Skipping the Tungsten 4 (the number is considered bad luck in Japan and other Far Eastern countries), PalmOne's latest Tungsten T5 blends the style of the budget Tungsten E with the elongated 65K-colour LCD of the old Tungsten T3. In short: it's easily one of the classiest and most powerful PDAs that the company has ever produced.

But will anybody actually want it? Desperately defending its market against mounting numbers of Pocket PCs, PalmOne knows that it must continually innovate to stay competitive. Analysts at IDC report that the PDA market remains in trouble, its market share hit heavily by more powerful, and popular smartphones.

So it's not enough these days to jack up the memory allocation and redesign the chassis. Any PDA that wants to survive these dark times needs to be more than just a battery powered calendar. People also expect high-end multimedia mastery as part of the deal.

Since Dell parachuted into the eorganiser market with its Axim range, a budget Pocket PC has been a better allround choice. Palm-powered PDAs have regularly lagged behind their Microsoftfuelled rivals as far as power and performance are concerned. But the T5 closes the gap between the two significantly. In fact, rivalling the functionality of Microsoft-powered handhelds seems to be the overriding theme here.

The T5 has some impressive technology, such as the fast 416MHz Intel PXA270 processor. It's not as speedy as the 624MHz and 520MHz versions used in the latest Axim X50 PPCs, but the Palm OS is far less demanding than Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2003 SE software. The highlight, however, is undoubtedly the 256MB of memory, the highest allocation of memory in any Palm-powered device to date. 64MB of this is internal memory (55MB of which is user-accessible), and this is supplemented by a 160MB flash disk, which gives you 215MB of RAM to play with.

Shipped without the usual docking cradle, PalmOne has also given the T5 the ability to act as a USB drive or memory stick. Simply connect the supplied USB cable, plug it into a PC and you can simply drag 'n' drop your digital content to the handheld rather than mess around with synchronised installs.