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Marshall's Review |
My favorite PDA of all time is the Sharp Wizard OZ-770, and of course
this website is dedicated to that model. However, the OZ-770 has been
out of production for several years. Mine is getting worn out, and
new Wizards have become more costly than I like. ("New in the box"
OZ-770s are now selling on EBay for up to $300.) So I have been searching
for a happy replacement. After trying many other PDAs, I believe that
the Palm m500 with a Seiko ThumBoard is what I am looking for.
In addition to all the normal PDA functions, here are the criteria
that have guided me in my search:
The Palm M500 alone would not meet all these criteria; however, combined with the Seiko ThumBoard, it does.
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COST: I paid $50 for a "new in the box" Palm M500 on Ebay a few weeks ago, and there is a good supply for sale there at that price. The M500 comes with 8 megabytes of memory, plus it has an expansion card slot that will receive either mm or sd memory. (You can see the slot in the photo at the top of this page.) I already have a 64mb mm card, and it works fine with my M500. The box and its contents have a lot of Chinese script, and this must have been meant for the Chinese market. However, the Palm OS 4.0 is in English, and the manual in the box has English, too, so all is well for me there! |
This is what you find in the box:
From left to right you will see the sync cradle, a printed manual in Chinese and English, the ac/dc power supply, the M500 with flip cover, some grafitti instruction stickers, and the software cd. The cover fits into a "silo" on the left side of the M500, and provide a stiff protective cover over the screen. However, you cannot use the flip cover and the Seiko ThumBoard simultaneously.