I had a Palm 3E, the modem and the foldable keyboard. I taught myself to type in uni (typing of the dead) and took notes on my Palm for the final 3 years of my degree. Miss the capability and the simplicity.
https://i.redd.it/sg6e01o9q4881.jpg
I had a palm smartphone (the Treo) long before the iphone came out, it was absolutely lovely.
Kind of sad that we didn't have a third major Mobile OS in terms of Palm with the same levels of application penetration as Android and IOS. would have been a real game changer.
They also failed to keep up with the competition in the LDA space even in the decade between their launch and the death blow from BlackBerry/iPhone.
I had an Ipaq (this was before the i went lowercase on tech devices) running Windows Pocket PC that I used all through college. It blew Palm out of the water in terms of features and apps (though this was before we called them apps).
Yeah, it did have tons of features but IMHO the Palm tried to do a few things really well and the fact that you could also play solitaire on it was a bonus, whereas the PocketPC tried to do everything and it only did it so-so to good enough. The PocketPC always felt cramped because of this while the Palm felt clean and comfortable.
There were Palm phones but HP just couldn't get it together.
The Sony Clie was teh awesomez but between Iphone, IPad and other mobile devices, it went to the great tradeshow in the sky.
You could turn a Palm pilot into a cellphone with a touch screen in the 90s, that's what the optional cellular modem was for. They just did a shit job with marketing.
I remember a dual screen leather folio concept that looked like it would change the world… it’s so sad what happened. Now webos just lives on in LG tvs
Palm Pilots fatal flaw was that most were never network compatible. Wi-Fi A was just about to be sensibly priced for consumers, but Palm stuck with crappy synching to Outlook via a serial cable. No usb and no wireless options was their demise.
BlackBerry was already super popular with executives and government people when Palm was starting to fail.
If Palm had the foresight to somehow be wireless capable, even for just synching email, they would have lived on a bit longer.
The blogger seems not to have been a Palm fan at any point in time - which puts us on opposite fields from the start, so I will just drop two comments:
1) Anything that strips Lotus Notes from a company/department should get a medal, and I mistrust anyone who doesn’t see what a money-grabbing piece of 💩 that it was.
2) Palms weren’t killed by smartphones; rather smartphones were their evolution. There is numerous evidence on how Steve Jobs took notes from Palm (some say he even tried an acquisition) when thinking about the iPhone; PalmOS could have become viable as a smartphone OS if it went into that direction (there were even a couple attempts, such as a Handspring module), but the company was too busy getting acquired then having its acquirers acquired, then sold, split and the works.
I had one of the earliest square-and-chunky Pilots from the era when they were US Robotics branded, not Palm. Like 1997-98? Graffiti text input for the win.
windows mobile and blackberry came and dominated a space they should have owned first but as with many things they failed to innovate. blackberry had great adoption in the workspace and windows mobile worked with many vendors. By the time they were both being dominated by apple and the new android phones coming out there wasn’t room for webOS.
Palm Treos were one of the first real smartphones. Camera, touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi, app marketplaces on the web. All available in 2004.
Theoretically you could go back to the Handsprings with cellular modems for that title, but those were more of a gimmick.
I suspect if they didn't add the BlackBerry style keyboard to Treos, and left them looking like Zires or Tungsten, they would have sold better. If they weren't so chunky with a smaller screen I'd still be using one fory Todo lists, instead of an older Zire
Apple also just had much better marketing
The Treos did *not* have WiFi which was one of their more serious problems. The Treos had a lot of design concessions to appease the cellular carriers that didn't want things like WiFi. The carriers were charging by the bit so they wanted all data to go over their metered cellular data. PalmOS was still very oriented to HotSync instead of being a standalone OS.
> Apple also just had much better marketing
The iPhone, even the original was a superior consumer product to the Palm and WinMo devices at the time. Mobile Safari was head and shoulders above browsers on PalmOS or WinMo. Media playback was superior. Apple did heavily market the iPhone but it was also a much better consumer product than Palm or WinMo devices.
Ok, so it's been a while since I fired up my Treos. The first one indeed doesn't have wifi, just Bluetooth, and the second doesn't want to turn on right now.
I stand corrected about WiFi. I would assume that they are compatible with the wificard that plugged into the SD slot they sold for the Zire line.
