I liked PalmOS, but I want to give a shoutout specifically to WebOS, which I felt was ahead of its time, both in concept and execution, in terms of what it could do and its potential. An entire OS built around web technologies, has not only proven to be something people would have gravitated toward (given the prevalence of React Native, NativeScript, Ionic et. al.), I also felt it looked beautiful and for its time, it was very snappy.
Unfortunately, it took them too long to acknowledge and figure out touchscreens, and by then they had dwindled their capital to such a point that a buyout was their only hope of surviving at any rate, and their touch screen phone never shipped. HP buying them out was the worst thing that could have happened, they had no resolve to sustain the phone market, which was and is incredibly competitive. I do feel though, with sustained investment and prioritization, that WebOS could have supplanted Android, particularly if they licensed it (which I think was ultimately what Palm needed to do. Their hardware was never the secret sauce).
FireFox OS was also a valiant attempt at something similar, but Mozilla couldn't quite get it where it needed to be, unfortunately.
disclosure: this is a very biased take, very much my opinions, but I look forward to discussion!
EDIT: To clarify, what I mean by 'figuring out touchscreens' is using one as the primary modality of interaction, sans any hardware inputs (like a hardware keyboard). For instance, the Pre had a touch screen, but no onscreen keyboard, so to type anything into it, you had to slide up the screen.
I'll second this. WebOS was conceptually way ahead of its time compared to contemporary versions of iOS, etc. A lot of its UI paradigms (switching apps as cards, etc.) ended up being adopted later by the big names as well. Just not ready to pivot that hard as a company and carrying a ton of legacy baggage as a brand at that point.
Windows Phone was similar. Superior product (not just technically--in usability testing too), but late to the party and lacking cultural caché considering its parent company.
And multiple reboots on the SDK requiring throwing away perfectly working code, broken promises on which devices would get 8.1, broken yet again for 10, eventually driving away even the more hardcore advocates among us.
Now what is left is an anemic team trying to push WinUI/WinAppSDK, while pretending all of that didn't happen, and that the developer community is still willing to put up with it.
That too. WP7 brought the premise of the amazing UX to the table and then the 7 -> 8.1 -> 10 stuff was a mess for the devs who still did want to invest.
Though I'm not sure how much users noticed that fiasco (my SO didn't) and honestly, even when WP7 was getting updates and looked healthy it was pulling teeth to get companies to make a 3rd app.
Windows Phone had the best UX of any of the mobile operating systems, it was something I could hand to a user who'd never had a smart phone before, and it was much more intuitive for them - they could figure it out without help.
Sadly they never got enough market share (or perhaps investment by MS to pay for third party apps to get developed) to get the pool of Applications needed to attract users, which is unfortunate.
The one side effect of the 'easy to newcomers' UX, was experienced users had to forget a bit about what they knew about how a mobile device was supposed to work to use it - thats not a huge barrier, but I suspect it also made adoption by existing power users a little slower.
IMO your last line there really hits the nail on the head with what I saw both on the ground and in the data.
Windows Phone was absolutely crushing it with first-time smartphone adopters, but for folks switching it was tougher, because WP didn't use depend on the whole "grid of siloed apps" concept as much. If you'd already used an iPhone, it took a second to unlearn.
And considering anyone making smartphone apps in 2010 was still on the early-adopter side of the curve--they'd already experienced that way of using a phone. There were still a lot of first-timers in the following 5 years, but the folks at the agencies and companies making the software weren't them.
No this... was not true. I did extensive usability testing on MetroUI and it confused users as it lacked visual cues, had massive homogeny issues between functions, and lacked visual differentiation enough to let me remember where anything was.
Hate it or love it, skumorphism educated billions on how to use a smartphone -- no one else even came close.
One of the key people of Palm and WebOS Matias Duarte [1] [2] [3] used to head up Android and Google Material design from what I remember, and a lot of the WebOS concepts are in Android now.
WebOS still might be ahead of it's time depending on how it's looked at.
