Yesterday, Palm unveiled their new m500 series handheld computers to the Australian media for the first time at one Sydney's fashionable haunts, The Establishment. Often used for product launches and promotions, the locale of the event seemed particularly fitting in this instance. Despite the growing popularity of high-memory Windows CE/Pocket PC-based devices, Palm remain commited to the shrewd design principles and software engineering strategies they invented as founders of handheld computing, opting for true innovation and interoperability over grunt.
The m500 series brings two new models to the Palm range, the m500 and the m505, and they demonstrate Palm's confidence from the outset. Instead of devising a radical new shell for the m500 series, Palm has recycled the elegant, popular design of the Palm V and given its waist a gentle curve to make it more comfortable to the grip. The two units are functionally identical apart form their screens; the m505 has a 16-bit colour display whilst the cheaper m500 has a monochrome display.
Internally, the m500 series doesn't even attempt to match the processing power of the likes of the Pocket PC-based devices. Though a slight improvement on the 20MHz processors found in the Palm V, the 33MHz offered by the m500s' Motorola chip is still a long way behind the triple figures commonly seen in the spec sheets of devices like the iPAQ. At just 8M of RAM, the same can be said of the series' modest memory capacity. But to call this stinginess would be to misunderstand the Palm's view of handheld computing.
Rather than trying to parallel the desktop computing logos, where hardware and software play a monotonous game of leap-frog, each trying to match requirements of the other, Palm has focused on keeping m500's OS as efficient as possible and given it unique expansion capabilities (sadly limted in the m100 series).
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