By Steve Niles
On March 4, Palm announced two new handhelds, the Palm m130 and the Palm m515, simultaneously servicing both the consumer and the enterprise markets. These two devices join the wireless Palm i705 to complete Palm's Spring 2002 new product line-up.
The Palm m130, pictured in Figure A, retains the rugged, two-tone look of the Palm m125, but it adds a fabulous color screen, long missing from the lower-end products.
FIGURE A
The Palm m130 is the first lower-end product to feature a color screen. (click for larger image)
The Palm m515, pictured in Figure B, updates the Palm m505.
FIGURE B
The Palm m515 upgrades the earlier m505. (click for larger image)
The Palm m505 had its share of critics, many of which focused on the dim quality that took away from what should have been a bright, vibrant color screen. The Palm m515 promises to rectify that with its high-contrast color screen that supports 65,000 colors. In fact, the Palm m515 is completely replacing its dimmer predecessor.
We're getting ahead of ourselves, though. Let's take a look at each device more closely one at a time.
The Palm m130
Palm's m100 series are considered to be lower-end models, appealing, according to Palm, to women, young people, and fence-sitters--customers who are not quite sure if they need a Personal Digital Assistant in their lives. These devices are much less expensive than other Palm handheld models, thus representing less of a commitment on the part of the buyer.
Earlier entrants to the Palm m100 series brought to this consumer market many of the benefits found in the higher-end models, such as built-in dual expansion for adding new applications, additional memory, games, and hardware add-ons. The dual-expansion architecture includes the Palm Expansion Card Slot and the Palm Universal Connector.
The Palm Expansion Card Slot accepts a wide variety of MultiMediaCards and SD expansion cards-postage-stamp sized cards that let you carry, save, and share documents, video files, ebooks, etc. The Palm Universal Connector lets you attach hardware add-ons like a digital camera, GPS locator, graphing calculator, or keyboard.
The Palm m130 has the same contemporary styling as its cousins, and it has the same built-in flip cover. What fans of the m100 series haven't had the pleasure of experiencing, however, is the benefit of a color screen. Since I started using a color device, in my case the Palm IIIc, I can't imagine going back to grayscale. I like the rugged thickness of the m100 series devices, and the new two-tone color scheme of the m125 is appealing, but I've resisted using one because of the lack of color. The Palm m130 has changed all that.
