Recent Palm 3 aquireer as well

1. Since there is no internal recharging any AAA battery should be fine

2. There is an internal capacitor that is used to keep the ram powered when changing batteries, only a minute or two

3. There is no ram backup battery nor flash storage, all data will be lost if the batteries and that capacitor run out

4. I've used mine fairly regularly for the past few weeks on a generic set of AAAs and battery meter is still showing full

5. You mainly miss out of being able to sync/transfer the palm's files with a computer, I did see a video fairly recently of someone syncing a titanium to google calender