Palm Tungsten W price and reviews

I already had it fixed, but the phone keeps breaking down.

This phone is coming down in price. It's available all the time on Ebay for under a hundred bucks. You may have some trouble using the phone in some areas. It's strongest feature isn't the phone though. Guys, it's a PDA. How many PDA's are available to you under a hundred bucks? Not many. What about Media you say? Well look at this way. If you need something to entertain you. This isn't the way to go. I personally like to carry my laptop with me on long trips and flights across the country anyhow. If you view this PDA in a different way than what the internet will tell you and all the new stuff coming out on what they now call smartphones, you can make this work for you. I use this in my Electronics Technician Career. I log troubleshooting techniques of my own and others so I can have a handy log book on how to fix something. I keep industry standards in it. Download and convert tutorial videos off of youtube and various other places. Take pictures with a camera we have at work and upload those straight from the camera memory card to the PDA. I make PDF files on my laptop in my spare time with bookmarks and then upload those PDF's to my Tungsten W. Every once in awhile I play game on it at break or lunch, but not often. You get the picture? I don't need all that fancy stuff they are putting on phones to bump the price up to over five hundred bucks. That's just silly to me. If you want a barebones handheld PC without stupid bells and whistles, this is the device for you. It can be unlocked if you go get you a smartcard reader writer for about thirty bucks and flash a blank sim card. Then you will be able to use it worldwide and on any cell service. You will also want to get you at least a 4 gig SD Card. This will allow you to store more than enough Office 2000 files, photos, movies, music. You can record music via software available for purchase on Palm's website. It doesn't have wifi capability, but I prefer the bluetooth method in my household anyway. Plus, you can put a bluetooth device on any computer way cheaper than wifi. Bluetooth connection is also easier to setup than wifi. You simply install the software, plug in the dongle, turn on the device and bam. It recognizes it. The bluetooth device will cost you extra though as it's not built in to the phone. But it's cheap enough. Cheaper than wifi. If you aren't familiar with bluetooth, you use it to connect to your laptop or PC and than you can use however the computer is hooked up to the internet to browse on the Tungsten W. See, you have most of the stuff the new phones are coming out with, it's just different in the way you get to those things. With a little patience and taking the time to educate yourself, this phone can do anything the new phones do.

For an alternative to a Kindle this ROCKED! I used it for notes, calculator, date-book, address book and reader in Afghanistan with no problems!
I had been reading about the new Kindles for E-books. I had used a TREO-90 since about 2001 for addresses, organizing events, etc. but the battery was shot. When I went on E-bay to find another I could only find parts!
I remembered an EXPENSIVE Palm device similar to the Handspring TREO-90. I found the Tungsten-W after a bit of searching. It was available on E-bay refurbished for $36.00.
I just got back from OEF (Afghanistan) after using it there for about 10 months. I was able to download e-books from the MWR or USO computers onto a flashdrive and then cross-load from my lap-top onto the Tungsten-W.
I also found some Scientific Calculator programs that helped immensly with my construction math for diagonals, angles, etc. (Engineers)
I never had to be too worried about breaking or losing the device as I'd only be out the $36.00!
I did try installing a SIM Card (worked great for reception there in Afghanistan) but encountered the same problem as everyone else with the audio and mic issues. I just ended up purchasing a cheap cell phone to use the SIM card in.