An entire mobile, responsive, offline first operating system which was almost entirely HTML/Javascript based. Running a phone and a tablet.
In 2009. [2] It was too bad they missed the window when iPhone launched, a good case study in missing the timing when the product was actually pretty good. Palm had the headstart on touch screens.
In 2012, the open version of webOS ran as an Android. [3]
The touch was pretty good too.
I had a Palm Pre Plus that I picked up for $30 in 2010.
Thing booted in seconds, had multi-tasking that looked like magic to iphone users, and had a swappable battery that got a lot of hate at the time for only lasting 1 day of prolonged use (with up to 2 weeks of standby).
I could bring a couple spare batteries on a trip and never need to charge my phone.
I edited my comment to clarify, however to do so here:
what I mean is they didn't adopt the touchscreen paradigms, such as onscreen keyboards. The Pre required you to use the hardware keyboard, and had no virtual keyboard functionality built in. It lead to some odd interaction patterns.
My recollection - which could be wrong - is that Palm did pivot to pure multi-touch interactions but it was never released, as HP largely gave up on the phone market by that time.
It was a more usable, and actually usable NewtonOS.
Lots that can be learned from it today still. When horsepower wasn't cheap, the device and OS had to focus on something and that was actually assisting with productivity.
IMHO The notification experience on WebOS was still way better than we get from android or iOS today. It was an absolute blast to write apps for as well.
I love how it prioritized the bottom of the screen as the place to interact with the phone. It still doesn't make sense to have all of that stuff anchored to the top of the screen like in all the modern phones. They really thought through things and I am really bummed it all ended up dead.
I was a Palm holdout into close to 2013. They weren't capable of the same range of things that a modern Android smartphone is, but it genuinely felt that someone had put time and effort into making the absolute best experience out of what they _could_ do.
On the Treo 650, for instance, making a call meant hitting Send (a hard key) from anywhere in the UI, typing a name to start a live search - you did not need to focus into a text box first - and hitting Send again to start the call. Likewise, if I wanted to send a text message, I'd hit the SMS button, start typing a name, hit Select to open that conversation, and then start typing the message. The device had a touchscreen, but for the most common activities, you didn't need it.
The 650 did not have built-in Wi-Fi, but with the Enfora Wi-Fi Sled and Opera Mobile, Web browsing was actually a decent experience. Likewise, I had some basic networked apps like AIM on there.
Before the 650, I had a Handspring Visor and the VisorPhone attachment. The VisorPhone was way ahead of its time, but what finally killed that for me was a side effect of Palm devices not having memory protection. If someone sent me an MMS message, the entire thing would immediately freeze (it had no MMS support, and didn't handle receiving one gracefully). I'd have to take the batteries out to reset it. As more and more people did this, it became a more frequent occurrence.
PalmOS still does a few things much better than any smartphone does.
The integrated calendar and todo list that was Datebk6 is simply unmatched on any platform, and I looked for a long time.
One of the key benefits of it was using a hard key to instantly open the calendar, with the cursor in the to-do list. The hard key was so good that you could almost entirely capture tasks on a phone in realtime while walking around.
If it sounds strange to talk about to-do's and calendars in the same app, a todo is just a task that happens to occur at a point in time on a calendar. Some don't have that time pre-scheduled. Having a list of to-dos that followed you every day if not completed wasn't a common task.
I'm curious if you could speak to this a bit more, I've had an itch to build something like this on the backburner for many moons.
My initial guiding instinct is roughly the same, hard to word without inviting caveats, but: todos/calendar are the same thing as I'm going about my day. Either I'm doing something, or I want to know what I should be doing.
> Having a list of to-dos that followed you every day if not completed wasn't a common task.
This bit went over my head: is the idea that it was rare to have a todo _without_ a date, so it wasn't a common thing to have ex. 20 todos without dates rolling over day to day cluttering up the UI?
Haha, me too. I avoided it even though building a todo list is a right of passage.
