[Firmwarrior]

I'd guess they didn't market it well enough

A palm pilot could do most of what people love iPhones for, but the only people who used them were business freaks and super-nerds

[LgWoodenBadger]

My Palm V was grayscale, did not have any wireless outside of some useless IrDa, no audio (music) or video of any kind, no camera, and no web browser.

[Brian_K_White]

My Samsung SPH-I300 had color and audio and internet and browser and basically an app for anything you could imagine just like android or ios today (better, since there was no Apple or Google preventing anyone from making any app they want, or preventing you from installing it), in 2000 or 2001, 7 years before the iphone or android.

Without a keyboard or numpad just a full front face color touch screen, it was a prototype modern style phone. I had email, audible.com app, ebook readers, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client. Vnc & rdp were ractically useless on 14.4k dialup equivalent and 160x240, but it actually physically worked. I had a couple different contacts db to dialer integration apps. Then just the infinite random apps like a netmask calculator, resistor color code calculator, etc. The contacts db had my works entire customer & vendor dbs on the phone while off line by using a simple csv export and the palm desktop synced it to the phone. Full size sd card slot.

It was freaking great. in 2001. iphone and android are 2007

[kragen]

yeah but the palm vii came out the same year, in 01999, and did have mobile internet service and a web browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII but cost more

it wasn't until the handspring treo 180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_Treo (released in 02002) that palmos devices were smartphones. the higher-end models even had color