Being the gadget fan that I am, I recently purchased a 3Com Palm V. If you are a fellow owner, you know the reasons why I chose this unit. It is the first truly pocketable and fully featured organizer (pocket computer) to be introduced to the market. If however you are like myself, you would have quickly filled up its 2Meg's of RAM with all sorts of add on applications (and games J )! Unfortunately, 3Com has not allowed the Palm V to be easily upgraded. Undaunted, I browsed the web to see if an upgrade is possible. Fortunately I found it is upgradable to a whopping 8 Megs! My little Palm V coulda' had a V8! Unfortunately, it is a bit of a chore to do the upgrade, as per the great instructions at:

Well, this doesn't look too bad, but wait -- if I make a mistake, this is what could happen:

Yikes!!! I don't want that to happen to my new (very expensive) toy! So, I looked for an expert. I found upgrades services from John Ong and; Efig, but these are both in the US and I wanted to save a little on shipping and not worry about customs officials. That is when I discovered that Tim Charron (A fellow Canadian) was starting a V8 upgrade service near Toronto. Here is his home page:

After talking to Tim via e-mail I discovered that he had been doing upgrades for a while on earlier Palm Pilots, and that he had done a few Palm V8's as a prospective business trial. After some discussion, I was impressed with his business ethic, and was satisfied that I will certainly get a working Palm V back, if there are any problems during the upgrade.

I backed up my unit using only Palm Desktop software and then carefully packaged it up and sent it off. After discussing it with Tim, he suggested that regular mail didn't insure for more than $100, so I decided to send it via Purolator. I carefully surrounded it in foam and a static guard and sent it off. From Vancouver, it arrived in Toronto 2 working days later. Tim was kind enough to e-mail me a short note that it had arrived and that he will do the work that evening.

That evening I got an e-mail from Tim that the upgrade was complete. The following Link is pictures of my unit while it was apart, that he kindly provided me (at my request). I wanted to know after all, what the work was like that he was doing inside my Palm V.

Can you see the photo with the unit on and opened up, before the upgrade? Yup, that is my machine and those are my applications! Now, as for the work, it is pretty good. Notice how clean all the solder joints are on the new chip, and that the old chip wasn't destroyed? I don't know how he did that - it is tough to do. In the same e-mail, Tim mentioned that he was sending it off 1^st thing the next morning so I wouldn't have to wait too long for it.

A few days later, my newly upgraded toy has arrived! Total turnaround -- exactly 1 week (mostly depends on how you arrange to ship it). It was packaged as carefully as I had sent it out, except Tim had actually added lots of bubble wrap in addition to everything else I had in the package. Of course I turned it on right away and checked the memory. There it is -- 8 Megs Free! I thouroughly looked the unit over for any signs of scratches, glue, gaps in the case or anything else that could indicate it had been opened up. I did find a slight ( hardly worth mentioning) jiggle in my power button that seems like it is a bit more than before, but that is about it. There wasn't any other signs of the upgrade.

I put the unit in my Hotsync Cradle and it instantly recognized that it was my unit and installed all my contacts and other standard palm application databases. I then went on an installation spree and installed as many Palm applications as I could find. They all loaded in fine, and I was even surprised that one piece of software I had in before the upgrade had all it's data magically restored when I re-loaded the .prc file. Did Palm Desktop do that?? I was happy about that regardless.

After thorough testing, a few games made it crash a few times, but they were old games for earlier Palm operating systems -- so that is not a big deal. Overall, I have tested the unit with about 3.5Megs of software so far and it is working great! Now that I have the old software out, it doesn't crash at all. As far as the battery life goes, I found the difference to be negligible -- actually I don't notice a difference at all yet. Overall, it is the same Palm V I sent out -- except with much more memory!

If you are interested in the officially tested parameters of a Palm V8, go here:

If you are worried about the expandability of the Palm V -- don't! Tim did an excellent upgrade job. The service was excellent, and the final product was well done. Yes, I am quite happy with my V8!

Bradc@home.com