dchoung

A friend had alerted me to a Newegg sale where they were offering the m500 for roughly $20. I jumped on it. I'm now the proud owner of a previously owned Palm m500. For those of you who could care less, the significance of this device is four-fold.

1. As far as Palm devices went, this was the swan song for the high-end grayscale screens. Sure, the m125 would follow, but that was for the soccer moms and poor college kids who never thought the m500 was worth its $400+ price point (probably rightfully so).
2. This was the first Palm device to support SD memory expansion. In fact it was probably one of the first mobile devices to support SD at all.
3. It's a Palm PDA so of course it will have Graffiti. Too bad Palm scrapped it once they went all-in with the Treos, it's always been a great text entry method.
4. It would make an excellent eReader! Thanks to free ebook sites such as memoware.com, my literature perusing needs would be met for a long while, and then I could always go to ereader.com to buy more current digital pulp.

Admittedly, the device itself wasn't the great leap forward many had hoped it would be. Still missing were such accoutrements that existed on more powerful Pocket PC devices, such as mp3 and video players.

Interestingly, the screen of the m500 itself is almost identical to the Palm Vx. Main difference being that the backlight is more of a yellowish tinge then the Vx's green. Also, I believe the Vx sported a glass screen whereas most Palm devices afterward had plasticky ones.

What the m500 did have going though, and what all Palm devices had going that nobody else was able to touch, was known as the Zen of Palm, the simplicity of the interface.

It's been said that the Palm OS design team would count how many taps it took to get a certain goal done, then would try to parry down that number as best they could. It was that kind of diligence and razor-sharp focus that made this OS stand out above the rest. What a lot of people forget is that Jeff Hawkins' main competition was the paper and pen organizers, the bulky pouches filled with unnecessary papers and material that had become more deadweight than anything else. So in order to be a worthwhile product, the Palm PDA had to be fast, faster than the turn of a page in a paper organizer. I'd say they pulled it off pretty well.

Don't believe me when I say that after nearly 10 years this is still an awesome device? Have a look yourself!