A vital upgrade? Or not? You decide... (Palm M505)

Member Name: jamescridland

Product:	Palm M505
Date:	18/06/01 (604 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Increased speed, Increased memory capacity, Colour, if you want it

Disadvantages: Unusual screen, Different cradle to the Palm V, Tech support hours

This is my fourth Palm computer. The first was a "Pilot 1000", the original Palm, with one meg of data space, no infra-red, and only a few applications. Haven't things changed since?


WHAT THIS LITTLE THING DOES
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It's tiny, first of all. It's very slim indeed; far slimmer than a IPAQ or equivalent, which is why I like it. It uses Graffiti, a handwriting recognition system which works pretty well and is pretty fast.

But the main point about any Palm is the connectivity. The m505, in common with its monochrome m500 cousin, connects to your PC via a USB cradle, to share data and even share your internet connection. (Serial versions of the USB cradle are a further £40). Users of a Palm V beware: it's not the same connection, so you need a brand new cradle, I'm afraid. I found the new cradle rather better built, but rather worrying - the Palm kind of 'snaps' in, and needs to be pulled off in a very different way than the original Palm V.

In addition, Palm computers talk via infra-red to any infrared-capable phone (with the notable exception of some of the cheaper Nokias). "Talk" means everything from connecting to the internet through your mobile, to SMS messaging with selected phones, and even swapping phone numbers between your phone's and your Palm's address books. All recent Palms do this - including the m100, incidentally - so this isn't unusual to the m505.

What is unusal about the m505 is that this is the first Palm 5-series (V, Vx, m500) which is in colour. Full colour, too, mind - not the low colour depth of the Palm IIIc: this is 65k colour depth. Impressive, though the resolution, unchanged from the standard Palm resolution of (I think) 180x180, isn't high and doesn't make photographs anything like photo-realistic.

The screen has been rather battered by the press. It's not the same as an IPAQ or laptop
screen - a screen that relies on backlighting to work, and totally unusable in bright light like sunshine. The Palm m505 screen is rather different, and quite unlike any colour screen you'll have seen before. The backlight is for low-light conditions, not the office, and the screen itself is rather more dull than the previous Palm V screen. It is on a par to the m100 screen, though, and I certainly don't find it too bad at all. It certainly comes into its own when using the unit outside, or in bright light conditions; and the backlight is restrained enough to use in a dark room without acting as a new form of ambient lighting. Try before you buy, if you possibly can: it's an acquired taste, and might not be to yours.

The m500 series also accept standard SDRAM memory cards, so if you really want to add up to 64Meg to your machine, then you can do this. Frankly, there's little point, but I presume that if you're a company putting your entire sales database onto a Palm, you might find this quite useful. It's one of the reasons I upgraded.

Incidentally, if you've got a Palm m505 but you keep your V, you'll find both can co-exist on the same machine without having to change the HotSync properties every time. Which is marvellous.


INSTALLATION
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Installation should be just a case of plugging the USB port into the PC, the mains adaptor into the USB connection, and then loading and running the software. When it worked for me, it was very simple: far simpler than other Palm's I've owned.

For me, though, installation was rather less than simple the first time around: the USB cradle seemed to knock my computer's entire USB ports out, and they're still refusing to run. I'm using an additional USB addon card, which I just happened to have. Now, I'm not sure what the fault was, nor who's fault it was, but I'm left with a PC without a proper functioning
on-board USB. In the event, this doesn't matter too much (I'm not a heavy USB user), but I record it here just in case anyone else has the same problem.

Palm tech support are hepful in the US (big tip: type in their phone number when it asks you for a phone number!) but the UK version of Palm tech support, based in fact in Dublin I think, were moderately unhelpful and typically only open between 9am and 5.30pm - just when I'm at work and not at home fiddling with my Palm V. Don't think much of their UK support, frankly; for a consumer product, they ought to be open when their consumers are using it.


SOFTWARE
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The m505 uses Palm OS4, a slightly updated version of the Palm OS3 that most of the Palm family use. Changes I've noticed are clickable menus (click in the title bar to see the menu appear); auto-fill (where if you start entering something that the Palm unit recognises, it appears to fill it in for you), a command-line bar that only works with the built-in software, and a few small changes to a few preferences. I've not noticed much else.

Supplied software is similar to a cross between the old Palm V and the new m100; you get a NotePad function replacing the MemoPad (scribbling notes instead of Graffiti), though the MemoPad survives intact too. You also get a diary, phone book, and to-do list - coming with full synch software to Microsoft Outlook. You also get the e-mail application first seen in the Palm Pilot Professional, which talks to Outlook but doesn't talk to POP mailboxes itself. And you get the wholly pointless 'Clock' program; pointless because there's no little window in the case to make this useful.

Also available for installation installed is an old version of AvantGo (v3.3) which takes web-pages and puts them onto your machine for later reading (download v4 from their website instead); some document program which enables you to edit Word document
s on the go; a program to allow you to put pictures and short movies onto the Palm (which is AWFUL); and in a further CD, you get an SMS application, MultiMail (a POP3/SMTP e-mail client); and Web Clipping.

Web Clipping deserves a mention. First seen on the Palm VII in the USA only, this seems to offer a set of applications which connect to small specially written websites - including Multimap, ITN, and the RAC. Pretty neat, and certainly much faster than surfing websites with AvantGo: this is the first time I've seen this technology and I'm impressed.

Something that ought to be pointed out is the huge amount of shareware, freeware and commercial software for these things on the web - much more than for CE machines. Whatever you want the Palm to do, it'll do it.


SPEED
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This is hugely faster than my Palm V. The Vx used a faster processor, but I believe it's even faster than that. The data sheet helpfully doesn't say how fast the new processor is, but I've no doubt that the new OS has had a good effect on its speed too. The phonebook snaps into place, AvantGo pages load almost instantly, and the software to let you see videos is pretty impressive to see. While the Palm V's speed never slowed me down, the subjective speed increase is impressive.


IS THE COLOUR WORTH IT?
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Put simply, no.

Now, don't get me wrong: I love colour, and the extra addition of colour in my home-made AvantGo channels really makes them shine. Colour games (I resurrected my copy of SimCity) really look smart. Yes, it's nice to have. But you don't NEED colour for anything on the Palm, much like you don't need colour in your paper notebook. It doesn't make it do anything you can't do in black and white (excepting maps, possibly).


TO UPGRADE OR NOT TO UPGRADE?
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This is a definite upgrade
from an m100 or IIIc. The sexier look and feel of the m505, instead of the plasticy feel of the cheaper models, makes it an aesthetically pleasing upgrade; the inbuilt rechargeable battery, better and larger screen, and much increased memory makes it a must.

Whether you want to upgrade from the Palm V or Vx is up to you. The thing looks the same, though the cradle has changed and even the styluses are different sizes. The screen isn't as good as the Palm V (albeit in colour); and the initial memory space is the same as the Vx.

I upgraded because my Palm V's screen was worn out, and I wanted the extra memory. You might not need the extra space, nor have worn your machine out to quite the same extent. Frankly, you probably won't want to upgrade if you've a Palm Vx; heavy users might want to upgrade from a Palm V.

Oh. And buy a screen protector. Take it from me, alright?


Hope all that helped. Any questions? Drop a comment here.

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