Price: $33.00USD

Intro:

    In this review I'm going to be looking at the second of the two PDA's that the nice people at Merconnet sent me, the Pal-Mate Touch Panel PDA. This claims to be the worlds smallest PDA, so do good things really come in small packages? Let's find out...

Features:

    - PDA with over 100 name,  phone number and email address memory, clock, schedule, calculator, fortune teller, casino 7's game, car racing game and animated screen.
    - Touch panel.
    - Powered by 2 button batteries (supplied).
    -Wireless PC and PDA-PDA data transfer.

Approx dimensions (length/width/height in mm): 69/44/9.
 

The box and its contents.

    The Pal-Mate comes in a stylish cardboard/plastic packet, inside it I found,

    - The PDA and neck cord.

    This PDA really is very small, about half the size of a credit card and not very thick. Generally it looks ok, the blue plastic has a nice rugged feel to it, though I can't say I'm impressed by the cheap rubber button at the bottom. On the back of this unit there's an optical sensor and emitter for data transfer, a small reset button, a stylus holder (the PDA arrived with a stylus in the holder) and the battery compartment. I can rarely resist my unscrewing urges, so I thought I'd take a quick peak at the battery compartment,

    The only interesting thing revealed by my endeavours was that the blue plastic is a paint effect on a white plastic base. If this were ever to wear off it would look very unsightly indeed.

    - 2 spare stylus pens.

    - A small manual.
 

Using the PDA

    The first time use you this PDA you have to press the reset button on the back of the unit - I quite liked being forced to do this, it made me read the manual (to find out why it wouldn't turn on)! A clever tactic, or a nice side effect of a battery saving feature? I'll err on the side of cunning and give the designers some credit ;o)
    From this reset onwards repeated pressing of the unresponsive plastic mode button presents the user with the following screens,

    From the top left to bottom right these represent; a time display, databank & clock modes, reminder and calculator modes, fortune teller and 7's game modes and lastly the car racing mode.

    Selecting the mode you'd like to enter is a simple matter of pressing the relevant icon with the one of the provided stylus pens, progressing through the option to achieve your desired goal is normally as straight forward as a few more stylus prods. The following shows the entry of a new name into the database as an example,

    The design of this PDA was chosen to mimic the look of a palm-top PDA, to maximise the screen size. Although the size of the screen on the Pal-Mate is very large when compared to the Magic-I the makers chose to use a very large pixel display, allowing for just twelve characters to be displays onscreen at once. This makes reading through a database of names very taxing, a fundamental flaw in any PDA.
    I've already mentioned that I found the plastic buttons on the display unresponsive and unfortunately the touch screen panel is just as bad - I frequently found myself having to jab the display several times to enter one character.

    Most of the other modes of the Pal-Mate echo those on the Magic-i, with the car racing game and the animation being the only real exceptions and I failed to see the point in either. The car racing game not only highlights the poor quality of the display once again, with most of it disappearing when you ask the car to move, but it also requires user input from three of the rubber buttons at once - an impossible task even for those with the smallest of fingers I fear.
    The animation feature displays a scrolling banner and I'm guessing it's only purpose is to impress friends, though I can't imagine who'd be impressed by it.

    Sending data to the Pal-Mate from a PC is done via the same clever system as was used in the Magic-i, and again the software failed to work for me in Windows XP - not entirely surprising. With the Pal-Mate the software also allows you to customise the animation, I'm sure you can guess my feelings about this.

    Communication between two Pal-Mate's is made possible by the inclusion of an emitter diode, a useful feature if all your friends decide to buy one of these along with you.
 

Conclusions:

    I found myself wholly unimpressed by the Pal-Mate. In my opinion anything with a price tag of $33 should make an active effort to justify it's cost. Although saying the makers of the Pal-Mate haven't tried would be very unfair, they certainly haven't succeeded at any attempts made. The Pal-mate is slow and unresponsive and a pain to use. I found it's main selling point, having a touch screen incorporated in such a small PDA, one of it's most disappointing features - a great shame.
    I couldn't possibly recommend that anyone looking for a small PDA buy this, instead I would insist they save money and push them in the direction of the Magic-i, a better PDA in almost every way.