Palm setup logo

My current Palm setup - Palm Zire 72

  • RAM - 32Mb as standard + my 512MB SD in the expansion slot;
  • OS - Palm 5.2
  • Screen - 320*320 hi-res colour transflective LCD
  • Sync - mini-USB cable or Bluetooth
  • CPU - 312 MHz Intel® PXA270 processor

Current software Space Trader 1.2.2, Plucker 1.8, STRIP 1.0,Documents To Go 6, AvantGo 5.7, BackupBuddy VFS 2.15, Filez 6.8.3, Metro 5.3.8,

and of course of all those great built in apps. It’s a great model, great display, good camera for pictures and movies - it’s fast too - really fast. The sync via mini-USB was much faster than before, and even the Bluetooth Sync is pretty fast. It’s truly multimedia capable too, WMV and MP3 playback, and I can add a Wi-Fi adapter too if I like. As before, I’m still running a lot of the same apps, but as it’s a much faster, hi-res device, they’re even better - AvantGo and Plucker look great - much nicer to read, and Metro is amazingly fast.

Older Palm setups

From November 2002 to December 2004 my Palm setup was the Palm 515 based on the following setup. It’s not my main PDA now as it has charging and reset issues now and then which is a problem! By today’s standards, it’s pretty archaic, but it did it’s job!

  • RAM - 16Mb as standard + SD expansion slot;
  • OS - Palm 4.1
  • Screen - 65000 colours
  • Sync - USB cradle with built in charger

At any time I usually had about 4Mb of documents on my Palm - everything from tech RFC documents, to the works of Thomas Paine to classic novels from Project Gutenberg. I also have hundreds of contacts, To Do’s, notes and a whole load of stuff. I usually sync it to my Mac running Palm Desktop 4. From November 1999 to October 2002 my Palm setup was the Palm 3e Special Edition - what made it special was that it had 8Mb of RAM, a clear case, and an ’enhanced’ mono screen. I finally retired it after 3 years as the AA battery cover on the back would fall off which was a small problem. Having said that, I still have it somewhere - it really was a cool piece of kit. By today’s standards, it’s very archaic, but it really was a great first PDA.

  • RAM - 8MB, and this was an enhanced model from 2MB!
  • Dragonball EZ 16 MHz processor
  • OS - Palm 3.1.1
  • Screen - grayscale
  • Sync - serial, or USB via kit