Palm has endowed the Tungsten T3 with a lightning-fast 400MHz Intel XScale processor and a healthy 64MB of RAM (about 52MB of which is available to the user). Additional SD or MMC media can be added to the SDIO-compatible expansion slot.
In addition to the standard applications native to Palm OS 5.2, the T3 includes the new Contacts and Calendar applications, which replace the aging Address Book and Date Book, respectively. Contacts allows for additional and customized fields (you can finally, for instance, store multiple addresses for each contact), while Calendar adds richer scheduling information and easier navigation. Furthermore, both programs offer better compatibility with Microsoft Outlook.
The T3 includes a healthy software bundle. Dataviz Documents To Go Professional Edition 6.0 allows for full manipulation of Microsoft Word and Excel files (and even limited use of PowerPoint decks), and separate applications offer support for Adobe Acrobat and e-book documents. Palm has even added J2ME support so that the Tungsten T3 can natively run mobile Java applications. Multimedia support is also strong, with a photo viewer, MP3 playback via RealOne's Mobile Player, and Kinoma's Producer and Player software available for compressing videos for on-the-go viewing.
The built-in Bluetooth transceiver provides connectivity to a growing list of similarly configured devices, so the T3 can wirelessly sync with a Bluetooth PC and interact with Bluetooth-enabled cell phones. This opens up more-useful features, such as autodialing from the PDA's contact list or using the phone as a modem for dial-up or high-speed data access (depending on the phone's supported network) to the Web, e-mail, or instant-messaging programs.
The T3, however, lacks a mobile pro's must-have feature: built-in Wi-Fi. If wireless network access is a requisite, consider instead Palm's $500 Tungsten C. Alternately, if you want much of the T3's functionality but can live without the larger screen and built-in Bluetooth, the $200 Tungsten E is the way to go.
