Explore Magic Cap, a Smartphone OS from a Decade Before the iPhone
learn.adafruit.com
learn.adafruit.com
1) it was ahead of its time in terms of writing apps in javascript and having them run in a web browser context. The hardware was not up for it and the programming environment wasn't up for it (i.e. no webasm and the like)
2) no ability at the start to write apps in native code. This severely limited one's ability to have graphical games. people use their phones to casually game, and if those games don't exist, the phones wont sell.
3) as forward thinking as it was, they missed some things. It was just too small physically for what it was supposed to be. I was a big believer in it, but it was just too small for my fingers to use effectively to type and the like. It would have been interesting to see what a pre in a modern size phone form factor would have been like.
with all that said, I have fond memories of it, especially being part of the group of people the jailbroke (and I made it happen without even having physical access to one at the time. thanks god for its debian (or really ipkg) roots, made it easy to reverse engineer and get code onto it.
The touchpad, on the other hand, was way ahead of its time. I still used mine till about a year ago when it finally kicked the bucket.
I should probably thank you and the other jailbreakers and hackers for the two platforms for your contributions making them more useful machines.
Also worth pointing out WebOS lives on! https://www.webosose.org/blog/2019/11/20/webos-ose-2-1-0-rel...
Amazing how all the pieces fit together.
Amazing anyone thought that was a good idea.
By the time they were done, the iPhone had launched and it was just too late.
I'm considering an Fxtec Pro1 or Blackberry Key2 exactly because they have hardware keyboards.
I still don't have muscle memory with on-screen keyboards, or if I do, it doesn't work properly due to the lack of physical cues.
I've been using smartphones since 2010. I still haven't gotten used to SW keyboards and at this point I'm fairly sure I never will. They're so inaccurate and terrible, I don't understand why people are okay with them.
The worst part is that I just dinged my Pixel's screen, so I could actually think about getting a new phone, but it's so wrong to me to buy a brand new phone one year later
Full of delight, something that modern OSes are sorely missing.
Little touches like being able to drop a little animated worm in the hallway and watch it crawl about - and it still being there when you come back later.
It’s a real shame that a decade ago, when incumbent phone makers were scrambling around trying to find a response to iOS, no one dusted it off and updated it for the modern world. Would have been such a contrast to the standard grid of boring icons.
General Magic was a big one, as was the Newton, though both were obviously too expensive to achieve serious market penetration. Geos was another important one; it was a pretty slick OS that could have beaten Windows or been the birth of a palmtop OS.
One of the striking things; lots of people really believed the only way to use a pocket computer was with handwriting recognition. The Palm "graffiti" tool for achieving this was pretty obviously never going to work (aka teach people a new form of handwriting) compared to keyboards. The fold away keyboard of the HP OmniGo was kind of an admission of this.
https://www.geek.com/apple/apples-first-touchscreen-phone-14...