Palm, AT&T Wireless Team on Tungsten W

AT&T Wireless Services will be the first carrier to offer mobile data service in the United States on Palm's Tungsten W, a personal digital assistant with phone features.

The device, announced last October, is Palm's latest hardware offering for the corporate market and its first product to include an integrated thumbpad. Palm follows several other vendors, including some that use Palm OS, into the market for combined phone-PDA devices.

The Tungsten W, with a suggested retail price of $549, can be ordered now from Palm. Beginning February 28, it will be available across the United States in retail stores including CompUSA and Franklin Covey. AT&T Wireless initially will not sell the device in its stores, relying instead on Palm's established sales channels, said Jeremy Pemble, an AT&T Wireless spokesperson.

For its data communications service on the Tungsten W, AT&T will charge users not by the amount of time they spend online but by the amount of data they send and receive. Monthly plans will range from 8MB for $20 to 100MB for $100. Voice plans will be sold separately, but customers will receive just one bill for both. The 8MB plan requires the purchase of a voice plan.

Tungsten Duo

The Tungsten W can be used with AT&T's Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service, which is available in 99 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, said Rick Hartwig, Palm senior product manager. The service should offer an average data transmission speed of about 40 kilobits per second, according to Hartwig. In addition, AT&T has roaming agreements with carriers in a number of other countries, and the device supports three GSM bands: 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 1900 MHz.

The Tungsten W is similar to the Tungsten T device but has a QWERTY thumbpad in place of the sliding cover that retracts to expose a handwriting space on the Tungsten T's screen. It features a brightly lit 320-by-320-pixel display with support for 65,000 colors. At the top of the device is a small external antenna and a phone headset jack. The device has one SD (Secure Digital) expansion slot. The battery can provide ten hours of talk time, according to Palm. The Tungsten W runs Palm OS 4.11, a predecessor to the recently released Palm OS 5.

Designed primarily for data communications rather than voice, the Tungsten W will require hardware attachments for use as a phone. A wired headset with an ear bud and microphone will ship with the device. A flip cover with a speaker and mouthpiece, which has a short wire to plug into the headset jack, is scheduled to ship in April with a suggested retail price of $40.

Extras, Options

Standard software includes Adobe Systems Acrobat Reader, DataViz Documents To Go Professional Edition, and a Web browser. Visto MessageXpress and Palm's VersaMail are offered for accessing POP or IMAP e-mail accounts. They support various groupware applications, including Microsoft Outlook and IBM's Lotus Notes.

In enterprises, the core market for the device, most employees want a corporate wireless device to complement their personal phones rather than replace them, Hartwig said. Palm did not integrate phone functions as tightly in this device as other vendors have in some combined devices, such as the Handspring Treo, because that would have involved compromises in areas such as battery life, display quality, and thumbpad size, he said.

The device has been rolled out with a service in Singapore. Services from Vodafone U.K. and Rogers AT&T Wireless in Canada were announced last October but have not yet begun, Hartwig said.