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.

A copy of this letter was sent to Palm Inc.I have owned 2 Palm handheld units in the past 3 years. The first was a IIIxe and it performed great until I dropped it 2 years later. The second unit, a M505 that I purchased May of 2001, is as of December 2001 dead. I find this to be completely unacceptable. I paid... for a second PDA instead of buying a Handspring, which was cheaper, because I trusted the Palm name and because of the positive experience I had with my first unit.My current palm died on me after 6 months and it took an entire month to get someone to successfully assist me with the problem. The problem was that the unit just stopped hot syncing one day. There was no damage to the unit it just wouldn't sync. I tried everything and it still wouldn't work. I was not informed until today that the entire line of M505's were defective - usually there is a recall on defective products to maintain company dignity. Of course as it appears Palm has no dignity because as I have been told this has happened to numerous consumers and all of them were given refurbished rather than new replacements. As a consumer I am truly disappointed in the customer service I have received from Palm Inc. The chat support is ineffective, the email support is better but response time is ridiculously long and still does not resolve anything.I am not happy to complain about a product that I have been unable to live without for the last 3 years, but now being forced to replace my Palm with a refurbished one, it has hit me that a PDA is only as good as the service guarantee behind it. Going forward I will not recommend Palm products to family and friends as I have been doing up until now. I do not wish this type of disservice on anyone and I definitely don't want to personally deal with it again.

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 had my Palm m505 for a little over a month when the hot sync problem started. That was January 7, 2002. This is now February 1, 2002 and I am still waiting for my replacement. I was sent an m500 as a replacement for my m505, but obviously I sent it back. The shipment date has moved continuously over the past two weeks. The most recent shipment date was for today. As of this morning, it has been moved to next Tuesday. Over the past two weeks, I have had no less than three Palm support people tell me that they had talked to the shipment staff and that my unit was going out that day and I would have it the next day. So far, that has not happened. Before anyone purchases an m505, they need to check the discussion boards at Palm regarding this problem. People have started to get so frustrated with Palm that they have begun contacting the Federal Trade Commission to see if any regulations have been broken. Up to now, I have been a staunch supporter of Palm and am currently a stockholder. But I can't say that I will be buying another Palm device or recommending them to my friends and associates until they get their problems straightened out.

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.