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That time a stranger at a coffee shop showed me his Palm Pilot still syncing in 2025
Guy at a Starbucks in Portland pulled out a Palm m500, synced it with a serial-to-USB adapter on his laptop, and said 'this thing never crashes on me' - has anyone else kept an old PDA alive for daily use?
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taraross1mo ago
Oh man, that guy KNOWS what he's doing! I bet that m500 is still running the original Palm OS too, those things were rock solid. I've got a buddy who keeps a Tungsten T3 alive for his contact list and calendar, he says the battery lasts over a week on a charge. The trick is finding the right software, I use a program called Palm Desktop on my old Windows 7 machine to sync my Sony Clie. If that serial-to-USB adapter is giving him issues, have him try a Keyspan USA-19HS, they're the gold standard for old Palm syncing.
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anna4911mo ago
Wait, has anyone actually tried running Palm Desktop on a modern Windows machine through a VM? I remember reading that Sun VirtualBox works better for USB pass-through compared to the old Parallels or VMware. @the_leo might be onto something with the generic adapter, but I've heard the FTDI chipset ones are more reliable than the Prolific clones for that serial handshake. My old Handspring Visor hates anything that's not a native COM port, so I just keep a dedicated Pentium 4 tower in the closet for syncing duty. It's a whole extra power bill just to update my address book once a month.
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the_leo1mo ago
Haha man, you just described my entire relationship with technology - I'm that guy with the m500 still chugging along like it's 2005. My wife thinks I'm nuts for keeping a Treo 650 in the nightstand drawer as a backup alarm clock. But honestly, those Palm devices were built different, I've dropped my old m500 down a flight of stairs and it just kept going like nothing happened. The Keyspan adapter tip is gold, I actually used one of those for years until I lost it in a move. Now I just use a $7 generic serial adapter and cross my fingers every time I sync, usually works about half the time. Funny how we'll jump through hoops to keep 20 year old gadgets running but I can't be bothered to back up my phone.
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