Testing: Eye candy for the masses
Written: May 08 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: : price, solid color screen, SD/MMC Memory Expansion Slot, 8 MB of RAM, nice design
Cons: small screen, problems whith cradle, thickness
The Bottom Line: Usefuller, better, nicer, cheaper. That's the path Palm should go on. Some improvements nevertheless required.
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| tobad81's Full Review: Palm m130 Personal Organizer |
The m130 Hardware Specs
Inside the case, the m130 consists of:
· 33mhz Dragonball VZ processor by Motorola
· Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard expansion slot for expansion ram and other addons
· Universal cradle/sync connector
· 16-bit transflective backlit color LCD capable of 65,536 colors colors (160 pix x 160 pix)
· 8MB Static RAM, 4MB ROM
· Rechargeable Lithium Ion battery
· IrDA (infa red) Transmitter/Receiver for "beaming"
· Universal Sync Connector is capable of USB/RS232
· Flash Rom is not upgradeable, but the OS is flushed out and v .1 stable
· Swappable face plate
· It weights 5.4 oz
· Size: height 4.8in x wide 3.1in x deep 0.9in
With price about 279 $ and it's 16-bit color display Palm m130 is very interesting PDA. 16-bit STN screen is kinda small ( 2 inches ), but despite that it look very nice. It has 160x160-pixel display, which isn't gona let you watch The Matrix, and with two brightness settings for indoor use. You can use it outdors, because it reflects ambient ligts, but not so good as some other PDA's. The display provide good contrast then some older models and that makes him easy and pleasant to use.
It is identical in many ways to it's older brother m125, which has monocrome display. Inside is 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor, Palm OS 4.1, and 8MB of RAM for extra applications.
The rechargable Li-ion battery can be used for few days before recharging, exactly I used it all together 3 hours before I need drop it into the included USB HotSync cradle to power it up.)
Btw. Between the connector and the base of the USB HotSync cradle is about a 1/4inch gap.
You can use extra memory cards (Multimedia Memory, Secure Digital Cards or upcoming Bluetooth SD card), keyboards, digital cameras and stuff, which is good because smc cards are dropping fast. 128meg cards can be found for around $50 this moment.
Software
It contains standard Palm applications: Date Book, Address Book, and Note Pad, installed on the m130. It comes also with Palm Desktop software for PC and Mac. Documents To Go 4.0, which lets you work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other documents on your Palm. To see some color you can use MGI's PhotoSuite Mobile Edition, which can display JPEGs and small, silent video clips. There's also software to help you connect your Palm to the Internet via your cell phone and Palm's MultiMail SE e-mail application.
Palm m130 is a very good model which despite the cradle problem, it has my full support. Affordable price for a full color display PDA made it good purchase. Very competitive product which will give some problems to mostly to the Sony.
In generally, I'm sattisfied with purchase, nevertheless I wolud make some improvements, but I hope that that they consider will consider that in m135.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 299
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Epinions.com ID:
tobad81
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 0 members
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