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My Palm History 27th November 2003 I've been using a Palm PDA for the last five years. I've had three Palms. m515 IIIc III Palm m515 I'm currently using a Palm m515. It's okay, but there's a few things I don't like. It uses some new form of Graffiti. Ts and Is are very different and irritate me no end. Also Es and Qs. And I can't do an O or 0 at all. They changed Graffiti for legal reasons, so I was told. No hard case flip-top. It's got this leather side-flip job that's loose and floppy and gets in the way. I really liked the hard flip-tops of the Palm III series. It's not contoured like the original Palm III. I read that the shape of those original ones came after the inventor carved a block of wood and carried it around and kept whittling and smoothing until he had a shape that felt good. The m515 is a shape made by a marketing department. Hard to hold and no contours. The colour screen is dull and seems to be lacking in the green department. I use CityTime and on the IIIc, the map colours were vivid and vibrant. On the m515, they're washed out and dull. The green background in card games is really washed out. New interface on the m515 so I can't use my old keyboard. Had to buy a new keyboard. I read that Palm have standardised on the new interface, so if I upgrade to a Tungsten or something newer, the theory is that I can still use my new keyboard. Battery usage sucks. You need the backlight on to see the screen. Even though I keep it turned way down, it sucks the life out of the batteries quickly. The IIIc could go two weeks without needing a charge. The m515 needs a charge every two days. Of course, there's a lot more to like about the new m515. Faster processor. Not sure what the difference is, but it's made most operations a little speedier. HandBase is still a little slow doing display on large databases, but it's a lot faster than it was on the IIIc. More memory. 16 meg of RAM. Woohoo. I can jam in some more apps, just in case. Space for a memory card. I bought a 32 meg memory card to fit in there, but can't do a thing with it. Out of desperation, I bought the Encyclopedia Britannica (miniature version) on a memory card, and keep that in the Palm at all times just so I can say I use the memory slot. The encyclopedia hasn't helped me any, but it sometimes helps to pass the time by browsing for simplistic facts. Faster syncing with the USB interface. This is offset by the extra trouble getting the m515 to sync with Linux using USB. I ended up buying a Belkin cable to carry round with the laptop and this has both USB and serial. I use either. The USB interface lets you recharge the built-in batteries. Palm IIIc I used the Palm IIIc for about one year. It fell out of my pocket one evening and landed on the ground. I didn't think much of it at the time, but next day I tried to use it and the screen was dead. I hadn't done a sync or a backup for a while, so I was pretty upset. When I fiddled with it a bit, it made a few beep-boop noises, so I though that maybe the screen was dead but everything else was okay. I stuck it in the cradle, fired up pilot-xfer and started a backup. It worked. I sucked all my data off the Palm and preserved it to cdrom. Then I went out and bought the Palm m515 and transferred everything to it and life carried on as usual. The Palm IIIc had some good features. Colour. Beautiful, bright, vivid colours. I loved it. So easy to see, even in daytime. More memory than the Palm III. More applicatiosn to jam in. But there's always things to dislike. It was longer than the Palm III. Considerably longer. It would poke out the top of my shirt pocket. Didn't fit in the hand as comfortably as the III. And it was a lot heavier. All the weight seemed to be in the rechargeable batteries at the base. Rechargeable batteries. Most people like this. Stick it in the cradle and recharge the batteries. Not so easy if you're travelling the wilds of Turkey or Tibet to find a power source that works and will fit your cradle, let alone making room for the cradle in the backback. The old Palm III used two AAA batteries, and even in the wilds of Borneo you can come into any little village and buy a couple of Duracell AAA replacements. Or carry a bag of them yourself, and they last a month per pair. The cradle. You get the cradle and then you get the power supply and you plug the power supply into the cradle, and the cradle attaches to both computer and Palm. I read reports that the power supply and the cradle could burn out your motherboard, but I never experienced anything like that. I just didn't like the clumsiness of it. Palm III My first Palm. Hand-contoured. Light. A delight to handle and use. For me, it was a new, exciting gadget and I loved it. Sure it had limitations, but I quickly became attached to it. I used it all the time. As always, there were small niggling problems. Not much memory. I was always running up against lack of memory problems. Always had to jiggle data and apps and switch apps in and out. The screen was glass and I scratched it from constant use. Too late, I bought those protective sheets and covered it up. It made it easier to use after the screen was scratched, but I wish I had covered up before. [Palm Home] [Linux Home]