PalmOne Introduces Tungsten E2 Handheld

palmOne announced Wednesday the Tungsten E2 handheld, featuring a brighter color screen, flash memory, Bluetooth wireless technology and a longer lasting battery.

The 4.7 ounce Tungsten E2 handheld (see photo below) uses a 200MHz Intel XScale processor and has a built-in expansion card slot that accepts MultiMediaCard, SD and SDIO formats. Other new features include a 30% brighter 320x320 color display with 40% better color saturation, 32 megabytes (MB) of non-volatile flash memory with 29.7 MB actual storage capacity and built-in Bluetooth 1.1 wireless technology for connecting to other Bluetooth devices such as phones, PDAs, and printers.

The E2 has almost double the battery life of the Tungsten E with usage without a charge of up to 8 days at normal use. Much of the energy savings comes from Palmis switch to flash memory away from random access memory. The switch to non-volatile RAM is significant because users wll now be protected from losing data as a result of a dead battery. PalmOne is gradually switching all of its PDAs and Treo smart phones to flash memory since it can store information without a constant supply of electricity.

The E2 includes Palm OS v5.4, Garnet and comes with DataVizis Documents To Go 7.0 software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint compatibility. The E2 ships with a USB sync cable and a separate AC power cord.

The E2 retails for US$249 and will be available on April 13.