HowTo: Using the Palm PDA in 2023

My first PDA was Palm m105, I used it in 2001. 20 years later I decided to check, how the last generation of Palm OS devices was looking and to check if it’s possible to use Palm OS nowadays.

Palm m105 was a nice device for its time, it had a grayscale screen with a “stunning” 160x160px resolution and a 16 MHz Motorola CPU. Compared to it, Palm TX looks much better — it was released 4 years later, and it has a 312 MHz CPU, 320x480 TFT screen, USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth support. It looks much more promising, and when I saw Palm TX on eBay in a brand-new condition, I decided to test, what will be the experience of using this device today.

This is the hero of our story:

Let’s get started.

Hardware

Palm TX looks small and light, compared to modern devices — the screen size is only 3.9" and the weight is 149g:

The first thing that catches the eye is plenty of buttons. The PDA has 9 buttons in total — four buttons for different apps, four cursor keys, and an “OK” button in the center. Using the preferences, every button can be assigned to any application: