Palm m505

It's an expanded Palm world

Though a little late, Palm eventually managed to market a PDA with a colour screen under its own name. I've always been a fan of Palm products, dating back to the very first Pilot; today my main PDA is a Palm V, and the new m505 surely is a nice novelty. Following a well known design, the m505 closely resembles its predecessor, the Palm V. Some small details, such as the colour of the new keys, the colour monitor itself and a tiny opening on top of the handheld unit are the only noticeable differences. There's a sensible difference in weight, with the old model decidedly lighter.
Of course the new m505 is not about aesthetics alone. The heart of this PDA is a 33 MHz Motorola DragonBall processor, offering rich 16-bit colour support. The Palm, has an expansion card slot for additional memory storage (up to 64 MB) or add-ons such as a dictionary/thesaurus, games, and more.
The expansion card slot, able to handle Secure Digital and MultiMediaCard (MMC), is probably the most welcome feature, allowing better storage of information or use of programs. The cards are about the size of a postage stamp and you can instantly run software programs, load e-books, graphics or even video files to your handheld without sacrificing memory space. Choose what you need, pop up the card and turn the PDA on, and you're done.
The new LCD display delivers more than 65,000 colours and represents the other major novelty, with no more need to sacrifice games, files and more to the monochrome screen that up until now distinguished the Palm products.
Despite this welcome novelty, the quality of the monitor lacks brightness, especially in comparison to competing products such as the Compaq iPaq. On the m505, the brightness is not adjustable. Pity.
The new native USB HotSync cradle (finally) allows one to exchange information between one's handheld and the computer, in addition to recharging the PDA itself. Unfortunately, the charging indicator never goes off, not even when the battery has fully recharged, leaving users in doubt. Moreover, docking and undocking the handheld seemed difficult, that at times both hands were required to complete the operation.
The m505 introduces a new alert feature that no other Palm device on the market has. A vibrating feature, like the one present on cellular phones, allows appointments and such to be recalled without the sound that can occasionally annoy.
The m505 ships with Palm OS version 4.0, the latest release. Also new is the Palm Mobile Connectivity software included as a standard feature for connecting to the Internet and obtaining e-mail via compatible cellular phones, and a rich selection of bundled software. The 8 MB of built-in memory allows storage of thousands of addresses and much more, more than enough for our normal daily operations.
The Palm m505 handheld is PC- and Macintosh-compatible and requires a USB port. Where the new m505 falls short of expectations is in offering a reason for those like me to change their Palm V. While being quite attractive to new users, the changes aren't that significant from other Palm PDAs. Probably the new Motorola processor has its limits, especially considering multimedia applications. Palm, in fact, is trying to move its PDAs onto an ARM architecture, due to that chip's wider potential.
Finally, $699 CDN seems a rather high price, even for a colour monitor. A nice product, keeping the trademark simplicity of Palm, but one that maybe came a bit late.

For more information visit: www.palm.com

Publication Date: 2001-08-19
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=285