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Palm Accessories 27th November 2003 Because I use the Palm so much, and always travel with it, I need accessories. Palm keyboard The most important accessory is the Palm keyboard. I use this a lot. I take it with me when I travel, and use the Palm and the keyboard in lieu of a laptop, taking the notes that eventually turn into the web pages on this site. The Palm/keyboard combination is a lot smaller than a laptop, uses much less power, and is very very convenient. When I had the Palm III and IIIc, I used this older keyboard. It was solid and robust and worked very well. Then I got the new Palm m515 and that didn't work with the old keyboard. Palm chnaged connectors, promising that the new connector at the end if the Palm was a new generation of device connectivity and would make Palm lives easier. It made mine slightly difficult by requiring me to buy a new keyboard. got the ultra-thin, fold-out keyboard. Check the photo - it's slim, it's tiny, it's sexy, it's worthless. Now that I have had the opportunity to use the keyboard for several months, I can comment on it. It sucks. It sucks badly. I have four main complaints with it, mostly based on the functionality lost by making the keyboard so small, and the new Palm connections. Opening the keyboard is difficult. The old keyboard could be opened very simply. The new one requires you to slide the back piece out, then push in a piece on the side, fold the keyboard out and click it down into place. When I got my old keyboard, I had it open and usable in seconds without reading a manual. I could not open the new one without reading the manual. Folding it back up again is just as tricky. Once you do manage to open the keyboard up, you have to attach the Palm to it. This involves holding the flap at the back down, sliding the Palm on until it connects with the weird little clips and hopefully makes a connection, and then you let the flap up so the Palm sits up on it. Yeah, sure, it sounds simple but it isn't simple to do it. On average, it takes me about 8 attempts before I get a connection, and can use the keyboard. It takes me so long to make the connection and get the Palm sitting up with the keyboard connected, that lately I just give up and use the stylus, because I can't be bothered waiting 10 minutes to be able to enter data. I read the blurb on the Palm web site about the new connectors, and they said it would make life easy and standardise things in the Palm world. Well, Palm, you failed. You made the situation worse. I had zero problems with the old keyboard and old Palm connection method, and have far too many problems with the new keyboard and the new connectors. That's a backward step. Once you manage to unfold the keyboard, and then struggle the required number of times to get the Palm attached, and you're ready to type, you still have one big problem. The keyboard folds out so that it sits on a base made from the keyboard cover. The keyboard does not lie flat, it sits on top of the base. The last two inches of keys on each side hang over the base. So if you hit keys at either end of the keyboard, the whole thing rocks up and down on the base, and that disconnects the Palm from the keyboard, and then you struggle for a few more minutes to reconnect it, and in the end you tear the damned Palm off the keyboard and use the stylus because it's just easier. And finally, if you do manage to start typing, and you want to enter numbers, you have to use the Function key. The old keyboard was slightly larger and the top row had the numbers. The new keyboard makes the top row do letters, punctuation AND numbers. Talk about contorting the fingers to hit the Fn key and type numbers. The new keyboard is too small, and it just doesn't work for me. It sucks. The whole situation with the keyboard is so bad, that I would rather enter data using the stylus than have to deal with the keyboard. The keyboard sucks. I wish I had never bought it. I'm going to sell it on eBay and hope some sucker wants it and hasn't played with the keyboard to find out how horrible it is. USB/serial cable for data and charging I would have preferred that the Palm IIIC used standard AAA batteries like the Palm III, because with AAAs it's a lot easier to keep the Palm alive when trekking through Tibet. However, the Palm m515 has internal rechargeables. You recharge them through the USB port. I don't like using the cradle when I travel, so I bought a Belkin USB cable. It has the added advantage of having a serial adapter for when USB under Linux is a total pain to connect. [Palm Home] [Linux Home]