Palm Vx Review

The Palm Vx Handheld was a revolutionary new Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) manufactured by Palm Computing in October 1999. The handheld was ultra-slim and ultra-light measuring 4.7-inch × 3.2-inch × 0.4-inch, and mass only 4 oz. In October 1999, it cost a mere $399 USD. The case was anodised aluminium for the back and front, and it was available in a standard silver finish; however, they also sold special limited edition units that were champagne, and millennium blue, in colour. It was one of the earliest ones to use the benefits of lithium-ion battery technology, and consequently took only three hours to charge and lasted up to a month. The reason why it lasted so long was due to the exceptionally low power consumption of the ARM processor and the monochrome Liquid Crystal Display (LCD).

RAM, ROM, Processor

The Palm Vx chipset was powerful in its time consisting of the 20 MHz MC68EZ328 DragonBall Ez processor made by Motorola Inc, and an 8 MB Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) K4E641212D made by Samsung. The Palm OS 3.3 operating system was stored in a 16 MB flash ROM memory manufactured by Samsung. It was the 29LV160BE-70, which is a 3 V chip in a 48 pin TSOP package. This unit has a fixed memory capacity and is not upgradable, however, after hacking the OS and soldering new chips I had some success, however, it is a project worthy of a PhD degree.

DRAM Issue

During early production, Palm was sourcing memory chips form many different manufacturers, and managed to get a bad batch of 8 MB DRAM chips. This had the effect of causing crashes, and data loss on a very small number of units. It affected a very small number of Palm Vx™, Palm IIIc™ and Palm IIIxe™ customers. The solution was a software patch, which solved this problem completely. Therefore, if you have bought a second-hand unit on eBay and it appears unstable, you may have to apply this software patch to make it more reliable.

E17A Battery Replacement

This palmtop unit has a metal body construction with the two halves of the case sealed with glue. It uses a custom designed E17A lithium-ion battery, sealed within the case and is non-replaceable, however, there is a way to replace it without much effort. The battery charges when the unit is on its cradle. A mains adapter connects only to the cradle to provide the power, hence, there is no other way to charge it without the cradle.

Instruction Manual

Here are two user manuals I managed to find from my CD. One manual is for PC, whilst the other manual is for Apple computers.

Palm Vx Instruction Manual PC

Palm Vx Instruction Manual Mac

LCD Display

This unit has a monochrome LCD with a resolution of 160-pixel × 160-pixel, and a 4-bit colour depth, providing 16 grey levels. It has a backlight to aid viewing in low light levels to achieve a better contrast, however this had the effect of inverting the foreground, and background, consequently making everything appear as a negative.

There is also a digitiser layer on the LCD, which works well with a stylus pen. The digitiser often required calibration when a program crashed and a factory reset became the only option.

Palm Computing Inc

Palm made some wonderful products back in 1999. They were the pioneers of handheld computers, which became popular due to their forward thinking and vision. In December 1999, the company experienced huge success and had 78% of the world market share in personal handhelds. When the company was still young, their mission statement was to be the leading global provider of handheld computing products and to provide developers with the industry-standard platform for creating excellent mobile solutions.

Software

This unit comes installed with Palm OS® v3.5, which is updatable to v3.5.3 to fix many low-level system issues. There was also a Palm OS® v4.1 upgrade, which was not free.

In addition to the OS, the following applications are included with it.

• Date Book
• Address Book
• Desktop Email Connectivity
• To Do List
• Memo Pad
• Expense
• Calculator
• Security
• Games
• HotSync® Software
• Palm™ Desktop Software
• Chapura PocketMirror
• AvantGo Software

Review

The 20 MHz DragonBall processor is outdated compared to the latest 11 GHz HummingBird SoC processor, nevertheless; there are still many advantages to using one of these old gadgets. For one thing, the batteries last a long time compared to the modern power hungry gadgets.

I found many free applications available on the Internet, and the most useful apps are the ebook reader, and remote control, which uses the infrared transmitter of the device to control domestic television and audio devices. I also played with installing Linux, which is a very promising upgrade to this device and opens up many possibilities.

Internet Connectivity

• TCP/IP
• AOL Mail
• Eudora Pro
• Lotus Notes
• Outlook & Outlook Express
• MultiMail Pro
• Netscape Communicator
• Yahoo! Messenger
• Yahoo! Mail
• POP3 and IMAP systems

Accessories

The Palm Vx user enjoyed a vast number of accessories, which were available to the mobile businessperson. The most popular was the "Palm Portable Keyboard" for out of office use. It was a full-sized QWERTY keyboard, which folded to fit into your top pocket. During its introduction, it retailed at $99.00 USD. There was also the "Palm V Modem Accessory" which was a cradle with modem functionality. It provided data transfer rates of 33.6 Kbps over a standard phone line, and cost £169.00 USD. For more information regarding accessories, please refer to the accessories page.

Specification

Palm Vx and Palm V

They were both identical in many respects; however, the Palm V had only 2 MB storage capacity. It did not have the AvantGo Web Channel Manager software, and its operating system was Palm OS® v3.0. The circuit board layout and chipset were slightly different; however, it was possible to upgrade the memory by replacing the 2 MB memory chip with an 8 MB memory chip.

eBay / Amazon / For Sell

You could get one of these for around five pounds; however, if it has the original box, charger, instruction manual, and all the accessories then it could fetch considerably more money.

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