10 months ago. The only thing I have to say to the negative of reliability is that I'm noticing some dark spots at the bottom of the screen, and the screen makes a high-pitched (but relatively quiet) screech whenever it's on. I have a feeling that my backlight is going to conk out on it soon...

I also wish that this palm was available with a cradle. Instead they just give you two ports on the bottom. One for power and one for the USB connection. This works fine, though, and I suppose it helps keep costs down on this unit. It is actually nice to be able to sync to multiple computers, and all you have to do is find a USB cable with the correct end (which my digital camera also shares... bonus). And I guess it was nice when I could just use a universal 12v power adapter for charging the palm in the car, instead of having to use a Palm-branded one...

All in all this seems to be a solid unit that would be worth looking into for an entry level Palm user. I would recommend looking at the Tungsten E2 instead, since it replaces the old Tungsten E. But I'm sure you'll be able to find some new in box Tungsten E's still floating around for a while.