The main thing most task or calendar apps have failed on for me is when tasks and calendars are completely unaware of the other.
It’s fair that all software has an origin story and resulting product arc, and solves a problem in a certain way. Still, a calendar that integrated tasks and calendar well is elusive.
Honestly, trying the app is the best way as another post has said. The author may still be pretty accessible, I still remember my interactions with him I becoming a customer.
My belief is everything is a todo. Including calendar bookings. It becomes a task when it’s scheduled and completed. From a calendar view when you check a task becomes the date and time it would have been listed on a. Calendar.
Happy to chat offline, maybe there’s something here now.
I don’t know if it’s an instinct thing. Entering thousands of tasks and completing them in lots of different apps helps though. I get the feeling I may not be the only one who’s tried to find something.
DateBk6’s todo feature was a little sublime, and configurable.
If you had a task today you didn’t complete it would push over until tomorrow. This was entirely uncommon. It could be placed at the top of the list the next day, etc.
Practicing GTD to DateBk6 remains the most productive combo I’ve ever used. Android, iPhone, Windows mobile has never come close. Too many taps ands magical pageantry filled gestures just to open an app and add a task. With palm it was just a button. I had set mine to press was fn+Calendar.
Maybe someone can built a phone case with a few shortcut buttons on it. For a while I used an Android app that detected fingerprints on the back. Different finger to launch different apps was handy.
Todos without a date could be just batched/contextualized work you have to do, gtd style during a time block. For example longer emails.
There is an app called Motion you may have seen ads for that is starting to do some interesting things in this area.
Watching swimming and listening to experiences on swimming might not be the best way to learn how to swim, literally and figuratively in a problem space.
It’s hard to know where the currents in the water might be and how to navigate them.
Experiencing todos that roll over would show up pretty quick in using DateBk6 in an emulator. Install it and try to use it every day. There might be a video on YouTube.
After PalmOS, for a while I actually bought any mobile device I could get a PalmOS emulator on to for DateBk6 while I looked for a replacement. It was only so good on an emulator though for day to day use.
I’ma product person. Getting “wisdom” from a “passionate user” likely rarely is the same as also experiencing it yourself and ensuring you have more than than a passing interest in the space.
I had the problem of a really busy period in my life in my 20’s that this helped with. It almost was an unfair advantage.
From time to time, I meet other folks who like this topic deeply, only because it helped them learn to not accomplish so much, but maybe have been really effective with their time at a period when it really mattered.
Really you'd want to both try it for yourself and get wisdom from somebody else. Otherwise, how would you know if they were right/wrong, correct/incorrect?
I never had the WiFi sled, but I remember feeling this way when I used my 650 in the car, plugged into the aux audio input, to stream 128kbps music from Shoutcast servers via some media player I've since forgotten (it aped the Winamp interface, but wasn't a port if I remember correctly).
This was at a time when folks I knew were getting XM radio, but for the cost of the data plan I was already paying for (only a $10/mo addon for unlimited!) I could listen to hundreds of stations. I even ran a Shoutcast server from home so I could listen to my music collection on shuffle as a sort of bespoke radio station.
So I had one of these and loved it so much, but then I switched to an, early-ish, iPhone, perhaps the 3G one, after playing with a couple early-ish androids. The iPhone was just so much better, generally, even if I lost the parts of the Treo that appealed to the more "nerdy" or tinkerer parts of me.
I think this was a lesson for me on how important UI is to mass-market devices. The Treo had so much going on for it, but most of the things you describe, most people would describe as awkward to use. Worse, the hardware keyboard meant the screen would always be smaller than an iPhone. I think the earliest Androids were marketed as "still has a keyboard" and that didn't really last. No one cared other than die-hards.
Downloading apps from random websites wasn't fun either. The app stores make a lot of sense in general, but moreso in mobile.
