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Marshall's Review |
The Sharp Wizard OZ-770 has 3 megabytes of memory, most of which
is available to the user for data, utilities, ebooks or games.
When the OZ-770 was first produced, 3MB was a reasonably large amount
of memory. Now it is barely adequate. The Palm M500 comes with
8MB of memory built in, and an expansion card slot for memory cards.
I'm not sure what the limit is, but I have a 64mb mm card in my M500,
and it works fine. So, obviously, the Palm is far superior to
the Wizard as far as memory is concerned.
The expansion card is not directly accessible to programs that are on the M500. But applications, documents and files may be stored on the card, and then brought into the Palm's onboard memory as desired. When you are finished with the file, you may then return it to the memory card, thus freeing up the onboard memory. There are third-party applications that have been written to create shortcuts to the files on the memory card, thus making the back and forth transfer of these files automatic and easy. "TealAlias" is an example of such a program.
Obviously, the huge memory available on the Palm M500 lends itself to storing ebooks (electronic books). I have put Moby Dick (a large book) on my expansion card, and it takes up less than a megabyte of memory. The entire Bible takes up about 2MB. Not only does the huge memory make the M500 a good ebook reader, but there are several free readers available. I like one called "cspotrun." It offers page-by-page advance, or automatic scrolling, as well as several font sizes.
Click here to find out more about ebook readers and other Palm applications.