The Palm Vx was a

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in part ...

made by the

Palm Computing Palm, Inc. was an American company that specialized in manufacturing personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various other electronics. They were the designer of the PalmPilot, the first PDA successfully marketed worldwide, as well as the Treo 60 ...

division of

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...

. It benefited from the sleek design and low weight of its predecessor, the Palm V, while increasing the available storage to 8 MB. At 114 grams, it was one of the lightest models ever offered by Palm. Retail price at launch was US$399. Soon after the release of the Vx, Palm Computing was spun off to form

Palm, Inc. Palm, Inc. was an American company that specialized in manufacturing personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various other electronics. They were the designer of the PalmPilot, the first PDA successfully marketed worldwide, as well as the Treo 6 ...

As a result, later-production Palm Vx units were the first Palm devices to no longer carry "3Com" branding.

Features

The Vx is based on the

Palm V Palm V is a personal digital assistant (PDA) by 3Com. Released in 1999 by 3Com, the PDA has an aluminum enclosure containing a Dragonball EZ central processing unit (capable of overclocking to 39 MHz) and 2MB of memory. The 16-shade gray ...

design, with the primary difference between the two being the Vx's 8

megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

compared to the V's 2 megabytes. This was one of the last Palm models not to include a memory slot. It was also one of the first to feature interaction with email, AvantGo, and other online programs. The Vx is powered by a

Motorola Dragonball Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor's DragonBall, or MC68328, is a microcontroller design based on the famous 68000 core, but implemented as an all-in-one low-power system for handheld computer use. It is supported by μClinux. It was designed by Mo ...

EZ processor operating at 20

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

. It was originally equipped with Palm OS 3.3, but later models came with Palm OS 3.5. An upgrade to Palm OS 4.1 was formerly offered for sale on the Palm Website but is no longer available. The device has a built in rechargeable battery (not replaceable unless the unit is disassembled), and a button on the top of the screen that permitted access to a contrast menu. It also includes an illumination feature, which causes the screen to be backlit by a green glow. However, the default backlight behaviour was inverted so that the text glowed while the background remained dark. This had the unfortunate side effect of making backlit pictures appear as negative images and made the display hard to read if the ambient lighting was at the same level as the backlight. The screen is very crisp and clear in bright sunlight and total darkness.

Special editions

On August 1, 2000, Palm announced the release of a "

Claudia Schiffer Claudia Maria Schiffer (; born 25 August 1970) is a German model and actress based in the United Kingdom. She rose to fame in the 1990s as one of the world's most successful models, attaining supermodel status. In her early career, she was compa ...

Edition" of the Palm Vx. The Palm Vx CSE featured a

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when ...

brushed-metal finish instead of the usual silver color, and came pre-loaded with a HealtheTec diet, exercise, and weight management software package, and Abroad!, a travel organization program. The device was sold exclusively through the supermodel'
website
and retailed for US$399. Palm also released limited edition, colored versions of the Palm Vx without special branding.http://news.cnet.com/Palms-up-with-two-new-products/2100-1040_3-244084.html Palm's up with two new products The special edition was offered in "gold" and "millennium

". There is also the "Palm CreSenda" edition with a blue faceplate reflecting the corporate color of CreSenda Wireless.

References

External links

Palm.com Details
3Com/Palm Press Release, October 4, 1999 {{Palm Devices Palm OS devices Computer-related introductions in 1999 68k-based mobile devices