Elf Sternberg

Last night I gave my brain a heart transplant. My poor Palm m500 is over five years old now, and the battery was seriously crimping my style. In heavy use (i.e. when I was using the E-book reader two or three hours a day) it would die after only two days of use. I've always been good about battery discipline, making sure not to do half-assed charges that cyst the battery, but after five years it was time for an update. You have no idea how it is to be twenty pages away from the end of a Bujold novel only to have the OS tell you, "You have less that 2% of battery power left. Shutting down to preserve on-board memory." That's happened to me twice in the past few weeks.

As it turned out, the update was pretty trivial. The new battery cost about $24, not unreasonable for a high-tech custom use thing, and it came with four different sizes of torx screwdrivers as well as a non-marring prytool. I tried the torx in order and the third one fit, the screws came undone, and the Palm pried open without a hitch. With a pair of tweezers I worked loose the connector and lifted out the battery. Putting in the new one was just the reverse of that process.

The Palm's memory restored from backup just fine, and I left it in the cradle for eight hours to get a full charge, and viola', I have a Palm that doesn't drop from 100% to 92% in the first ten minutes of life, and seems to be holding a charge very well.

It's gonna take some seriously compelling technology to make me give my Palm m500 up. It was one of the last of the black-and-white screens, which use very little power, and with the 512MB SD card in the back it's got serious room to grow.