I also learned most times I'm forced to be a "tinkerer" by the industry, when most times I just want stuff to "just work" so I can choose what to tinker with. Oh, my win10 wont update to win11 because I need to redo the boot type and install a TPM chip on my old motherboard? That's not fun tinkering, that's annoying. The same way all the little things about the Treo or other less polished tech were like that. The game or novel I'm writing? That's fun tinkering.
It was also a lesson for me on how if you want to sell a mass-market product, the geeky, super-efficient, nerd-culture wisdom, etc stuff is a liability, not an asset. A lot of Apple wins is because someone said "this is too nerdy, get rid of it, abstract it away, make it easy, pretend you're a stressed out executive in a hurry." That model just gets sales and then that becomes our new default.
Apple is trying this in VR too, but Meta seems to already Apple-ized its current gen of headsets. Its a very Apple-like experience. I think that's hurting it. Ignoring the price issues, I can get "apple" from Meta already. They're several years too late. Apple, reportedly or rumored, cancelled its electric car program probably because groups like Tesla and others have already "Apple-ized" the car.
I'm not sure what areas Apple can attack now. We've all learned Apple's lesson.
I don't think Apple agrees with you that Meta has made headsets Apple-ized. Apple's idea with headsets is that you're basically never in a black VR void. Nobody has done that except Apple.
You're probably right about cars to a point, but I believe there the main problem is that Apple no longer believes self-driving cars under all situations that are safer than humans are achievable with current tech.
I think there are creature comfort areas Apple can work on, definitely, but I was very surprised at how Apple-like the experience of the Quest was, from unboxing to the UI. Especially coming from a Vive/Steam combo which is a bit of a technical Rube Goldberg machine and expects a certain amount of technical skills on top of owning a gaming PC, which is its own barrier to entry, both financially and technical skill-wise.
The bigger issue is that the Meta is just a gaming device while the Vision Pro is being marketed as a productivity device. I think this is where Apple can have success. They could, predictably, be the Apple // to Meta's Colecovision.
I'm trying to avoid sounding overly nostalgic about Palm OS but it really was a nice personal computer.
This snippet highlights the focus on UX (beyond the look and feel!), and as creators I think many of us can relate to (and maybe remind others...) how great products require deliberate care in design AND implentation.
> The user interface received particular scrutiny. Hawkins set firm limits that any slow operation be reworked instead of showing a busy indicator, and explicit error messages should be avoided. Graffiti was a given because handwriting had to work, as no physical keyboard would have fit at the time. Mindful of how unusual such a device would be to many users, Ed Colligan declared that Touchdown should “delight the customer,” and developer Rob Haitani established a design theory he grandly christened the “Zen of Palm"
Palm was incredible. Enyo, webOS, the list is a long one. It's hard to overstate Palm's effect on handhelds, how they successfully challenged Blackberry to the benefit of both companies, and the tragedy of its demise[1]. Jon Rubinstein, Palm's creator, is bitter about its fate to this day.
I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with my Palm TX, dutifully logging my thoughts and ideas on the two thousand mile walk from Georgia (USA) to Maine, saving them to a tiny SSD, then beaming them all to a journal when I hit a wifi spot in a town library or somewhere.
I still think back on that thing, and the absolutely AWESOME folding keyboard I had for it (2 oz, smaller than a pack of cigarettes folded up, folded out into a rigid keyboard that had a tray for the Palm, really useful typing on your elbows on the floor of a tent). It was a full commodity computing environment: calculator, cached wikipedia, word processor, email, pdf maps/guidebooks/almanacs. Honestly, if you added Maps to that thing, I would still use it today, no question.
Palm was - once Elevation Partners sucked all of the cash from the place - hoovered into the giant value-destroying machine of HP, where it promptly died, as do all things that enter HP post-HPUX.
[1] The moral of which: "Do Not Trust Private Equity. Ever"
You're right that Palm was fighting against Blackberry and it made each of them better. But Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft were laser-focused on one another's products. Then Apple came in and did something so out of left field they were caught with their pants down. What do you mean we need a GPU to render transitions?
