
USRobotics PalmPilot Personal review - shawndumas
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/01/usrobotics-palmpilot-personal-review/
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kinkora
While the palm pilots was an exceptional device, I had more love for the
Psions (particularly the series 5) if anybody remembers them.

I had a Series 3, Revo and then the 5mx. Each one of those devices had an
excellent battery life (uses AA!) that last for days on heavy usage, myriad of
apps, memory cards, and for the 5mx, a fantastic keyboard.

The only reason why I had to move to a Palm device was because Psion screwed
everything up when the colour screen PDA evolution came along.

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spitfire
I had a IIIx, Vx, M500, Tungsten something and tungsten something+1.

I remember how horrible the SDK was and the hoops you had to jump through to
develop on the thing. It was after all a memory starved, M68K embedded system.

I also remember the fragmentation that was the "app store(s)" of the time. I
feel no sympathy for developers today when they whine the apple app store
isn't $whatever enough for them.

We have it fucking amazing today. Still, it was pretty good times back then.

~~~
necubi
Yeah, I remember (perhaps too fondly) selling software on Handango and the
others in middle school and the amazing experience of getting my first royalty
check from them ($500--an almost inconceivable amount of money at the time).

I remember Codewarrior and the Palm OS SDK less fondly (the GUI toolkit was
sort of maddening), but still, those were the days.

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franze
once upon a time (2001? 2002?) my whole office then (a semi national news
agency in europe) got Sony CLIÉ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLI%C3%89>
devices - a so called PalmPilot Killer, just like Palms, but from Sony, and so
much better. The Sony CLIÉ would help us to become a real digital business (I
was in the sales pitch meeting of the sony guy)

long story short, they complete fucked up the companies MS Outlook bases CRM
system with one address book HotSync© action - by one employe.

That employe was me (I was just the first to push the HotSync© button...).

there was a backup of Outlook of course, sadly the backup could not get used
to restore the CRM (don't ask...)

about 20 people were typing in address data for the rest of the week.

i now have 5 Sony CLIÉ at home, i hope the will be worth something sometime.

~~~
kalleboo
And to this day, two-way contact sync is still not a solved problem. Just the
other week, iCloud duplicated all my GF's contacts...

~~~
vibrunazo
Google contacts (within gmail) is great for this, for a single account. Never
had a problem.

Though syncing between different accounts (my gmail account + my google apps
account) is not trivial. There are some decent apps on the google apps
marketplace, but none of them work as seamlessly as single account syncing.
But I wouldn't call it an "unsolved problem" in any way.

~~~
follower
> Never had a problem.

Are you using this with Android?

I stopped bothering after my 2.3.x phone insisted on "syncing" in one
direction only from Accounts --> Phone and reverting any updated numbers on my
phone.

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glhaynes
I hadn't touched one of these in well over a decade—there was quite a while
that I used one daily—when a friend brought one by a few months ago.

If you haven't gotten a chance to play with one in a while (or ever!), it's
startling. It's astonishingly simple, fluid, easy, and focused like few
products in the history of computing have been.

Fun game: can you still draw all of the Graffiti symbols?

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
As I loudly and frequently observe, Graffiti still beats the pants off of
modern touchscreen keyboards, especially if you want to type anything with
punctuation. (Like code, for example.)

PalmOS also doesn't get enough credit for an amazingly "discoverable" UI. I've
used an iPod Touch and an iPhone for over a year, and learning to do things
like organizing app folders, deleting apps and how to show play time
indicators in iTunes took a ton of frustrating trial and error. I still have
no idea how to select text reliably, let alone copy and paste. Most of the
time, I have no idea in advance if tapping on something will show more
information, move to a different screen or start dialing a number.

On a Palm, every dialog has a help icon that provides detailed explanations.
UI widgets are simple, consistently applied and convey exactly one meaning.
The menu is always a tap away. PalmOS doesn't look flashy, but it's tasteful.

If you ask me, new devices have become much prettier, gained better battery
life and obtained faster CPUs, but we've slid backwards substantially in
usability.

~~~
Osiris
There is a Graffiti keyboard available on Android.