As for iPhone being more polished, of course it was, that's what apple does. It spots trends, refines implementation, and sells it at a premium.
I'm not sure what your point about hotsync is, that's basically how the original iPhone worked as well. Palms biggest issue is that they never really refined their software, or made their devices fun but default. The OS in 1996 was practically the same OS in 2004. Nothing interesting was bundled, and the application marketplaces weren't commonly known. There was a ton of software you could get to make them great devices if you knew where to find it.
Palm rested on their early success didn't iterate and evolve after some early failures, then got surpassed by other brands. A computer company story as old as time (or at least the 80s)
The Treos required some pretty shitty hacks to get the Palm SDIO WiFi adapters working. It was a total non-starter for 99% of Treo owners. Carriers did not want smartphones to have WiFi and enforced that with Palm, Microsoft, et al. Apple signed a not insignificant deal with Cingular which traded exclusivity for not carrying any Cingular branding/apps and the inclusion of WiFi. It wasn't until *after* that deal when carriers were over a barrel that they relented on WiFi on phones. They wanted that sweet, sweet metered cellular data money.
As for HotSync, while the iPhone did require tethering to activate and transfer media in its early incarnations it was not as limited as contemporary PalmOS with HotSync.
> As for iPhone being more polished, of course it was, that's what apple does. It spots trends, refines implementation, and sells it at a premium.
This is just saying "Apple made a better product" with more words. A refined implementation is what makes a better product. If something works better or better meets a customers needs, it's a better product for them.
I used just about every smartphone OS before the iPhone came out. In the process dumping tons of money on expensive phones desperately wanting something that didn't suck. Even as limited as iOS 1.0 was, it was far and away better than any of the phones I'd used before it.
As you point out, PalmOS did not meaningfully change to meet a more connected device. What was fine in 1997 was antiquated in 2007.
Ooh I've never heard of the O2 XDA before, I'll need to look into those
I'm not sure which point you are disagreeing with though. The one of the first smartphone part, or the keyboard part.
Notably both of those have hidden keyboards which is a design I've always loved since it doesn't take away screen space
All of my palm varieties aged out. They just stopped working; Handspring, Sony, and a Palm brand (don’t remember the model, it was an early release model)
Very short answer to a very long history.
Palm was already suffering form BlackBerry success. Apple's iPhone hit, market just didn't need Palm Pilots as they were. Sold off to HP. HP tried to make a tablet device with Palm's OS called webOS. Android was already a thing by then and the market settled on Apple and Android as nobody wanted to write five or six different versions of the same app. HP pulled the tablet off the market, webOS was then revamped to power Smart TVs for LG, which is where it is today.
Lots of details I skipped including how terrible HP's tablet launch actually was.
The same thing that allowed them to succeed was what ruined them: their OS was extremely simple, so it was relatively fast and cheap and succeeded when the Apple Newton (which was far more ambitious) didn't. But as more capable and reasonably priced competitors showed up (Windows CE, then smartphones, then iPhone), they took too long to jettison the super-low-power hardware and OS they'd done so well with. By the time they were ready with a new, competitive platform (WebOS), it was way too late.
To add on to this, part of the simplicity of PalmOS is it was based around HotSync. Your PC (or Mac) was the canonical source of everything on your Palm. The Palm was just acting as a remote interface for notes/calendars/etc and would synchronize with the master data on your computer when you did a HotSync.
Early Palms didn't even bother with flash memory, if you swapped the batteries the Palm was lobotomized until you ran HotSync to get all the data back.
This model of data management was interesting in 1997. It was far less interesting or useful in 2002. It was antiquated by 2007. As you mentioned Palm took a long time to move away from the simpler functionality of PalmOS into something that could be considered its own device and not just a remote interface for your calendar and notes application.
By the time PalmOS started seeing those changes Palm hardware and software were no longer made by the same company. PalmOS also had third party licensees doing their own thing. The development of PalmOS turned into a clusterfuck. Both RIM and Microsoft offered better "Enterprise" software that let devices be more reliably remotely managed and synced with central servers. Palms sucked as consumer products because they were crippled in all the ways consumers wanted to use them.
The iPhone beat the shit out of all three because it started as a *consumer* device. The browser and media player worked well. Since the e-mail client supported POP3/IMAP it could just work with people's existing e-mail accounts with no special middleware. Apple shrank OSX to a phone rather than trying to scale up a simplistic single tasking OS.
