I've seen the light. Well, not quite the light: the HS Light. HS Light is a hardware vendor that specializes in battery chargers and Tail Lights for Palm OS PDAs (A Tail Light, available for Visors only, is a little flashlight that plugs into the bottom of a PDA. HS Light offers them in orange, green, blue and red).
I'm not writing this article to speak of the virtues of having a PDA light however. I'm writing it to rave about HS Light's $15 Palm m500 Emergency Charger, which recently saved me a lot of heartache and headache on a weekend trip where I didn't have a charger cable or docking station for my Palm m515. I did have the battery charger, which I had been planning on testing for a review anyway. Little did I know that a real world test case would be beckoning just around the corner.
Due to a software incompatibility between a piece of software on the Palm m515 and the Palm OS, the PDA froze with a Fatal Alert. Of course, there was no way to disable the offending software. So no matter how many soft resets I performed, the unit kept repeating the same error.
(This is a real problem I wish Palm would address). Frustrated, I left the unit frozen and on and forgot about it. When I checked up on it, the battery was dead.
