Xplore M98 PalmOS smartphone with stylus and included 32MB Sandisk Micro-SD card

I bought this Palm OS based smartphone because I love the simplicity of the traditional Palm OS Garnet, and the high availability of third party applications of all kinds, from good games to open source databases to "voice over IP" SIP applications.

Another good selling point of the Xplore M98 is its "clamshell" format and 1.3MP camera, which actually looks more like a 640x480 CMOS sensor software -interpolated to 1.3MP, but which gives average quality images. Personally, I prefer a clamshell design over the more basic "candy bar" design and to my knowledge, the M98 is the only Palm OS based, GSM clamshell phone in the marketplace.

"PDA Mode" showing the familiar PalmOS application launcher
Second frame: benchmark showing CPU speed

Buy one in the West, if you can

I bought my Xplore M98 at Amazon.com, after I spotted these units being offered by third party seller Mobileplanet.com and reported about it on the INQ. Two weeks after I bought my unit, the Xplore M98 units were gone both from Amazon.com and also directly from Mobileplanet.com. When I asked about a month ago, Randy Neal from MobilePlanet.com said: "Those two phones have been discontinued. That is why we do not have them on our site any longer".

GSPDA should really get its phones into Amazon.com!

I was surprised and contacted GSPDA, which replied: "MobilePlanet.com is not an authorized distributor / dealer of Xplore. We have no knowledge of their announcement". After further INQuiry to Mobileplanet, the representative back-pedalled: "That could be true. We probably didn't sell enough of them and decided to discontinue carrying them". Oh well...For the record: the Xplore phone line from GSPDA is very much alive, over here.

To boot, the Xplore M98 is very affordable, at a below-$300 price point, something to be praised in the age of extravagant premium phones with ridiculous $900 price tags and fashion-like empty sales speeches like "This phone draws its name from the powerful desert-born wind that originates in the Sahara". Yes, that was aimed at you guys at Nokia.

M98 as a phone

As a mobile, the M98 is a good phone: standard GSM, Tri-Band unlocked and supporting GPRS Class 10. Voice quality sent by its microphone is good and the voice reception is loud and clear. It's very lightweight with only 109 grams, and on my tests had excellent signal reception throughout the big city, with the signal level indicator most of the time at 4/5, only once dropping to 3/5 once.

The SIM card goes under the battery as usual, and dialling/phone book management is done by the Xplore software that automatically saves all entries in the PalmOS standard applications, which are also tweaked allowing you to copy entries from the phone's non-volatile memory to the SIM card, and vice versa.

The only weak spot is battery life, which according to the official reports gives "up to 100 hrs" of stand-by time, but which in my experience is more near 48 hours. It all depends on what you do with it over the day. As a general rule, if you use the "speaker" function, that is, with loud sound coming out of the ringing speaker, the battery dries very fast. This happens with MP3 playback and also when playing any PalmOS games -five very good ones are included, I must add-.

Talk time is indicated as "up to two hours" for each fully charged battery. This might seem too low but is almost in line with other phones like the ubiquitous Motorola V980. That's why the manufacturer includes an additional battery in the box at no extra charge. And speaking of charging... you can charge the extra battery using the additional "battery charger" included in the box with the AC multi-voltage (100-240v) power adapter, while the battery used on the M98 can be also charged at the same time using the USB data cable. This is very handy and I almost never use the AC adapter and flatbed battery charger, just plugging the data cable from my notebook to the phone to let it charge.

Battery removed. GSM chip slot, Micro-SD socket, and battery contacts

On the connectivity side, besides the USB data cable it features a standard PalmOS IR port on the left side of the dialing keys halve, allowing you not only to beam PalmOS data snippets like phone numbers and to-do list entries to any other device running Palm OS, but also to "sync" your phone to the Palm Desktop software on PCs and also beam PalmOS applications from one PDA or smartphone to/from the M98.

Finally, as a phone it supports ring tones both in polyphonic format -MIDI files- and MP3 format as well. With a "Transflash / Micro-SD" slot under the battery, I bought and installed a one gigabyte Sandisk "Micro-SD" card to it and filled around 40% of the space it with MP3 songs and a few dozen MIDI files. A 96x96 colour TFT screen on the back of the clamshell allows seeing signal level, battery charge, and who's calling, when phone in the "closed" position.

When you are using the phone as a MP3 player and in closed position, the Xplore's custom mp3 player displays the song name and author -ID3 info embedded into the MP3- scrolling in the back screen. There's also a very bright white LED near the CMOS sensor which serves both as a "photo light" -it's not a flash- when taking close pictures in complete darkness and also as a way to find the phone in a dark room when it's ringing, as it starts flickering -this option can be disabled by going into the preferences.

