m500 vs. m130

[schurr]

Hi,

I'm not actually a Palm Owner - yet.
I'm trying to decide which unit to buy.
With the holiday offer on the M130....the M130 and the M500
are the same price.

From what I can tell using the Comparison Chart at www.Palm...
They are the same with the following exceptions:
The m130 has color and the m500 does not.
The m500 has Flash ROM and the m130 does not.

Since I don't know what FLASH ROM is, I don't know if it's important
to me or not....

Which would you choose???
Thanks!

[Ben S]

FlashROM isn't particularly important. It would allow you to upgrade the OS in the m500 to OS4.1, but the benefit to doing that is fairly limited (most of what it does can be replicated by installing patches that *don't* require FlashROM). The m130 comes with OS4.1.

Chances are there won't be any more FlashROM upgrades for these devices anyway.

Personally, I wouldn't consider FlashROM important either way.

[schurr]

Thanks for the response Ben!
Sounds like the M130 is the way to go.
It would have the 4.1 OS and from reading about OS 5 -
I wouldn't be able to update to it w/ any of the models I can afford!

[Ben S]

At the moment, the only Palm model that runs OS5 and that is capable of running OS5 is the Tungsten T. All other Palms, including the upcoming Tungsten W, are based on non-ARM versions of the Motorola Dragonball CPU, and as such can't support OS5.