Thumbpad for Palm M500/505

Rating:
Summary: A neat little thumbboard -- not perfect, but still neat
Review: The Targus ThumbPad is an external thumbboard that attaches to your Palm via the Universal Connector at the bottom. Rather than covering the buttons and Graffiti area, it extends a couple of inches beneath the handheld, which amazingly rests firmly in place. The ThumbPad is made of plastic and is very light.

It's not nearly as functional as the full-size folding keyboards -- useful extra keys like "New" and "OK" aren't there, but that's to be expected with a keyboard this size. More perplexing, however, is the absence of parenthesis keys. You do have to reach for the stylus and the Palm's own buttons from time to time, and you must resist the temptation to use the ThumbPad's directional keys in the Apps menu -- they don't page up and down.

The fact that the ThumbPad flares outward from the Palm's base gives the keyboard more room and allows the keys to be bigger than the keys that PDAs with built-in thumbboards have. Key action is very nice, as nice as the Tungsten W or C (but with more room) and far nicer than Sony Clie thumbboards. I find typing surprisingly quick. I would have preferred to see sticky Shift, Fn and Control keys, like some built-in thumbboards, since holding down two keys at once is awkward on a keyboard of this type.

Overall I'm quite pleased with this little thumbboard, and look forward to using it to send SMS when my Palm Bluetooth card arrives.

This review was drafted on a Palm m505 using the ThumbPad.

Rating:
Summary: [...Bad] Connector
Review: The ThumbPad is very lightweight, but seems quite durable. The Visor slides into a nice solid dock with the ThumbPad, unlike other mini-keyboards I've seen where the connection is very tenuous, and you have to be really careful to support the unit to avoid putting any weight on the connection. With the ThumbPad the can just hold the keyboard, which easily supports the weight of the Visor for comfortable typing.

The keyboard layout has a pretty big flaw. There's only one shift key, at the lefthand side. Would including a shift key on the right side as well have increased the size of the unit by that much? Punctuation is accessed using the "function" key, and, you guessed it, there's only one, on the lefthand side, right next to the quotation mark and apostrophe, making it very awkward to type these symbols. If there were shift and function keys on each side, you wouldn't have to shift your grip on the ThumbPad and it would be much more comfortable.

My biggest frustration with the ThumbPad is a non-fatal but annoying bug. If the ThumbPad is idle too long (on the order of ten seconds), the PDA stops accepting input from the keypad. I have to turn off the PDA, and turn it back on by pressing a key on the ThumbPad, and then I can continue typing normally. My email to tech support has not yet been returned (though it's only been a few days). I had a similar small bug with a different Targus keyboard in the past, which was never resolved, so I think I'll be avoiding their products in the future (when possible--the Visor user doesn't have a LOT of options for peripherals!)

Rating:
Summary: Much faster than Graffiti, but still has its flaws.
Review: The ThumbPad is very lightweight, but seems quite durable. The Visor slides into a nice solid dock with the ThumbPad, unlike other mini-keyboards I've seen where the connection is very tenuous, and you have to be really careful to support the unit to avoid putting any weight on the connection. With the ThumbPad the can just hold the keyboard, which easily supports the weight of the Visor for comfortable typing.

The keyboard layout has a pretty big flaw. There's only one shift key, at the lefthand side. Would including a shift key on the right side as well have increased the size of the unit by that much? Punctuation is accessed using the "function" key, and, you guessed it, there's only one, on the lefthand side, right next to the quotation mark and apostrophe, making it very awkward to type these symbols. If there were shift and function keys on each side, you wouldn't have to shift your grip on the ThumbPad and it would be much more comfortable.

My biggest frustration with the ThumbPad is a non-fatal but annoying bug. If the ThumbPad is idle too long (on the order of ten seconds), the PDA stops accepting input from the keypad. I have to turn off the PDA, and turn it back on by pressing a key on the ThumbPad, and then I can continue typing normally. My email to tech support has not yet been returned (though it's only been a few days). I had a similar small bug with a different Targus keyboard in the past, which was never resolved, so I think I'll be avoiding their products in the future (when possible--the Visor user doesn't have a LOT of options for peripherals!)

Rating:
Summary: [...Bad] Connector
Review: This product is junk, due to a cheap connector that broke the first time I tried to remove it form my Visor Pro. The keyboard wouldn't work at all when first installed, then worked intermittently with much adjusting of the position of the keyboard after the connector was cracked. A really disappointing dud.