PalmOne m505 Color Handheld

From reading the reviews regarding the quality of the 505's color screen, I was apprehensive about my purchase. I'm an Engineer on a major US railway and I was worried about the readability of the screen in our locomotives. Never fear, it works great. I am very pleased with this model Palm and I highly recommend it to anyone in the business that has thoughts about buying it. Now, I leave home the heavy catalogs I once carried. My pockets are much lighter now, too. The Palm 505 has replaced my old address book and Engineer's Time Book. It's made my work-life much nicer. The expansion card is great add-on as well. It was bundled with my Palm when I purchased it from Amazon.com. I keep pictures of my wife and kids stored in the Palm. They don't get torn up like they did in my wallet! There are too many other wonderful features to be listed here. Try it for yourself.

I find the PalmOne m505 to be a convenient PDA. This handheld is great for storing phone numbers and appointments. In addition, you can use document reader software that allows you to look at powerpoint, excel and word files. Documents to go is usually included in the software disk that comes with your PDA. These have a color display and are backlit for low/no light condition usage. You can use standard sd cards to expand memory to hold files but not applications.

Of course the color isn't as brilliant as you would hope, but when you compare the m500 & the m505 side by side, the extra money makes it worth it. In bright light or with the backlight on, the colors stand out nicely. The m505 is well built and the 8mb of memory is enough to load anything you want. If you've been thinking about buying a PDA, I'd highly recommend this one

The m505 is probably the convergence point for Palm OS systems -- less powerful than the biggest Visors, but sporting an excellent colour display, certainly enough oomph to get the job done, and the new features of Palm OS 4. While still dreadfully anaemic when held against the comparatively gargantuan CPUs and screens of the Pocket PCs, you still get one of the fastest Palms available, a pocket handheld that really can fit in a pocket (try that with an iPaq), the elegance of the Palm OS (versus how difficult Windows CE can be to figure out and operate), excellent colour with a well-designed backlight, and USB connectivity for under $500. Works great with Windows and Macintosh alike. The only major sour notes here are battery life and the Secure Digital card slot. Battery life, while acceptable for day to day use, demands that it charge just about every couple of days or you'll be looking at a low battery indicator faster than you think. This is somewhat inconvenient at best for road trips, and of course the worst culprit for battery drain is that unfortunately beautiful backlight. Second, the Secure Digital card is a good idea crippled by poor execution. Many applications don't know how to access their databases on the card, and some applications when transferred to the card will run dramatically slower. As a memory expansion option, it's mediocre at best: if memory is a big deal to you, look for a Palm that can utilise Compact Flash memory cards (this one carries 8 megabytes -- good but many reference works loaded on your m505 will eat this up). Fortunately, this setup does work well for ROM cards, and so the expansion slot isn't really wasted. These complaints aside, this is an excellent value and well-worth your consideration. If you're looking for the sweet spot in handhelds between price and features, look no further.

Hi, I just wanted to say that this is the best hand held that I have ever owned. Granted the screen is not that of a laptop, but it's not supposed to be. And in response to the problem with the cradle, it is only a problem with the cradle, not the Palm itself. My experience with this Palm has been very positive.

Review of the bulletin boards and the amazon reviews reveals that product has a known defect with the cradle. Like some of the other reviewers, my cradled worked fine for a few days, then just quit. Customer support is virtually impossible to obtain and Palm's web-site makes no mention of this known defect. After 45 minutes on hold, on a long-distance call, I finally talked to a customer support rep who admitted there was a problem and offered to send a "refurbished" cradle. Unacceptable,--I paid for a new one and they want to give me a used one. There are many web-sites which discuss this flaw, ...

I have used Palm for several years having beenn disappointed by the demise of the Apple Newton. My palm V and then my palm 111C worked for me flawlessly. I have now "upgraded" to the Palm m505 and have just sent in my third return. Not one of my new palm m505 has synchronized properly. One of them didn't even go on right out of the box. My brother also bought a m505 also and he has just sent for a replacement, having experienced similar problems. The color is also disappointing and pails in comparison to the color of the 111c. If my next exchange is also deffective I will ask for a refund, and think about an alternative product.

I got this recently as a gift. At first I thought it was a table coaster but turns out it's actually a device that is comparable with the iPhone. Where all the other phone gadgets out there are trying to one up each other with the latest and greatest features and "apps". Palm is truly being innovative by going in the reverse direction. Using an innovative dull color pallet, and 8mb of memory, palm knows its users want less not more. Where it does amazing is on a single battery charge... it will last for weeks. I now have cool applications like a clock and memo pad. If I ever get bored at that I can always use it as a table coaster.