Palm Pilot is BACK!
I never realized how dependent I was on my “little silver book”. Thank goodness I was talking about this with a buddy of mine and he lodged my memory to remember a little problem I read about the M5xx series when I was initially researching the purchase. Turns out there’s a problem with the design of the M505 (and others in the 500 series) and the use of the USB cradle to sync. If you get an excess of static electricity built up and then you touch your palm while it’s in the cradle, you can knock out the ability to sync via USB. Palm put out a bunch of new cradles that were supposed to fix this problem, but apparently not since I have one of those new cradles.
So after a week of trying to uninstall palm applications, reinstall onto different machines, soft resets…I finally remembered this static problem. I did some googling and came up with a bunch of postings on palm discussion boards and there are tons of people with the same problem. There’s 2 fixes. 1) hard reset your palm & drain the batteries completely. Apparently after the drain & recharging, you reset the settings in your palm and you can sync again. 2) take the back off your palm & disconnect & reconnect your battery. Not so easy…not your normal screwdriver will fit these screws. There’s also some other useless options..1)Ship your palm back to Palm Inc at your expense and they’ll replace it. 2) They’ll ship you a replacement palm & you return yours back to them once you get the replacement - $40 US. These aren’t solutions to a bad design problem.
Finally I found a useful solution (one that they’re keeping semi-secret). Palm has a memory card that will back up your apps to the card & then can reset your palm for you & automatically drain your battery. You leave it for 8 hours, recharge for 2 hours. You sync again and you’re back up & running. Use the memory card to restore your data. Don’t miss a beat. The problem is they’re keeping this memory card a secret..they never offer it…you have to know about it. I asked Tech Support and they said they were out of the cards…it was a 2 day trial. Bull! If you call their executive escallation number & ask for it, they’ll give it to you. I called that number after reading about this on the boards and had the memory card in my hands less than 24 hours later. Much better. Tried it out immediately and it worked perfectly.
Read the messages here.