Primitive as they were, Palm OS devices were amazingly fast. Some programs pushed the envelope too far, so their slowness relegated them to proof of concept - but the bread and butter applications offered instant interaction: my lowly Pilot 1000 was absolutely snappy, switching from calendar to agenda and searching among my contacts - never a perceptible delay and no unnecessary user manipulation... Optimized ! A similar feeling when migrating from 3270 forms to HTML forms: infinitely more functional, but still - some of the "all business and not one unnecessary gram" streamlined optimum got lost along the way.
I miss my Palm Pilot 1000, I miss my Treo 650. I know they don't do a hundredth of what my cheap Android does - but I'm nostalgic nevertheless.
Palm OS never got the respect it deserved IMO. I had a Palm device in 2003 which had a camera, app support, and audio/video playback. The Palm Treo line existed in 2002 too, and that added cellular connectivity to the mix.
Apple gets a lot of credit for pulling the idea of a modern idea of a smartphone out of thin air, but if you look at the interface of even the earliest Palm devices almost a decade earlier, so much of it was right there.
Granted, Apple’s Newton was there before Palm, too, and that work fed into the iPod and iPhone designs. I think it’s a great lesson in how some ideas need time to gel – in this case, you needed multiple generations of improvements on the hardware to get not only viable CPUs but also things like screens with accurate and responsive digitizers to make the UI feel right. PalmOS had some nice features but it was also an old design with unprotected memory so it crashed enough to be annoying and even when the mobile CPUs were ready the software was a huge undertaking.
On the social side, we also needed a big shift in usage. When the Palm or Newton designs were being made, wireless networking wasn’t common the way it is now and especially people weren’t used to using software the way we take for granted now. Email was a novelty for most people, business documents were exchanged physically, and mobile gaming was a kid’s pastime. The big thing which made the iPhone 1 so appealing was that everyone had spent the previous decade finding things they wanted to do on the web and then you could take that with you anywhere. People who were looking at the traditional PDA usage thought it’d fail since it didn’t have a Blackberry keyboard.
Apple doesn't deserve credit for inventing the smartphone the same way Palm doesn't deserve the credit for inventing the touch-based PDA, but both companies made products that hit the perfect spot - the Palm was much cheaper than the Newton and the Zoomer, aiming much lower, and proved to be just enough computer to carry around. The iPhone was far less capable than a Windows CE (or a Palm) phone back then, but was a joy to use (unlike its competition).
I switched back to PalmOS for my daily mobile computing a couple of years ago, so I think I've given it time for the nostalgia effect to wear off. It's still incredibly fun and absolutely doable.
To the article's point, what we do with modern devices today is just another iteration of what these do. For the average modern app/SaaS, there's a very often a Palm app that did the same thing in 2002.
There's also still active exploration in the Palm space (ARM board swaps, new expansion modules for the Visor, apps in-dev from several folks including myself).
There was even an external GPS module that you could get for the Palm (using offline maps that you could sync). I felt so cyberpunkish carrying the combo around and navigating cities on foot with directions -- basically what anyone can do today with Google Maps on their phone, but this was over twenty years ago!
Wow, that’s cool! Can you share a bit more details about your day to day usage of Palm? Are you using any third-party apps? If yes, where did you get them? Do you sync your palm with your PC?
Sure thing! Third party apps yes (see: palmdb.net), but obviously not typical 3rd party services (no Spotify, etc.).
I mostly use a few models of Handspring Visor, typically grayscale, so not even the latest OS. Visor Edge for something as thin and sleek as a modern phone. Visor Neo if I want expandability (similar to pg6-7 in the Ars article). There's a fun module that adds both more memory and a vibrate motor for alarms, but I'll swap that out for a camera or mp3 module at times. Charge or swap batteries once or twice a month.
Common tasks:
* Notes, To Dos, Contacts, Calendar (excellent stock calendar, per @j45 above)
* Alarms & Reminders (stock + Diddlebug, which lets you draw/write notes w/ a timer)
* Offline browsing (Plucker can crawl pages and sync them)
* Weather (note: cached on sync because my Palm doesn't have wifi)
* Calorie tracking
* Games (we have a Wordle port!)
