Friday, April 1, 2011

Palm V Hand held PDA (Electronics)


This review is from: Palm V Hand held PDA (Electronics)


I own a Palm V for more than 6 months and watched my initial expectations gradually fade away. Not that this shiny gadget is a failure, but people (and maybe the marketers [!]) pushed it up to a "carry-your-life-in-your-pocket" position.

Despite the -reasonable- limitations of its size, Palm V does more than a good job. Its own Graffiti pen-based input interface is acceptable and fast, the operating sytem easy to use and failure-proof. You can find loads of software, most for free, at your convenience on the web, while the ones that already come with the unit would let you carry out any daily organizing and recording task. With the HotSynch craddle, charging and synchronizing , -even with Microsoft Outlook,- are almost effortless. When charged the unit almost keep working forever (I could not test it to exhaustion yet!). The infrared support adds to all that.

Now about my expectations fading away...

Play with a color, Windows CE based palmtop, and the idea to carry a heavier and short-breathed box in your pocket would probably seem to be an idea. I carried my Palm V with me during long business trips, playing around on spreadsheets and trying to read books I had downloaded. After at most 20 minutes of staring at that dull green and dark olive screen, I shut it off and never touched it for at least another day. Games? Remember your Nintendo days where they had those Gameboys? Don't expect any better. And sound (not beeps) is yet to come in future episodes!

If Palm is intended for packing your organizer data in and taking it out on the road, than it does it. And with the software you would find, it even would act like a remote control or a full-featured scientific calculator. I actually did not ever bother with sending e-mail using it, and would not since I would have to connect it to a wall outlet around which I could have found a connected desktop or a laptop 99% of the times! And, services for Palm VII are not yet available in Istanbul. But having my Palm V charged with a map and a guide at TeleComm '99 in Geneva was quite a good surprise: Having a Palm means to be the part of an evergrowing community, for which services and facilities also grow. And so it goes on...

Here is the deal...

If you look for a marvel a quarter the size of your laptop to replace it, than wait for another season or you'd better go for a slightly more expensive Windows CE color device like one from the Cassiopea C-100 series. However, in that latter case you'd end up charging your palmtop at every stop you would find and wait for the files to pop-up forever!

If you look for a sturdy and stylish organizer with easy loading and interface, a notepad at your fingertips witout the hassle of pen and paper and with thousands of pages of capacity, that Palm V is what you are looking for (if you are willing to pay all that money for only that).

Well it can do more than that, but that would be like a 3-year-old boy acting like his dad, even with all that software around...
Palm V Hand held PDA (Electronics) at amazon.com

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