Simple to use, very straight forward, great item.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
My granddaughter (9) saw my Palm Tungsten E and thought that she would like one. I bought her this Palm m500 PDA and she was over the moon with it as she could connect it to her laptop. No complaints, so I reckon it must be OK. If buying a similar model for yourself, try and get the one of the later models.
Palm m500 Review Features Released in March 2001, the Palm M500 features a DragonBall CPU as usual, clocked at 33MHZ. There is 8mb of RAM and the usual IrDA port (I never use this apart from controling my TV using NoviiRemote). New to this line is an SD (Secure Digital) / MMC (MultiMediaCard) slot. I could not get this to work with large (1gb) or SDHC cards, perhaps due to its age. It appears that this may be supported under newer devices by using some Shareware called PowerSDHC, but it just crashed my m500 with a fatal error, causing me to need to reset it in safe mode. There is also a new silent (blinking) alarm, which is great for when you don’t want to disturb anyone. There is also a vibrate feature. It is quite weak, however. The rechargeable battery seems to charge fast, and you get at least a day of solid use, or over a month of on-and-off use, which is a little better than my old Palm IIIx, as well as being much cheaper (No more expensive Duracell AA's!) Display My m500 is monochrome, unlike the m505, and has the usual 160x160px display. The display is much nicer than that of my old Palm IIIx, having improved contrast, and being less green/shiny, making it much easier to see in all light conditions. I also think they have used a different digitizer, as it "feels" different - Less solid, but not in a bad way - Perhaps they used plastic instead of glass? There is still the naff inverted-backlight (Which I hate!), but it is much nicer than on the IIIx, as its a light grey/white on dark grey/black, rather than the old blue on green. One thing to note is there is no contrast "wheel" (I was hunting for it for ages!), but a button on the grafiti area to launch a sofware-based contrast adjustment application. This works quite nice as when you move the slider, it changes in real-time. Chassis The brushed-aluminum chassis (The back is coloured plastic, though, but looks indistinguishable from metal) is very similar to that of the popular the Palm Vx. Unlike the Vx's hot-glue construction, it is fastened with (T5?) Torx screws - Making hacking it that much easier :) The m500 is also much thinner than the III series - The m500 is about half the size of the IIIx, with the flip cover. The unit weighs about 120g. I cant quite guage whether this is any lighter or heavier than the IIIx or Vx, but it feels "right", and thats what matters. Buttons I prefer the new black buttons to those on my old Palm IIIx (Apart from the power button, which I hate, as it can be set off by the hard case), as they feel much nicer, and are recessed so that its harder to accidentally activate them (And drain your battery in doing so.... This happened a lot on the IIIx until I installed a hack to fix it). The power button does have one nice feature, though. It is translucent and doubles as the battery charging light. Annoyingly though, it never changes to let you know when it is actually finished charging! Syncing The m5xx line features a new, faster, USB sync interface. However, this meant that I was unable to sync under Linux (Which I had previously found very easy using a serially-connected Palm IIIx). There are also no signed 64-bit Windows drivers (Although I had success with the ones from Access).Read full review
This palm is not bad only basic black screen. But as with all Palm products they won't sync with any pc with an operating system newer than XP. The software fails to load on vista, and the device won't be recognised by windows 7.
The Expansion card slot is a great addition to this palm, Very light and a great ergonomic feeling. The cradle is a little big but everything is just perfect and does the job.
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