* Longform writing - I have a foldable keyboard and usually use plaintext, but there are word processing apps that save to HTML if you want. I also often write on an Alphasmart Neo, which can IR beam back and forth with the Palm and PC.
* Personal project tracking/flows
* Photos (technically video too, but only have 8MB memory for everything)
I have newer PDAs too that can natively handle things like voice recording, cameras, video playback, etc., but I really like the grayscale ones. A late Clié like a VZ90 or some of the others in this thread will have more bells and whistles (even OLED!).
Note also that all of the above is a more manual process than modern phones (and more manual today than it was then, because Outlook supported Palms in 2002 unlike now). If you use Google Calendar I think you can still sync, but if there's an important work meeting that I want in my pocket in addition to the laptop--I do the little ritual of adding it myself.
I commend your dedication, but the ability to interact with the physical world is essential to a modern smartphone. How does an old Palm device offer alternative routes when driving?
Sony CLIÉ were my choice of Palm devices. Hi-resolution (double), better colour, better screens, better system apps. Crazy hardware design, cyberdecks with so much personality, a far cry from what we have today. And one CLIÉ device that perhaps inspired the iPhone, the TH55, as both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were fans.
I miss how production focused those applications were. There's some really good apps on F-Droid, but it's clear those apps come from a different community. PalmOS apps were for people trying to automate the boring or laborious bits of a working day at an office, F-droid productivity apps are for programmers on HN ;)
The Palm III's and V's and later Treo's were amazing for their time. The simplicity and minimalism of the applications resulted in some of the best productivity I've ever had.
Here's another from Samsung at the very end of PalmOS's life that probably deserved more recognition as a startlingly effective PDA and phone:
Fun little devices, really outgrew its origins as a business organiser to the point that a 13 year old me demanded one. Sure, I had a Gameboy, but I wanted a portable computer with real programs, dammit!
I still have my Zire 31. Some day I will take it out of the drawer and savour the remains of my neglected island civilisation in Village Sim, before jumping into a spaceship and trading highly profitable goods in Space Trader. Then I'll enjoy some low bitrate YouTube rips in Kinoma Video, the few I could cram onto the 64MB SD card...
There were on-device development systems for Palm as well. I remember playing with Chipmunk Basic that even had access to some UI elements so you could have working buttons and dialogue boxes in your programs.
The opening line strikes a nerve... gadgets really are no longer fun. Everything has been virtualized and abstracted away into a sleek, inoffensive, but boring rectangle we are forced to carry around everywhere.
I got the out-of-print book Piloting Palm as research for my book. You can get a used copy for about $9. (it's co-written by David Pogue, the guy you see on PBS all the time)
Shameless self-promotion: This New Internet Thing, by the way, will be free to read in serial form! Just search on Amazon for my pen name "Albert Cory" to pre-order the Kindle version. I actually spoke to Donna Dubinsky and got a "job" for one of my characters.
Palm plays a key role for one of the characters. The context is that "handheld computer" was already a tainted category, after GO, Newton, Momenta, Zoomer, and General Magic had all wasted money and failed to catch fire.
Everyone insisted that you had to have wireless communication, and you had to recognize cursive. Jeff Hawkins had the guts to defy that, and focus on the price and the form factor, period. He gave up on cursive and gambled that people would use Grafiti. Saying "no" to features is one of the hardest things in tech.
These days it's fashionable to say that your database is not an app integration interface, but imo Palm OS did this right. Having a single, omnipresent DB with published schema for important PIM databases was a pretty great thing for apps operating on common data, or just structured data in general.
It's taken sqlite's ubiquity for the benefits of an always-available platform DBMS to become well-known again, but the common tables paradigm has only come back in an ad-hoc way (eg addressbook and calendar in Android).
