Like many of you, I used a Palm device back in the day. This was back in 1998 when mobile phones were only good for making phone calls, when unlimited Internet service was unheard of, and a personal organizer was normally made of paper. I remember the days of the green backlit device, with the graffiti handwriting recognition system, and that shark game to teach you how to use it. I loved that shark game.
I remember when a color screen was something those Handspring Visors had, while Palm purists used monochrome and liked it! This was long before Microsoft came on the scene with their “Windows Mobile” platform and in those wild days you could find an application that would do almost anything you wanted, and long as it wasn’t too processor intensive. I remember being jealous of the guy three cubes over: he got the new Palm VII and could access the network wirelessly to sync his email. And I also remember how I convinced the IT manager that I really needed that Handspring Visor Prism, and not just so I could play solitaire in color.
Using a palm device in the early days was a lot like when computers where just being developed. You had a few other options, and maybe some clones that got bought out and folded into other companies as time went on. People were writing homebrew applications, turning their PDA’s into TV remotes, and controlling their house lights with them. I’ll admit to using mine to roll dice for the weekly table gaming sessions, once I convince the DM that it wasn’t a cheat.
And then phones started to have more and more features. The Ipaq came onto the scene, with a larger screen and some pretty flashy gizmos. I had a wifi compact flash card for mine, and a sleeve you could slide onto the device that would turn it into a GPS with turn by turn instructions. But the PDA’s days were numbered by then and even though my Palm could sense it, she probably didn’t know she’d be dead a decade later. There was that new thing people were starting to talk about, the huckleberry or something, but no one saw it as a threat, right?
And we see now that Palm has struggled in years past, trying to remain relevant when everyone has email on their phone, a contact list with everything there is to know about your associates, your friends, your family. I remember right before CES this year, Devin and Peter mocking the fact that Palm was hosting a press conference to make a big announcement. I’m actually glad for Palm. I hope that they can turn things around and make get some of that old magic back, when they were running the show and if you weren’t Palm OS compatible, you were outta luck.
Godspeed you, Palm OS.
I ever use Palm III, It very good to support my work at that time.
Palm Tungsten was the real breakthrough…I had one…never found anything like it again….the titanium body really mattered.
http://www.livbit.com
I loved that device…still have it in an office desk drawer and ocassionally take it out to look at it and marvel at its design and how helpful it was.
I still have my Handspring Visor Platinum (yeah, I needed the extra mhz!) in one of my drawers somewhere.
I used to sell PDAs at a major electronics retailer back in the day. I loved the things.
The funny thing is, while I knew everything about them at the time… I didn’t own one because my meager salary couldn’t afford one. I wanted one of the Handsprings though… that expansion port had some awesome stuff available for it. I worked with a guy who had the Prism and the Sprint Cellphone expansion for it and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Of course these days, I sort of *have* a PDA. It’s my iPod Touch. Because, let’s face it, the iPod Touch is just a PDA pretending to be a music player.
(And you totally forgot that the first color palm was the IIIc, which came out before Handspring’s Prism did).
That was a fantastic trip down memory lane! My first PDA was a Casio with a dedicated portion of the screen for data entry. Then I got my job working tech support for small businesses in town … and with it came my first Palm III. That thing was amazing! I learned Graffiti in a weekend, and then that was my preferred method of input for all my PDAs since then. Of course, now my xv6700 smartphone has a hardware keyboard, so I never use the “Block Recognizer” option anymore. (How did Microsoft swing that, anyway?)
Thanks for the memories, Dave. Nice work.
The memories… Sniffle.
I had the 1mb PalmPilot Professional (back when it was still owned by US Robotics). It lasted 4 years before getting run over by a car. Only piece of tech gadgetry (outside of stereo) that was as useful at 4 years old as it was when I got it.
I moved on to a Handspring Visor, Tungsten T, and Tungsten T5.
Palm dug their own grave many years ago. When Blackberry was first on the market, had palm put out a ‘me-too’ device with push email, everyone would still be using PalmOS. However, they made the conscious decision that no one wanted push email and that was the beginning of the end.