Palm 500v review

Palm 500v review: Palm reckons its smartphones aren't just for besuited salarymen.

Palm has done a fair bit to make the 500v different from your average smartphone. The lightweight, white body is more palatable than the usual regulation blue, and instead of a stylus/touchscreen/button mish-mash, there's a chunky five-way controller and dedicated 'back' and 'home' keys. Ultimately, though, the 500v can't escape its smartphone heritage. It's too big for most pockets and the cramped QWERTY keyboard has keys that are a shade too small for gorilla-like digits.


As an emailer the 500v is sublime. It's the first Palm running Windows Mobile 6, with all the sync-friendliness that implies, with Vodafone's TPP interface. This can be confusing at times, with several different routes to performing simple tasks, for example you can access the browser via Vodafone Live or Internet Explorer. Alongside push email, you can set it up to retrieve Hotmail messages at specific intervals.


The Palm devours full Word and Excel attachments, but the screen is a touch on the small size for reading content on those websites that aren't optimised for mobile browsing. That said, the browser did fly through the popular likes of Facebook, the BBC's site and eBay.


The 500v at times feels stripped down. There's 3G, but no Wi-Fi, or touchscreen.Without a dedicated button on the body or a flash, the two-meg camera seems a bit like an afterthought, and produces overly bright pictures. It's an example of the 500v's identity crisis: it's unsure about what it wants to be, so it ends up doing lots of different things, but all of them in a workmanlike fashion.