It was also pretty cool how they included the original versions of all the built-in PIM apps as sample code in their SDK. It meant that there was a huge amount of "Datebook+" or "Memos+" type apps that was just the built-in app plus some handy features the developer wanted themselves, without the developer having to re-invent the wheel (culminating in some fantastic advanced apps like Datebk4)
I'm a bit disappointed that this discussion thread has mostly been about nostalgia (which is great) and not the technical details TFA brings up. Really curious about the "everything is a database" concept and how it contrasts with other operating systems. Based on the article it sounds like the choice to design Palm OS like that was because of "strongly influenced by the classic Mac OS," and for "computing memory consumption"?
First, apps had no filesystem available, only a database which they could use as a datastore. It was not a particularly powerful or fancy database, everything had to be done via the C++ API rather than a query language IIRC. But it simplified app development quite a bit and made the apps smaller and more robust.
Second, there was a set of common tables available to all apps that provided the basic PIM data, including addresses, calendar, todo, email and notes. This meant that third party apps could safely interoperate with this data alongside the builtin apps and extend functionality.
Wish they had talked a bit more my favorite Palm OS device, the Tapwave Zodiac. It had a nice big screen, was very durable, and while the game selection wasn't exactly robust, it was still fun.
And it worked just fine as a Palm OS device. Played video quite well too. It was an excellent machine all around.
I still have my Tungsten E2 with the WiFi SD card, though the WiFi only works with WEP. I kept a crappy old WiFi router with WEP on it as a bridge just to allow the Tungsten to connect for a long time.
I had a Treo 650 before I had an iPhone and always thought of the iPhone as an evolution, not a revolution. The reason that I switched was that I was mainly using Mac OS X on the desktop at that time, so using iPhone OS (as it was called then) as a companion was kind of a no-brainer.
However, in hindsight, even more than Palm OS I actually miss Pocket PC.
I don't agree actually, having used various mobile devices, including a Palm III, Jornada 548, Visor Pro, and the Samsung Blackjack 1 and 2. Sure, they had some nice features (and gimmicks) but the ease of use outside of the basic PIM apps left much to be desired, the screens were mediocre at best, and mobile web browsers on Pocket PC and the Blackjacks were at best good only for checking news/weather. I still remember watching the iPhone keynote livestream and being absolutely blown away, only settling for the Samsung because my parents didn't want to splurge (probably for the best, as I lost the 1 and got a 2 as the replacement). In my second year of college I lucked out and a friend sold me her iPhone with a shattered front glass, and with a bit of surgery I repaired it and used it until the launch of the 3GS. After that I never looked back (well, now I collect vintage PDAs so that's not /entirely/ true heh).
Don't get me wrong the other devices were (and are!) fun to tinker with, but for something I use every day and depend on like a phone I just want it to work.
Of course web browsing was “inferior” compared to an iPhone, but the Jornada also got released 7 years earlier. You could argue that the web itself wasn’t really useable beyond checking the news and weather back then (not saying it is today, but that’s another story).
Also keep in mind that iPhone OS didn’t even have downloadable apps initially.
I loved being able to go a month without charging or changing batteries. I don’t know if there is currently anything on the market than can run for a month on its own.
PalmOS was a decently civilized platform to develop against. I remember using the CodeWarrior IDE to build a little portable app for managing parking meters. Using XModem over RS-232 you could update the machines' configuration, download transaction records, etc.
We were using the HP-95X before that, and the Tandy 102 even earlier. The Palm was a sexy modern alternative to those clunky platforms.
I had a Handspring Neo and organized the heck out of my life with it. Read books, played games, kept things organized, etc. Had a 128MB CF card extension on it, so it had "infinite memory" for that time.
Then I got a Palm LifeDrive for the fun of it, however I had a smartphone at that time, it was just a retrocomputing device.
Handspring Visor was THE BEST. The cartridge expansion ("Springboard" slot) was great. The unit was relatively affordable to begin with and was easy to tinker with. Once I had gotten it online by a series of like 3 or 4 cables and adapters from Handspring to my Motorola Startac, connecting to the GPRS network. It wasn't fast, but for simple text applications (email, AIM, etc) it worked.