Pocket Tunes -shareware MP3 player added by me- at work
The phone one which is free but doesn't look as nice

One of the best features of the Xplore M98 is that this mobile's graphical interface has a "dual personality": you can switch back and forth between "PDA mode" and "Phone mode". This is achieved with the simple pressing of a button on the left side -next to the one that brings up to life the custom Xplore MP3 player software. In "phone mode" you see a 3x3 grid of big icons "WAP Browser" "Messages" "Phone book", followed by "Media Browser", "Camera", "Games" and finally "Organizer", "Settings", and "Call Info". This mode is very easy to navigate with one finger and using its D-Pad.

By pressing the same button on the side, you can switch between the "phone mode" interface to the "PDA mode" where the familiar PalmOS launcher interface is shown. Actually, first you get the "Xplore launcher" which is a custom shell that looks similar but adds "Xplore" to the top and all the indicators (battery, signal, GPRS mode, sound level, SMS indicator icons to a bar at the bottom of the screen. But it's just another PalmOS launcher application. You can close it and get original full PalmOS launcher screen. If you do that, the traditional PalmOS battery level indicator and time appears at the top of the screen.

Two retractable stylus are included for use as the PalmOS stylus while in PDA mode. One lives inside the phone and is easily removed when needed. The other is a spare and is included inside the M98 retail box. It should be noted, however, that you can navigate the PalmOS launcher and select apps -and "click" using the D-Pad, with a single hand operation. Most PalmOS games also are able to use the D-pad buttons so taking the stylus out is only reserved for those times when you want to type names or numbers into PalmOS applications with the stylus using the traditional PalmOS Graffiti recognition.

Also included is a set of "earbud" headphones with a proprietary cable that plugs into the USB data/charging socket and doubles both as a "neck strap" carrying device and also leads to the ear buds. Due to the length of this one, you can't have the phone in your pocket and use the ear buds. If you want to use the M98 as a MP3 player, you must keep the phone hanging from your neck. This is nice for walking around and to use while exercising, but not comfortable in every situation. I really, really would have preferred a standard "audio out" stereo audio jack socket on the phone rather than this proprietary cable and ear buds.

Speaking of MP3s, for some reason the included MP3 player cannot be seen as a PalmOS application in the standard PalmOS launcher and the only way to make it appear is to press the MP3 button on the left side-.

Great design, stealth marketing and no distribution

Before I ended up buying my own Xplore M98, I did what any quality journalist would do: ask for a freebie sample to do the review. They were not thrilled at all, going as far as denying the phone would work in Argentina's GSM networks, despite the fact that the local mobile networks down here from three different companies all use the same GSM 1900 band used anywhere else in the world. Company representative Kenneth Tse said: "Regarding M98 sample, regret to tell that the Xplore M98 is an Asian version and it can't be worked in Argentina" (sic). By February 4, Group Sense employee Francis promised by e-mail "your case will be referred to our Marketing Director for further follow up". Then, I stopped hearing from Groupsense altogether, so I ended up buying one.

The Good

1. Compatibility: factory unlocked, and works just fine with all three GSM networks available down here. Its 1.3MP camera is the icing on the cake. 2. Weight: very Lightweight.
3. Form factor: very nice clamshell.
4. CPU Speed: more than enough. According to a benchmark application, it's faster than a Tungsten T PDA from Palm.
5. Screen resolution: runs all standard PalmOS 5.0 "lo-res" applications. So if it works on a Treo 600, it runs on the Xplore M98.
6. Batteries: Two 3.7V, 830mAh Li-polymer batteries included in the box. Be prepared to charge the phone at the end of each day. If you plan on staying away from your home -or a power source to charge it- carry the spare one.
7. Multitasks!: despite biased remarks by WinMob fanboys with a hidden agenda that often portray the Palm OS Garnet 5.4.x as one old piece of junk good for nothing, both my NX80V Clie PDA and now also my Xplore M98 smartphone can multitask just fine. And yes, I'm refering to some Gartner "analysts" out there.

The MP3 player in the M98 -and also the "Pocket Tunes" PalmOS MP3 player that I installed later due to the nicer graphics- are able to play music in the background just fine. Even while you press the camera button and start taking pictures. This is very nice and shows the power of both the OS and the device.

