3Com Palm V

After acquisition by 3Com, Palm Computing still made palmtops. Classic palmtops - small, portable devices with stylus for text input. Palm V has casing made of aluminium, and lookf more solid than earlier Palm III with plastic casing.
Palm V is powered by Motorola "DragonBall" MC68EZ328 16MHz CPU, has 2MB of RAM and serial port connectivity. Back-lit LCD has pressure detection layer so it can detect stylus and lines drawn by it. A special handwriting font called Graffiti is used to enter text.

The palmtop comes with Palm Desktop software which allows to transfer files and data from/to PC. Inside, there is Palm OS Operating system, which can be programmed by user. After releasing Palm computers, the company opened a developer program offering SDK. Currently, PalmOS SDK (version 3.x is needed) is hard to obtain.

Manufacturer 3Com

Origin USA
Year of unit 1999
Year of introduction 1999
Type Palmtop, Palm OS
CPU Motorola DragonBall 16MHz
RAM 2MB built-in
Floppy Disk None
Hard Disk None
Other media None
Graphics and display: 160x160 LCD, greyscale (16 shades)
Sound: Speaker
Keyboard and pointing device: Touchscreen with stylus
OS: Palm OS 3.1

Power supply:

Built-in battery

Power supply in serial port connector
I/O:  - Serial Port
 - Imnfrared port
 
 
 
 
 
 
Possible upgrades: ??
Additional peripherals:  None

Serial port connector (Looking towards copper on the device, connector is in the bottom):

\  |10_|_9_|_8_|_7_|_6_|_5_|_4_|_3_|_2_|_1_|    /
  \-------------------------------------------/

1 - DTR
2 - Power +5V
3 - RxD
4 - RtS
5 - TxD
6 - CtS
7 - Button IN (short to Power)
8 - ID input
9 - NC
10 - GND

Warning: Before turning an exhausted unit on, wait a minute or two with power connected. Sometimes battery needs to be charged a bit to run the palmtop.

Links:

http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/PDA/PalmOne%20Vx%20Handheld.pdf - Manual
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815224921/http://palm.com/support/downloads/dt303.html - DOWNLOADABLE Palm software to make Palm device communicate with Windows 9x PC!
http://mobile.eric-poncet.com/palm/tutorial.html - Programming tutorial. SDK not included.
http://www.rigacci.org/wiki/doku.php/doc/appunti/hardware/appunti_palm - Resetting Palm Vx (newer one)
http://pages.interlog.com/~tcharron/Palm8M/V8/V8.html - Disassembly