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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

I'm still a little bitter that Palm failed. I have my Z22 kicking around, still charged, and I noodle with it from time to time.

I feel like Android and iOS sort of forgot about the professional and semi-professional market segments, which have been drowned out by broader demand and had their preferred featureset designed out in favour of an experience with a broader market appeal.

Opening a Palm device feels like you're being invited to schedule something, take note of something, or otherwise make a productive choice. Opening my phone feels like I'm supposed to respond to WhatsApp and browse shitposts on Reddit.

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Palm's webOS was ahead of its time, too. Apps were written in JS, HMTL & CSS, all messaging systems were integrated into a single inbox, there was universal search, and it took years for Android and iOS to adopt its card metaphor model for multitasking, too. The way app switching works in Android and iOS now is the way app switching worked from the beginning with webOS.

The palm pre was possibly a decade ahead of it's time, I loved that thing. Amazing hardware keyboard, decent screen for the time, webOS, magnetic wireless charging!!

It's still hands down the best phone I've ever owned.

I feel like Android has mostly "caught up" on the things that the Pre was better at; maybe around 5 years ago? I do remember switching from my Pre to a Droid 4 after dropping the Pre on its power button, and it was a massive step backwards in pretty much all dimensions.

This was also the death of my Pre, that plastic case probably could have been improved a bit... I went to a droid bionic after I think, it was...alright? I enjoyed that it was linuxy, but soon learned that I needed a device I couldn't hack as a primary communication tool.

WebOS may very well be my favourite mobile OS.

What really lost me was the hardware. Unfortunately the Pre/Pre 2 was very underpowered and extremely limited in choice of carrier.

There’s a lot of reasons why WebOS never ‘made it’, but I think hardware, for myself - was a huge limitation I could never get past.

The original pre had issues. The slider mechanism developed play, the screen or plastic cracked close to the charging port, it was underpowered… the pre 2 however was nearly perfect. A bit too late though. A shame.

Psion 5mx was where the magic happened.

The Psions really felt ahead of their time. I got a Revo for Christmas and good luck convincing 12 year old me he wasn't James fucking Bond.

I spent years ticking back and forth between Palm and Pocket PC devices. Palm hardware quality was bad and Pocket PC software was terrible. To this day I wonder why Palm thought it was ok that all their LCDs emitted a high-pitched humming noise when turned on.

> Palm hardware quality was bad

They were definitely not perfect, but at the time (and at my budget as a middle school student), Palm devices were the only way to have a pocket-sized computer of my own that I could bring to and use in school.

The shareware community was amazing, and it's almost impossible to imagine how much stuff I could fit into 2 MB of total system memory: An eBook reader and a couple of books, several games (shout out to Space Trader), a TV remote control, offline newspaper articles...

Only to see it all disappear in a heartbeat when changing batteries, with no way to restore while traveling for the summer! (My m100 had a flaky capacitor and would sometimes do that.)

The design was fantastic. They just made bad choices about parts vendors, in my opinion.

> To this day I wonder why Palm thought it was ok that all their LCDs emitted a high-pitched humming noise when turned on.

Maybe it was designed by people who couldn't hear it? High-pitched sounds are supposedly the first to go with age/tinnitus/etc: https://mosquitoloiteringsolutions.com/why-mosquito/sound-de...

That was the era of the elecroluminescent backlight.

This technology required a high-voltage (~100V) squarewave across the mostly-capacitive EL panel. This squarewave was at audio frequencies.

The panel also happened to function as a piezo tweeter, depending on mounting.

I worked for a cell phone company at the time. I have two memories of this technology:

1. Using the prototype phone out of its case and touching the 100 V squarewave to my ear. That's some tender skin...

2. Using a primary transformer in reverse as an audio transformer, to play the lab stereo over EL panel. It turns out the panel color changes a little bit with frequency.

So why didn't pocket pcs or non-Palm PalmOS devices have the same problem? All of the Palm units in my collection have the buzz but none of the Clies do.

They mostly used LCDs with LED backlights (not sure what they used the some early WinCE laptop style handhelds with color displays)

Yet another sad story. I wanted to love those but I couldn't put up with the passive-matrix display.

I had a number of the IIIxe in the late-middle days of Palm. They were a little fragile and tended to get busted up. I had one whose switch-mode supply hummed audibly- that one ate batteries. Maybe you had better hearing than me or worse luck.

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