The Bad:

1. Printed manual is in Chinese language. The English language one is available as a PDF on the included software/drivers CD
2. There is no optional, thicker "high capacity" battery available. I don't care if it makes my M98 thicker, I really, really would like to see someone design a thicker "double size" battery that is actually like the sum of two standard batteries "glued together".
3. The Micro-SD slot is below the battery. At first this was very annoying. Then I found the solution: CardReader is a PalmOS application that when run allows "exporting" the internal memory card on PalmOS devices over the USB cable, acting as a "mass storage device". Translated, this means that if you install and run CardReader, when you plug the Xplore M98 to your Windows - or even Linux - PC, the contents of the MicroSD card will become immediately available as a "removable USB drive". Allowing you to copy, erase or move files back and forth between the PC and the smartphone just as if it were a thumb drive, without any additional software, and more importantly, without the need to remove the phone battery to access the Micro-SD card. Find CardReader, over here.
4. The included 32MB Sandisk Micro-SD card is of little use. I'd prefer if they shipped the phone with nothing, and the cost of that SD card that nobody would use could be subtracted from the sale price.
5. The M98 contains images of the OS both in Chinese and English. When you do a hard reset or you power it up for the first time, you are asked what language you want it in, and that decision sticks until the next hard-reset. I really would like the M98 to be English-only -or Spanish only for that matter- and the memory space used by the Chinese OS to be freed for other use.
6. Lacks of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. For a Xplore PalmOS GSM smartphone with Bluetooth, try the M68 but sadly it costs around $100 more and has a "candy bar" design, not clamshell. Hey GSPDA, how about a M99 with the same clamshell design but external SD slot and internal Bluetooth, in the same form factor as the M98? That would be great.

The Ugly:
1. Stealth Marketing - The company is not promoting this phone in the West. I told them repeatedly that with wider availability and some promotion, PalmOS users who currently have a Palm/PalmOne PDA and still don't have a smartphone would flock to it. They didn't sound very enthusiastic.
2. Secretive culture. The company wanted me to sign a NDA in order to provide me with "technical details" of the unit. That was after I asked about the pin-out of the 18-pin data/USB/charger connector in the back to attempt to build my own "data connector to stereo audio female socket" adaptor cable. When I asked them for a "Software Development Kit" (SDK) for the Xplore M98, in order to write PalmOS applications that for instance could write to the back "caller ID" screen, I was told by GSPDA's Francis Li "Palm Developer can get the SDK from Palm Source since the M-series phone was developed according to Palm OS 5.4 compliance" (sic).
3. Weak plastic feel inside. The plastic in the inner side of both halves of the clamshell feels weak. Always open it with care and when using it, never press too hard with the stylus on the LCD screen, as you're acting as a lever on the hinge. It just feels like thin cheap plastic.

To understand what plastic I'm referring to: the M98 comes in three colours: all white, "orange" and "silver". In the orange coloured version, it's not actually totally orange as you see on the pictures, but orange on the exterior halves, and black inside. Well, it's the black plastic which feels weak. Beware. I would certainly pay $50 more to have a more sturdy feel on the whole phone. As is, it feels like a first-generation Motorola Startac, those that we used in the dark ages of 800Mhz AMPS analogue service.

Summary: The screen is good. It sports a good selection of PalmOS applications, including the PalmSource Web Browser 2.0 which as you can see on the picture below, allows loading any html web page, not just WAP. It allows sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages.

GPRS internet connection active.
Here: PalmSource Web Browser 2.0 displaying a
blog entry about the INQ's spiritual leader

For those of you with a child at heart, included are five great fully-licensed PalmOS games: Bejeweled, "Book Worm", "GTS Racing", "Megabowling", and the amazing "Zap! 2016" from PalmOS developer gods at Astraware.

In this review I decided to cover only the "phone side" of this mobile. In a future "second INQpressions" article I will focus on the data/PDA side and show third party PalmOS applications that can be installed and run in the M98 for IMAP e-mail, and the like.

The Verdict

If GSPDA reads this review, please consider the suggestions I've made. The M98 really deserves to be enhanced and become a "M99" with clamshell design, an optional bigger battery, and built-in Bluetooth. For those of you looking for an affordable PalmOS GSM smartphone, with the caveats mentioned, look no further. I give the Xplore M98 three and a half Fernandos in my personal one-to-five rating scale, or seven over ten if you wish.µ

See Also
CardReader for PalmOS devices
PalmOS smatphones and PDAs get "Voice over IP" with new SIP compatible client
PalmOS revived with Treo 700p release
GroupSense and Qool Labs make nice PalmOS GSM phones
Palm OS is going Linux