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.
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]
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 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.
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'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?
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...
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"?
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.
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.
[+] [-] no_wizard|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ckz|1 year ago|reply
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.
I'm also biased though. :)
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat%C3%ADas_Duarte
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/1653488/palms-lead-webos-designe...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/matiasduarte/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
[5] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141855-open-webos-can-now...
[+] [-] pavlov|1 year ago|reply
You're perhaps misremembering Palm's webOS hardware. Touch was always part of the platform.
The first device, Palm Pre launched in 2009, had a multitouch screen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre
[+] [-] gunapologist99|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] myvoiceismypass|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] don-code|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lou2ser|1 year ago|reply
I remember sending ICQ messages to friends while sitting in traffic on I-635. It was kinda unbelievable to be online in a car
[+] [-] zoeysmithe|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gelstudios|1 year ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|1 year ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] philistine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] liotier|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gunapologist99|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moolcool|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rbanffy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway74354|1 year ago|reply
(I'm bad at cropping YouTube videos. The part in question is [12:53 - 14:30])
[+] [-] ckz|1 year ago|reply
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).
Happy to provide recommendations.
[+] [-] jhbadger|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sintezcs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] philistine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] msephton|1 year ago|reply
I did some preservation of Palm stuff, lost SEGA games https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2019/04/24/recovered-forgott..., app hacking, and more.
When browsing the Wayback Machine for old Palm apps, it's so interesting to see pretty much all development stop once the iPhone was released.
The original Palm software and user interface design was heavily inspired by the Macintosh.
"Piloting Palm" by Andrea Butter & David Pogue is a great read.
[+] [-] brnt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gunapologist99|1 year ago|reply
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:
https://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=4840
https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/photos.php?p=187
(great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4J3QREiuJ0 )
[+] [-] HeckFeck|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] metabagel|1 year ago|reply
I retired to my own moon a couple of times at least.
[+] [-] alexisread|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] crims0n|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sirtaj|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] kalleboo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deltarholamda|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mactyler|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] steve1977|1 year ago|reply
However, in hindsight, even more than Palm OS I actually miss Pocket PC.
[+] [-] ChickeNES|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
The revolution part was a smartphone for the masses instead of the super interested. It was so easy anyone could use it, and they sure did.
[+] [-] billfor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] glonq|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] causi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|1 year ago|reply
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.
I still miss Palm. They were so good.