PalmOS always reminded me of the original Mac System - runs on 68K, basically single-tasking, can present pretty monochrome GUIs on a fairly low-res screen.
While your personal anecdotes may be true, your recall of the Palm in the marketplace is simply wrong. Palm had a native Notes app and IBM even sold a rebranded Pilot. I worked in IT in NYC, and they were very popular. Blackberry was very expensive and reserved for c suite users. You should vet your memory against reporting from the period.
> I worked in IT in NYC, and they were very popular. Blackberry was very expensive and reserved for c suite users.
Your perception is probably skewed by working in IT. In London in the late 90's I had a Palm m505 as well other subsequent Palm products..
The Palm user-base in the UK was tiny. Blackberry was much larger, and only increased when they started selling to consumers.
I remember palm pilot being the generic word for digital planner (sure, tech journalists would say PDA, but you know what I mean).
I didn’t even remember that Blackberries were originally just PDAs…
In NYC (and America), Palm was the first to market and owned the market for a period of years. There was the marketing fiasco when they transitioned to a new product line from an old one without clearing stock of the old line first. But Handspring launched a Palm clone for a reason (and Handspring eventually merged with Palm).
I have linked a different article by Farquhar some days ago, if that is what you're referring to. Or maybe “Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed” I shared one month ago, for which its author issued an errata some days after? Without details it's hard for me to make use of the criticism.
It wasn’t your post, it showed up in a google alert. Here’s the page: https://dfarq.homeip.net/timex-sinclair-1000/
It is so wrong on so many points and I don’t have the time nor energy to correct it. Fortunately, it will disappear in search results because my site is authoritative.
I was just going to comment that the blog post linked to by the OP was riddled with inaccuracies. I don’t know if OP and the author of the blog post are the same person, but it read more like an anecdotal story filled with blurry recollections. I was very close to the Palm ecosystem for years, was a registered developer, and had an early e-commerce site selling several PalmOS apps that I developed. The story, the rise and the downfall of Palm is a lot richer and deeper than this blog post would have you believe.
Palm pilots and other PDAs went away with the rise of the smart phone.
Though the Palm Treo 650 I had was a buggy piece of shit. The BB and iPhone and their ilk were much better.
I worked in IT throughout the period. The Handspring Visor with smartphone tech was fine for the time. The Blackberry was good, but it required its own special intermediate server between the device and the email accounts. The Palm line also had the advantage that they worked with Lotus Organizer (on PC, and Now Contact and Up to Date on Mac). The Windows devices brought ActiveSync, which allowed for sync'ing calendar data wirelessly (something the Blackberry's lacked). It's my recollection that began the migration to CE devices that then took a majority of the market until the iPhone was introduced (which itself was essentially a feature phone for its first few years, since one could not add additional app's to it).
ActiveSync was the biggest POS I have ever used pretty much. Palm Pilot sync was primitive but worked, Windows Mobile sync was slow as hell and failed in weird ways.
Palm Sync was reliable, but required the direct serial connection. TBH, I could not afford the Sony Clie at the time, but if someone handed me a Palm/Sony with the integrated keyboard (and a working battery...), I would finally be able to ditch Outlook and go back to Lotus Organizer.
iPhones happened.
After the iPhone was intriduced, Palm pilots were no longer terribly useful.
Prior to iPhones, Palm Pilots had a user friendly edge over essentially all competitors.
I can’t be bothered reading your essay even though I was a HUGE fan of the Pilot/PalmPilot/Palm back in the day. But as to the question “What happened to Palm Pilots” the answer is simple: they were superseded by smartphones.
not entirely accurate. Palm made a series of smartphones. It was eclipsed by Windows CE phones, which could do more, and those were eclipsed by the iPhone and the move to touchscreen smartphones. The evolution took multiple years.
After the Treo line aged out/lost to BlackBerry, Palm Pre was hampered by being late to the party vs Android as well as being a sprint exclusive at a time when Sprint couldn't deliver high speed service vs Verizon and AT&T.
I don't know if late is the right term, since the Blackberry existed concurrently with Palm devices. Blackberry won the corporate space away from Palm because of the way the devices could be managed. Palm had a long life in the consumer space. The arrival of the iPhone shook everything up because it ignored the rule that the devices should sip data. Palm and everyone else were caught flat-footed, as it were.
