Palm m505

If you are like me, you may have seen ads for PDA’ s (Personal Digital Assistants) and thought to yourself, “Now that’s too much. I definitely don’t need one of those. What could I be missing anyway?”

Well, a great deal actually. I never thought I would be the next member on the handheld bandwagon, but here I am front and center. My review of the Palm m505 is simple. If you like to be organized and are tired of carrying a bag with your huge Day Runner and Post-Its everywhere, get one immediately!

When I got the Palm out of the box I plugged the cradle (where you transfer info to your computer and charge the batteries) into my computer, then stuck the software CD in my computer. The CD easily walked me through some simple steps and in less then 10 minutes I was reading the news, looking at my Yahoo pages, and checking the weather and movie listings in my area. Then I started pushing more buttons and found the address book, calendar, to-do memos, and notepad (all that stuff that I schlep around in my coffee-stained big black book). Having it on my computer and this handheld thing makes all the sense in the world. My Day Runner is definitely not synced to my computer, that’s for sure!

The Palm software is extremely simple to master. Everything is where it should be. When you add the “Documents To Go” software, you can drag and drop Word and Excel documents to your Palm to work on later or have handy in case you need them. My budgets and project contact lists were perfectly formatted on the Palm m505.

Now get this… my coworker asked me to beam one of my documents to his Palm. Beaming, to the uninformed (me before I got one of these), is when you stand a few feet from someone and you wirelessly send them the document, application, picture, note, business card etc. to their Palm. All though it may not seem like it the time saving possibilities of carrying and transferring documents this way is astounding. Beaming may take a bit to get use to, merely for the fact that the possibility is new to my realm of thinking. I was that way when the cell phone first came out. It took me a while to realize that when I was thinking of someone I could actually call them on the spot from anywhere.

The Palm m505 has many other features, too many for this review. You can add digital cameras, MP-3 players, GPS features, wireless modems and cell phone capabilities. Those add-ons I will save for another review. If you don’t get the m505 get the Palm 125 (see Palm m125 review). For now I have nothing but great things to say about my new Palm. If I think of something that I don’t like about it, catch me in traffic somewhere and I will beam my criticism to you in your car.