My Ongoing Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
2025-10-09
Over the last few years I have been using a Palm PDA regularly, switching between daily and a few times a week. For quite a while I was using my Palm M500 daily as my wallet. I had a wallet style case so I had my ID and cards in there and always had it with me. Eventually I switched back to a minimal wallet and just used the M500 a few times a week. Then I acquired a couple new models of Palm to experiment with. First, I got an m515 that was fine but didn't ultimately add any benefits for me. The color screen was actually worse than the m500 grayscale screen because it was much less visible without the backlight on. I passed it along to a friend.
After that I got a Sony Clie PEG-SL10. The draw of the SL10 for me was the higher resolution grayscale screen. While the higher res did look nice it had the same issue of being significantly less visible without the backlight. There were things I liked more about the SL10 but I couldn't get past the screen so after a test period it ended up in the drawer.
A while later I got the Tungsten C that I am writing this post on. It is a much different device than the m500. It certainly has some big upsides but the question was whether it could dethrone the m500?
The big differences are the Tungsten C has a thumb keyboard instead of a graffiti area, a higher res backlit color display, a much faster CPU and Palm OS 5. The thumb keyboard is a nice upgrade to me. The high res color display, while an obvious upgrade to most, is more of a mixed bag to me. I'm mostly indifferent about the CPU and OS version.
The reason I see the display as a mixed bag is because I generally prefer passive displays that are visible without backlighting in most conditions. Those types of displays
are not only easier on the eyes but also result in something else I value, much better battery life. The best of both worlds doesn't exist in the Palm world unfortunately.
The faster CPU and Palm OS 5 upgrades are nice to have in some instances. There is a wider array of software available but everything I really use my PDAs for runs just fine on OS 4. Having the thumb keyboard though is really nice for writing posts for my capsule on the go, writing notes, planning projects and many other text based things.
My conundrum between the m500 and the Tungsten C is determining which combination of features ultimately wins for daily usage. The m500's vastly better battery life and ambient light visible display are hard to give up. On the other hand the keyboard and higher resolution makes doing a lot of text entry and reading articles nicer.
I'm still not sure which is better for daily use. For a few weeks I was using the Tungsten C daily as my wallet. I got an adhesive card sleeve that I stuck to the Tungsten C's flip cover. One thing I have found that helps a little with the display and battery life situation is a brightness hack that enables much dimmer and more fine grained control of the backlight. It makes it a lot nicer to look at at night versus the overly bright default and seems to extend the battery life as well.
The time I spent with the Tungsten C as my primary PDA went pretty well. I do really prefer having the thumb keyboard. Graffiti is nice but for doing longer writing I think a keyboard is better. I like the Tungsten C quite a bit but I still felt that something was missing. Using it in low light was improved by the backlight hack that I found but typing on the keyboard is quite difficult without bright enough ambiant light. This brought me to my current daily driver PDA, the Sony CLIE PEG-TG50. Look for a post about the TG50 on the gemlog in the near future.
