• $40

• Provides owners of older PalmOS PDAs with the convenience of a rechargeable Handheld.

• Not yet available for Handspring or Palm m10x PDAs

Design:
Cost/benefit:
Coolness:
Overall:

Hardware
The kit consists of three pieces: a snap-on attachment with a power supply that turns your HotSync cradle into a charging base, a NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) battery pack, and a replacement battery door with holes for the charger to make contact with the charging unit.

The unit I tested was a "pre-production" model but seemed well constructed and operated just like I expected. Included with the unit were several pages of photocopied instructions which, while brief, were complete and easy-to-understand.

Installation
When I unpacked the Charge-N-Run from the shipping box, I didn’t even have to refer to the instructions to figure out how it worked. The Charging attachment slid easily over the top of my Palm IIIx’s HotSync cradle and snapped firmly in place. I then plugged in the attached "wall-wart" power supply and I had a charging station.

Next I took out the AAA batteries from my Palm and replaced them with the NiMH pack supplied by the manufacturer. I removed the original battery door and snapped in the replacement one provided. I was worried that it would be loose and rattle but it was actually a better fit than my original battery cover. Once I installed the battery pack, I powered the unit on just to make sure everything was OK. It powered up and indicated a partial charge.

I placed the unit in the cradle to charge and proceeded to browse the manual to figure out how to read the charge-indicator light correctly. The Charge-N-Run is equipped with a single, green LED that glows solid green when the unit is powered and the PDA is not in the cradle. When the unit is charging, the LED flashes rapidly, and once it’s fully charged, the LED blinks more slowly. This may sound a bit ambiguous, but it’s really very easy to tell what the charger is doing at a glance once you’ve watched it a couple of times.

The manual also provided instructions for calibrating the battery-charge indicator in the launcher so it will correctly detect the charge level of the battery pack. I’m not sure if Palm OS v3.3 has settings for NiMH but on my unit with Palm OS 3.5 I was able to set it to NiMH and the battery meter seemed to be fairly accurate after that.

Battery Life
I ran the PDA until I received the first low-battery warning. It took me about 9.5 hours to do this. That works out to about 2 weeks normal usage for me, but then I read a lot of e-books on my PDA. The unit takes about 6.5 hours to charge the batteries when they have been discharged to the low-battery warning but under normal conditions an hour or two in the cradle once a day should keep your PDA "topped off".

The battery pack can’t match my m505, which gives me about 10 hours when I don’t use the backlight, but under normal usage conditions you’ll most likely never encounter the low battery warning. On the plus side, if you do run into a situation where the battery pack is depleted, you can always remove it and slap in a pair of regular old AAA batteries. In fact, if you plan on taking your PDA on a vacation or business trip, that’s probably the most convenient solution.

Conclusion
In short, the Charge-n-Run provides the user with a lot of flexibility for a very reasonable price: $40 is about what you’d pay for a charger and a set of rechargeable batteries. Furthermore, unlike rechargeable-only PDAs, you can swap out the NiMH pack for regular batteries if you want to travel light.