PalmTungsten E2 Handheld

I have had Palm devices since they first came out. I currently have a desktop PC, 2 laptops, and 2 iPads. I have tried to get away from the Tungsten 2E for for years but NOTHING does what they do nearly a well as they do it. They are clearly the best appointment, calendar, contact list around. You will never be late for an appointment again. No iPad app on my $600 dollar iPad will quickly setup a repeating appointment in a complex manner like: the the 2nd Sunday every other month. No app will start to notify me with a beep 1 day, 1 week, 1 hour, or minute before the appointment or task and continue to beep me every 5 or ten minutes until I acknowledge it and either silence it with one touch or put it on snooze to remind me again.Such a system is only good if you keep it with you, so you have it as soon as you commit to a new task and enter it immediately. The Tungsten can always be in a shirt pocket or purse my iPad cannot be. If you forget it, when you finally retrieve it, there it is beeping every 5 minutes for your appointment. No iPad app will do that.It has a great "To do list" with priority rankings, great software so you can enter everything with a keyboard and sync it to your Tungsten. If you ever run over it with a car, get another, re-sync it and never miss a beat. This brings me to durability. I have dropped then hundreds of times and always cringe but never did more than scuff them up. I have dropped one into a storm drain grate, washed them in a front loader with laundry, dropped one in my Lilly pond and salvaged them all after drying them out. One I warped with too much heat because I got impatient and forgot to go back and check on it while drying it out. I was still able to hot sync it and buy another.They have great battery life. If I was going out of town for less than a week, I never took my charger. I could go on and on but I will jump to the limited short-comings.The Cons: They are older technology so less ebooks and less sharing of data, no surfing the internet, no email, etc. They have one notorious flaw where the touch screen can get so out of whack that you cannot calibrate it. This does not happen often. When it does just let it run down by running some function non-stop, then recharge it.

I had a Tungston E2 that died after ?? 10 years or so. I moped around for a while (The Palm company is dead & buried, etc) but then had an inspiration and went out on Amazon to see what I could see about E2s. I found an outfit called Guaranteed Tech that had some for sale. Apparently they bought up all the new E2s sitting around (In Palm Warehouses or wherever. maybe at HP places) plus a bunch of E2s that I guess didn't work anymore. They tested them all, reconditioned those that they could, and put them all up for sale. They put new batteries in all the unused E2s, and did whatever they could to get the others to work also.I ordered a new one and it arrived a few days later and worked like a champ right out of the box, with one MAJOR exception. It wouldn't interface with my computer which had with all the old Palm E2 stuff already out there. I called Guaranteed Tech and spent the next TWO HOURS working with a guy there (I think he's the owner or some such). He was very patient with me and we tried one thing after another and eventually the interface started interfacing. The problem was apparently that the old UserID on my machine wouldn't interface with the same UserId on the new Palm, or some such. Whatever.Anyway, my new Palm is now up and running and interfacing like a champ. I lost all the data on the old one but that was partly due to auto backup that I had running weekly, PLUS dear ol' McAffee antivirus software. t apparently didn't like all the new stuff trying to get into my machine or somesuch. We disabled McAfee for a while, did a few other things, and now my new E2 is working like a champ and interfacing beautifully. God Bless Guaranteed Tech!Would I recommend Guaranteed Tech to anyone else? YOU BET!

I am a very busy facility manager, and I need the Palm operating system (OS). I believe the Palm OS is superior to any other PDA OS, and I do not have the time to learn something else. This product is exactly what I need badly, but it is just too expensive to only last from 6 to 18 months. I am painfully aware of this because my fifth (5th) one of these (always purchased new) just quit.I do not abuse these units! I keep them from moisture, shock, and vibration. All I do is use them gently, a lot. Most of the failures have been related to the beeper which I rely on as a meeting or deadline reminder. Other failures have been battery related. The latest failure is the centering procedure for the stylus operation being off ¼" too high on the display no matter what I do making the alpha-numeric touch screen function impossible to access.If this product cost less than $50.00 knowing it will only last for months not years, I may again consider it. I guess I am saying it is cheap junk only worth $50.00 at retail.I seriously considered some of the Sharp and Casio models, but I need a program like Documents-to-Go so I can upload my large database of Excel notes which I can search while away from my office. I wound up purchasing a "like new" Handspring Visor Prism for just over $100.00.If anyone knows of a (reliable) color PDA that runs the latest Palm OS, and is not expensive, please post or comment to this message. This information would not only help myself, but many others...By the way, I would not recommend wasting your good money on this unit!