[HN Gopher] Palm OS and the devices that ran it
___________________________________________________________________
Palm OS and the devices that ran it
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-04-25 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| moolcool wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway74354 wrote:
| Handspring documentary by the Verge had an interesting
| perspective on the matter:
| https://youtu.be/b9_Vh9h3Ohw?start=773
|
| (I'm bad at cropping YouTube videos. The part in question is
| [12:53 - 14:30])
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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).
| j45 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Apple does deserve credit for making the best device ever for
| beginners.
|
| Apple is very good at making things for beginners who are not
| super technical.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| These were truly ground breaking devices. I miss palm os and wish
| they didn't wait until Apple ate their lunch.
|
| The then ceo Ed colligan said something to the effect of, "how
| are the music player people going to make cell phones?"
|
| And the rest is history.
| gelstudios wrote:
| 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"
| HeckFeck wrote:
| 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...
| alexisread wrote:
| If you'd been able to buy a Psion 3 (or even better 5) you'd
| have got your wish, they came with OPL to write on the device
| :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| metabagel wrote:
| I immediately looked for a comment on Space Trader. What a fun
| game that was! I feel like FTL is a direct descendant.
|
| I retired to my own moon a couple of times at least.
| brnt wrote:
| Tossing my Zire 31 is one of those things I still regret.
| navjack27 wrote:
| I love and miss the Dragonball era of Palm devices. Before arm.
| Very cool devices.
| lycos wrote:
| 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 CLIE'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.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Clie was quite good, first 320x320 device I got back then
| uxjw wrote:
| I loved the Clie for the built-in camera. Not sure that the
| quality was much better than the old Sony cameras with built-in
| floppy disk drives though.
| etimberg wrote:
| I remember buying a used Zire 72 off a friend in highschool. Was
| a great device; I think I still have it sitting in a box
| somewhere
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
|
| I still miss Palm. They were _so_ good.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| 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.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I actually had a Jornada 548 as well!
|
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| 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 ;)
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "their touch screen phone never shipped"_
|
| 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
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| My Handspring Visor from the year 2000 also had a touchscreen
| (with a stylus)
| wifipunk wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| Not only did it have a swappable battery, it also had
| wireless charging eight years before the iPhone.
| skyyler wrote:
| Magnetically aligned wireless charging, at that!
| Something that the iPhone only got a few years ago.
| ckz wrote:
| 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 cache considering its parent company.
|
| I'm also biased though. :)
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| ckz wrote:
| 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| ckz wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| Remember how MS gave you a EUR$100 to publish _anything_
| on their app store?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, killing XNA in the process.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| I agree that WebOS was cool, but the article is entirely about
| Palm's _much_ earlier OS with its earliest history actually
| beginning in the late 80 's.
| j45 wrote:
| PalmOS is worth it's own focus for sure.
|
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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]
|
| [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...
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| 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.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I feel the pad is the modern pda, but it has been stuffed too
| much and is usually too large and heavy.
|
| Do we have a modern non iOS non Android (Android's app env is a
| disaster) product?
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Battery life?
|
| If modest cpu, lightweight OS + e-paper screen, for example.
|
| Oh wait... that's e-reader territory. _Could_ make for a nice
| tablet alternative though, if coupled with a decent library
| of apps.
| pavlov wrote:
| But where do the apps come from, if not Android?
|
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
| ckz wrote:
| 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).
|
| Happy to provide recommendations.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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!
| sintezcs wrote:
| 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?
| ckz wrote:
| 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 Clie 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.
| philistine wrote:
| 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?
| sirtaj wrote:
| 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).
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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"?
| sirtaj wrote:
| The "everything is a database" took two forms.
|
| 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.
| liotier wrote:
| 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.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Agreed! To be fair, Androids still don't last more than two
| weeks on a pair of AAA batteries though!
| j45 wrote:
| Still, what the palm did it did with a lot of focus on helping
| users be more productive.
| billfor wrote:
| 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.
| crims0n wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| don-code wrote:
| 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.
| lou2ser wrote:
| Wow, never thought I'd see Enfora mentioned in a thread in
| 2024. I worked there for a year or so, supporting those early
| GPRS cards.
|
| I remember sending ICQ messages to friends while sitting in
| traffic on I-635. It was kinda unbelievable to be online in a
| car
| soylentcola wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Enfora was great.
|
| GPRS not so much! It did give a taste of the future and a
| good headstart to think about things to learn to recognize
| the iPhone/App Store moment.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| DateBk6... Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Homepage is still up :)
|
| http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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?
| msephton wrote:
| Just try the app for yourself.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Datebk6 on Palm OS? Is "just" the right word? :)
|
| Let's say I find a PalmOS emulator, pirate a system
| image, pirate Datebk6, put in some dummy data.
|
| Could that explain what the post meant re: commonality of
| having todos rollover?
|
| I don't think so. That's not a function of the software,
| that's a function of a particular use of the software.
|
| Would using it be the same as getting the wisdom from a
| passionate user?
|
| I don't think so. Living with PIM software is such a
| different beast from demoing it.
| msephton wrote:
| 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?
|
| Emulator to run Palm apps on your smart phone
| https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/
|
| Just asking somebody is a very minimum effort approach.
| Reach higher!
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| 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.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| 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.
| causi wrote:
| Back when they actually paid attention to hand-feel. No
| smartphone has ever felt as good in the hand as my Lifedrive or
| Tungsten TX.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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 )
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjysw9VhIM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rNbUiB_PWQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl-53WtBzxA
| sparrish wrote:
| Palm rewired my mind. I still write my upper case 'E' in jot.
| NikkiA wrote:
| 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.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| 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"
| philistine wrote:
| 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?_
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Did you ever use Vindigo to find restaurants near you?
| msephton wrote:
| Sony CLIE 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 CLIE device that perhaps inspired the
| iPhone, the TH55, as both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were fans.
|
| 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.
| glonq wrote:
| 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.
| TomMasz wrote:
| 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.
| wazoox wrote:
| I still have my Visor, VisorPhone, Treo 270, Treo 600, Treo 650
| in a drawer somewhere :) I had a Palm Pre too, but the USB
| connector died after 5 years...
| buescher wrote:
| Omits the very interesting AlphaSmart Dana and Neo devices.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-25 23:02 UTC)