Palm AT&T Wireless team up with Tungsten W

See correction below

An announcement planned for Monday that AT&T Wireless Services will be the first carrier to offer mobile data service in the U.S. on Palm’s  Tungsten W, a PDA (personal digital assistant) with phone features, has been delayed, according to Palm. A new launch date for the service and product will be announced shortly.

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 can be used with AT&T’s GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) service, which is available in 99 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., said Rick Hartwig, senior product manager at Palm, in Milpitas, Calif. The service should offer an average data transmission speed of about 40Kbps, 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: 900MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz.

The Tungsten W is similar to the Tungsten T device but with 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 10 hours of talk time, according to Palm. The Tungsten W runs Palm OS 4.11, a predecessor to the recently released Palm OS 5.

Standard software includes Adobe Systems Inc. Acrobat Reader, DataViz Inc. Documents To Go Professional Edition and a Web browser. Visto Corp. MessageXpress and Palm’s VersaMail are offered for accessing POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) e-mail accounts. They support various groupware applications, including Microsoft Corp. Outlook and IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes.

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, will ship in April for a suggested retail price of $39.95.

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 such as in 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.

The Tungsten W will have a suggested retail price of $549.

Correction

In this article, a Visto Corp. application was originally incorrectly bundled with the Palm Inc.