Android took many *years* to catch up to the iPhone. Blackberry spent all kinds of time trying to catch the iPhone and failed (Blackberry was sponsored in a sense by Verizon because the iPhone was an ATT exclusive).
A definitive history of these devices would be kind of fun to do. Sadly, OP's post is just so wrong on this, people should ignore it and just read the Wikipedia entries.
As a guy who loved his Handspring Visor, I feel a twinge of nostalgia every time I turn on my LG television.
That said…
PalmOS and later WebOS were definitely superior for the PDA market, as the various Microsoft OS's of the time were slow and ate battery power like crazy. And I didn't have a feeling that there was a dearth of Palm apps available.
The original Pre felt like a plastic toy (I had one), I also had a Pre 2 and the elusive Pre 3 (I still have my pixi floating around). If the Pre 3 had been the original pre AND they pushed for business software to be developed for it, I think it would have been the dominate device or at least not something that disappeared over night. I went with apple in the end because even the microsoft apps were better on apple devices than they were on microsoft's own phones and I needed them for work. (I had several windows mobile phones too, I used to work at a cell phone company and got to try out A LOT of phones). Oh, and built in parental controls - which is what has kept me with ios, I have kids and managing their phone usage is 1000x easier on an apple device than it is any other device.
There's so much nostalgia for Palm OS but am I the only one who found Windows Mobile a breath of fresh functional, connected air after Palms?
While I did pretty much exclusively use Clie's through the early Y2K's (ending with the NZ90) I was pretty much mainlining various HTC WM phones be it with carrier badging or otherwise through the mid-2000's even after the iPhone until the App Store started becoming useful.
Palm pilots could only do a fraction of what a smart phone does now, but what it did, it was the best at it!
I wanted a palm cell phone, but they were expensive, and analog. Shortly after the palm cell phones came out, the cell networks (finally) went digital. At that point, there was no reason to get one.
I wouldn't really blame HP too much for Palm's demise. Most of it lands on Palm themselves. They had a huge market in enterprises before wireless devices were available. There wasn't an exec I supported between '97-2000 who didn't have a Palm Pilot of some sort. But when Blackberry came along, Palm failed to match or beat the feature set that those devices provided. When given a choice between a Blackberry or a Treo 600/650, every IT department and exec would choose the Blackberry for security and ease of use, even if they were substantially more expensive to implement. By the time smartphones came along, Palm was too far behind to catch up and become relevant.
70 Comments
OldObject4651@reddit
schenkzoola@reddit
porkchop_d_clown@reddit
International-Pen940@reddit
FrostyMasterpiece400@reddit
randombits0110@reddit
duct_tape_jedi@reddit
DaCheatHSR@reddit
calawaydotcom@reddit
0xbenedikt@reddit
GPT3-5_AI@reddit
Mynameismikek@reddit
daecrist@reddit
bjbNYC@reddit
Taira_Mai@reddit
DangKilla@reddit
Critical-Advantage11@reddit
wmdailey@reddit
AmazeMeBro@reddit
wmdailey@reddit
kaelef@reddit
Hey-buuuddy@reddit
billwood09@reddit
pyrulyto@reddit
billwood09@reddit
blinkybit@reddit
magitoddw@reddit
JCD_007@reddit
Critical-Advantage11@reddit
giantsparklerobot@reddit
Critical-Advantage11@reddit
giantsparklerobot@reddit
PoolRamen@reddit
Critical-Advantage11@reddit
PaleDreamer_1969@reddit
IHeartBadCode@reddit
kaelef@reddit
giantsparklerobot@reddit
Blah-Blah-Blah-2023@reddit
jolly_rodger42@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
Which-World-6533@reddit
Johnnybw2@reddit
Just_to_rebut@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
sunnyinchernobyl@reddit
alberto-m-dev@reddit (OP)
sunnyinchernobyl@reddit
TechDocN@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
texan01@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
Blah-Blah-Blah-2023@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
foulpudding@reddit
Current-Bowl-143@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
le_suck@reddit
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
MechanicalTurkish@reddit
aroundincircles@reddit
fnordius@reddit
aroundincircles@reddit
PoolRamen@reddit
Glidepath22@reddit
MikeLinPA@reddit
plathrop01@reddit
unrebigulator@reddit
0xbenedikt@reddit
Lonely-Artist5371@reddit