Also I had an uber powerful IR Blaster (that could also learn any remote) that was great for terrorizing my father. Good times.
I loved Palm since my first, the IIIe SE and have had many of their other later devices too. I was even invited to the launch party of the Zire 71 with it's cool slide out mechanism! Oh and the Tungsten|T when it could finally play MP3s was very neat, and another sliding mechanism making it more compact. Ah memories, well back to my non-distinctive slab of glass.
I was also interested in the Sony CLIÉ's running PalmOS but never tried one. And of course the Psion's also seemed really cool but never landed its way in my hands.
I always felt that graffiti/jot got the 'return' gesture wrong, it should always be a down stroke followed by a leftwards stroke, which IIRC both MacOS X's and Windows Pen both used.
Toward the end I was using PalmOS almost exclusively with fingertip input rather than a stylus.
The 5-way navigator on newer devices is still arguably better than anything we have on modern smartphones; you could page through Launcher categories using the hardware button, select an app using up/down left/right and open it with the center button. You could even navigate the menus without touching the screen at all. Much of the UI could be interacted with this way.
There was even a third-party keyboard which was somewhat usable without a stylus (although best in landscape mode).
But the iPhone brought capacitive multitouch to the table and changed everything. Even discounting the multitouch (eg pinch-to-zoom) features, it was lightyears ahead in terms of sensitivity and precision. There was just no comparison!
Wow. I chanced upon the existence of the Tandy Zoomer this past year while browsing vintage PDA videos on YouTube. Compared to the Atari Portfolio, the HP 200LX, the Handspring Visor, and of course the PalmPilot, there's hardly any videos about it at all. Had no idea it was Jeff Hawkins' first device that led to the founding of Palm!
I started with a Palm V, then a Zire 72, then finally a Treo 700p. Everything just worked and Graffiti was remarkably easy to use (its replacement wasn't). But ultimately, the Treo couldn't keep up with the iPhone and (later) Android. I bought the original Motorola Droid but was disappointed when OS updates stopped so early and went for an iPhone once 4G was available. Continuing innovation requires a lot of resources and there aren't many places where that's the case.
What would be the selling point for a non-phone, non-Android standalone PDA today?
I'm trying hard to imagine what it could do, but drawing a blank. It wouldn't be meaningfully smaller or lighter than a phone, it would be bigger than a smartwatch, and it wouldn't have any of the apps that people are used to.
The bar for PDA software is considerably higher than in 1997. Even just a calendar needs cloud integrations and instant smart search and whatever. Email is a much bigger can of worms.
Developing that software suite on a non-Android platform seems like a lot of work for something that would still leave many users disappointed to find features missing.
I still have my Visor, VisorPhone, Treo 270, Treo 600, Treo 650 in a drawer somewhere :) I had a Palm Pré too, but the USB connector died after 5 years...
Unfortunately, it took them too long to acknowledge and figure out touchscreens, and by then they had dwindled their capital to such a point that a buyout was their only hope of surviving at any rate, and their touch screen phone never shipped. HP buying them out was the worst thing that could have happened, they had no resolve to sustain the phone market, which was and is incredibly competitive. I do feel though, with sustained investment and prioritization, that WebOS could have supplanted Android, particularly if they licensed it (which I think was ultimately what Palm needed to do. Their hardware was never the secret sauce).
FireFox OS was also a valiant attempt at something similar, but Mozilla couldn't quite get it where it needed to be, unfortunately.
disclosure: this is a very biased take, very much my opinions, but I look forward to discussion!
EDIT: To clarify, what I mean by 'figuring out touchscreens' is using one as the primary modality of interaction, sans any hardware inputs (like a hardware keyboard). For instance, the Pre had a touch screen, but no onscreen keyboard, so to type anything into it, you had to slide up the screen.
reply