Having used Palm for several years in varying shape and form, when looking for a new mobile phone to replace a Nokia, given good experiences of Palm in the past, it seemed a good idea to give their new (as was then) smart phone a try.
The first three or so months of owning the phone proved the 500 has plenty of features and is rather user friendly, it felt and looked great and build quality hadn't proven to be much of a problem, however after this time, things started to go downhill. The main glitch would be the socket used to plug in a USB cable / charger. The quality of this is has proven to be questionable, considering that it is very easy to disconnect the socket from the main circuit board inside the phone, making charging either challenging or impossible.
Other build quality issues include how well the keys are fixed. The qwerty keyboard stays in place without issue and feels very robust, but I have had problems where the hot keys used to control the main features of the phone can fall off and break / are lost, or on my currently replacement (this is my 6th), take a lot of effort to allow it to work.
With the six replacement phones, the first one was admittedly my own fault (smashed the screen), the rest due to the charger socket breaking it's connection from the circuit board, and the current one came with a non functional hot key and keeps turning itself off for no reason at all.
Battery life of the phone is generally quite reasonable, at idle with occasional use it'll last around 4 or 5 days, or it could last anything down to a day, depending on how much I use the internet.
The features the phone contains are really good and user friendly, the qwerty keyboard is relatively easy to use, however it may benefit from slightly larger keys as I sometimes find it challenging to use with fairly average sized hands.
Overall it's a good phone for what it is, but due to build quality and reliability issues, when I'm due to upgrade my contract, I will not be having another Palm, and a Blackberry will probably be a more suitable phone.
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Aug 20th, 2009
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