A few years ago I had owned a Palm III. When I first bought it, I thought it was great. Here I had my Rolodex, and calendar at my fingertips where ever I went. That euphoria lasted all of two months as I smashed the glass display on two consecutive units. After that experience, I decided that the Palm wasn’t for me.
Well you could image what I said to my wife when she begged and demanded that I get her own for the holidays this year. Yes, I eventually broke down and bought her the Palm IIIXE.
After using the unit for a few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that there is not much improvement since it earlier predecessor the Palm III. The major differences between the two are the added memory. (Now 8 Megs compare to the paltry 2 Megs of the original palm III). The PALM OS has been upgraded to PALM OS 3.0. There is some added conduit support but most if not all the applications appear to be the same as the standards one that I had 3 years ago.
What has made these palms more attractive today is the price drop. While I paid almost 450.00 dollars a few years ago for the PALM III with two Megs of Ram, I now can get the PALM IIIXE for 199.00 with the additional Ram.
Features:
The features are still all there. Email, Calendar, Address Book and ToDo list are obviously the most popular for the most people. There are conduits to sync up with most of the major email and calendaring applications on the market today. Microsoft’s Outlook has become the most popular of the Enterprise solutions. Email can become difficult when creating and sending new messages. First you don't have access to your corporate email directory and second, it can take some time inputting your message with the included stylus.
With the explosion of the Internet, PALM INC. recently bought out ANYDAY.COM as a web enabled calendaring solution and called it MYPALM.COM. Now you can sync your palm from anywhere. You don’t have to be at your local workstations desktop to upload and download information. As long as the PALM’s Hotsync manager is installed on your PC, you can sync up with the MYPALM web site.
There really hasn’t been any advances in the character recognition software. The short hand for the character hasn’t changed. Still it was easy to pick up quickly and master to write yourself brief notes and make changes to your calendar. There are palm add ons that use other forms of short had that may do a better job. One is called JOT which is closer to the real thing.
The Unit
While improvements in the casing seem to be missing. I did find out that the glass display had been improved. Apparently I was not the only one to have issues with breaking this device.
Here is a recap of what happened to me a few years ago:
The problem I had was that I was always on the go. The easiest place I found to store my Palm III was in my shirt pocket. Then one day about 2 months after I have been using this device, I bent down to pick up a dropped pencil and out came my pilot. Needless to say, I cracked the glass screen in many pieces.
Not to worry, it must be under warrantee. (Wrong!!!) But 3Com said they would trade me a refurbished Palm III for 100.00 dollars. A few weeks later, I received the refurbished Palm III in the mail. This time, I was not going to let it fall out of my pocket again. I bought a leather case and placed it in my front pants pocket. It's safe now, I thought. (Wrong again)
About 3 weeks later, I inadvertently bumped into a desk and sure enough, I cracked the glass screen again. This was with the Palm III in a case too.
The moral of this story is if you’re going to be moving around a lot and do not have you pilot in a real secure place, you will eventually break the screen.
Today, it doesn’t seem worth sending the unit back for a refurbished one for 100.00. Therefore, I would recommend keeping the PALM in a portfolio or you purse (ladies) to keep it secure from harms way. While I believe the number of incidents have gone down, I still am leery about the units construction.
The Palm IIIXE still uses double AA batteries. These should last about 2 – 3 months depending on use. But you also have to remember that you will lose you data if you don’t replace them less than a minute. Otherwise you will have to have saved you data to the PALM Desktop or MYPALM and re-sync it.
Conclusion: While my wife loves it now, I still believe it is only a matter of time before it breaks. I would recommend the PALM M100 series which has rubber sides that seem to protect it better from a fall. Also the sleeker palm V series with the metal casing also warrants a look. I guess the jury’s still out.
Same size and weight as earlier Palm III models 8 MB RAM (4 times that of the popular Palm IIIe connected organizer) Upgradable features and operating...More at Amazon Marketplace
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