~~~
moylan
but the stylus available for android and iphones are horrible (at least the
2-3 i've tried).

my sharp zaurus had a neat learning mode which allowed me to teach it
graffiti.

one of the main reasons i gave up palm (had a iiix, iiic, visor neo, m125 and
palm e) was when they moved to graffiti 2 due to the lawsuit as it's accuracy
was less no matter how much time i spent with it.

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maguay
I had a Newton that I was given in 2000 after a relative's company
decommissioned them (a medical services company that had rolled out hundreds
of them to home healthcare nurses). Frankly, it seemed pretty amazing even
then. The built-in character recognition wasn't very good, but Graffiti on the
Newton did work quite nicely.

Then, when I first got an iPod Touch (3rd gen), I tried out the notes app and
hit delete, and was delighted to see the EXACT same animation for throwing the
doc away as the Newton used. iOS definitely has several things that were
influenced by the Newton OS.

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soapdog
I never had a palm. I had an iPaq running windows mobile... worst device
ever!!! The windows mobile experience was so flawed that I decided it was
better to return to my Newton 2000. The newton never failed me, I used it
regularly until about 2 years ago when I left it on the sofa and someone sat
on it breaking the screen... still, it worked for enough time for me to dump
its ROM...

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paulsilver
I last used my Palm Vx... this morning, as it acts as my alarm clock, 10-11
years after I first got it. BigClock is one of the only apps I needed to get
to improve this excellent little device.

These days, the pick up for where you're tapping the stylus often gets out of
sync with reality, so I've aliased one of the physical buttons to the menu
that lets you re-set it as I had to do a hard reset once when it got really
out of sync.

It's feeling it's age, but is still a wonderful little machine and has it's
own simple charm. Brilliantly focussed on getting things done - and I believe
it was used by David Allen in Getting Things Done as it came with all the apps
you would need to use his system effectively.

~~~
smackfu
The Palm V series was also very pretty, with the previous plastic case
replaced with aluminium and all the rough edges rounded over.

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shalmanese
I used to love the auto-scroll feature on my Palm eReader and find it baffling
that none of the major eBook platforms on iOS (iBooks, Kindle, Stanza) support
this feature.

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Tyrannosaurs
Until I got my first iPhone (3GS), the Palm V remained my favourite and most
used PDA (and I've had a Psion, an iPaq and a BlackBerry).

It was small, quick, had good battery life and did the basics really well
which (aside from the battery life) are the reasons I like the iPhone. Sure
it's great that I can do loads of other stuff on it too, but the core stuff is
still what makes it work for me.

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deniska
My Palm IIIe has 2 mb RAM and 16 mhz CPU. But it was much less laggy than most
modern android devices with dual core CPUs and gigabytes of RAM while doing
same tasks.

I even used internet (through irda gprs phone) on it.

Unfortunately now its touchscreen is broken and I haven't managed to find
another compatible touch panel on ebay or dx.

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jaylevitt
As a PalmPilot 5000 owner (and Pro, and V, and a few Clies).. when the iPhone
came out, I screamed

"THIS is what we meant!"

~~~
dpio
I was the same way.

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sad_panda
Could somebody make a custom shell for Android that makes it feel like Palm?

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LVB
Ah... the days of futzing around for a few minutes to experience the magic of
IR "beaming" a couple lines of contact detail to a colleague sitting a foot
away.

~~~
Leynos
What I find disturbing is that exchanging contact data between mobile devices
has become _more_ complicated rather than less.

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georgieporgie
My favorite user experience/prototyping story comes from the development of
the Palm Pilot. From Wikipedia: _Before starting development of the Pilot,
Hawkins said he carried a block of wood, the size of the potential Pilot, in
his pocket for a week._

I used and programmed for a IIIx. It was snappy, had a full productivity suite
built-in, and there was some sort of Instapaper-like app that would bundle web
pages and sync them onto the Palm. It was revolutionary for bathroom reading.
;-)

I still carry my old Tungsten T when I'm in Japan, since the JEDict
(dictionary/character lookup) implementation is way better than on any other
device I've tried.

~~~
danilocampos
AvantGo. I remember it well. And I remember thinking how cool it would be to
have cell service built in one day.

~~~
shalmanese
I'm still looking for an AvantGo equivalent for my iPhone. I don't know why
AvantGo never came out with an iPhone app. Sure it has 3G but there are
advantages in having content local to a device, especially on a commute where
data is spotty at best and load times are long.

