Submitted by Palm has revolutionized the PDA industry. In 1996, it released the Pilot and in less than ten years, sold 38 million devices outfitted with Palm OS. Read about the development of the Pilot (and the ill-fated Casio Zoomer
and Graffiti for Newton) here.
I had a palm professional (the 1mb version) and i carried that thing for years and years. I dont think I ever crashed it once (probably as I never played games on it…) for what it did, it was rock solid. great backlight (better than the current black backlights!)..
that thing was damn awesome…
how the first versions got out with 128kb is beyond me.
My first PDA was the Palm IIIe. I bought it in 1999 and it worked flawlessly until last year when I dropped it on a concrete floor and busted the display. I looked at getting a newer one but they’re expensive and loaded with bells and whistles that I don’t really care about (although the color screens look nice). It seems that Palms are trying to be too much like pocket pcs and not PDAs.
It would be nice if there was a nice simple version that was like the IIIe except smaller and lighter and with the option of a color screen. Give it a replacable battery pack and it would be just about perfect. Palm has been adding a lot of stuff but some of us just want to track appointments and have a central location for all of our contacts. Put it in a small, easy to carry package and you have a true PDA. That’s what captivated me about the Palm and that’s still all I want out of it.
For me the Palm V was the killer device (upgraded to it from Palm Professional). I used the V until Handspring released the Treo 270. Didn’t like that 270 much and upgraded to a Tungsten T the moment it hit the market. The T proofed to be a good replacement for the V, despite not being that stabile (too much bells and whistles). I think if I hadn’t given away my V on purchasing the Treo, I might even have skipped the Tungsten T. After the T I went to Symbian for a year (Treo 600 not good), but returned when the Treo 650 was released. The 650 might not be as complete as Windows mobile smartphones, but it lasts 4 days on a battery and that alone keeps me stick to the platform. I’m very interested in seeing Palm keeping its staying power when making that switch to Windows Mobile themselves….
I think Palms were a little over-hyped, but nowadays the pocket PCs really are like mini-laptops for $200 and are actually usable: http://electronics.search.ebay.com/rx3115_Handheld-Units_W0QQa10244…
For that you get video player, mp3 player, games, builtin wireless, web, email, word/excel, voice record, remote control, good handwriting recognition, plus the normal calendar, notes stuff that Palm always had.
As someone said: “Pocket PC functionality is what everyone would want if they could afford it.”
I’ve always been a huge fan of Palm-powered devices, from my first Palm III to my current Sony Clie NX-80V. I’ve had plenty of PocketPC devices (hp Jornada, 2 iPaqs), but they’ve always struck me as fundamentally ugly. PocketPC/Windows Mobile really is a shrunken down version of Windows, and the Windows paradigms don’t work properly on a handheld. Palm OS, though, is designed primarily with usability in a handheld form-factor in mind, and it works that much better. Ditto for the long-defunct Newton OS (until its destruction, my MP2100 was my primary PDA). But back to Palms. If you want to know about Palms, I suggest you read the following article: http://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen33/hawkins1.html . I read the original when it came out in magazine format years and years ago (I’ve been a Pen Computing subscriber since ’99), and it’s still an exceptional article. Now for one little aside. My personal feeling is that the Handspring Visor Edge is the pinnacle of PDA design. Greyscale screen (I dislike colour), rechargable battery, amazing design. If anybody knows where to find one, feel free to send a link in the direction of my e-mail address.
I bought a second hand IBM WorkPad for $100 at 1999. It is using Palm OS 3.3.
As I was studying a part-time degree course at a web base university, I copy and paste the lecture notes on the web to the WorkPad desktop and sync the data with the WorkPad.
Then I can read the lecture notes anywhere and it is lighter and smaller than a laptop. Cool.
The only thing that bother me is the battery life. It is using 2 AAA batteries and don’t last very long. I cannot leave home without spare batteries.
Borrowed a PalmIII, bought a Palm M105 and a keyboard, used it for quite some time – WordSmith actually is an eccellent wordprocessor. Then I was fortunate enough to get a Sony Clie PEG-N770 and a keyboard – you know the ones driven by a 33Mhz Dragonball, featuring DSP for MP3 and a MS slot … I used it for wordprocessing and as MP3 player until I bought an iRiver IPF-799 – now-a-days i most use it for storing passwords and logins and to remind me of birthdays (HappyDays are a wonderfull application).
I’ve recently used one of those modern PocketPC PDAs and my impression was: What a piece of shit this proprietary Microseft system is. PalmOS does the job fine.