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Comment by zwog | Hacker News Reader

I was still in school in the first half of the 2000s and spent a lot of my hard earned money on more or less useful and smart hardware, especially smartphones (mostly called PDA-phones in the pre-iPhone era) and with hardware keyboard. I think my first device was the HTC Blue Angel. I also had a Treo 600 and the Palm Abacus. Those were really nice devices, PalmOS was way better than Windows Mobile and worlds better than Symbian UIQ.

Fun times.

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Right there with you.

Palm was fun to use. To be fair, by the time HTC started releasing cool looking PDA's, Microsoft did ok, just slow and buggy. Symbian was cobblers ... the worst.

I miss that primordial soup of those times.

Weird laptops, crazy PDA ideas, etc. Utterly boring now, despite being exponentially more useful.

Through middle school and high school I lived on my Palm devices. I carried them to class, broke out the portable keyboard, and did all my notes and assignments on them, then spent the breaks between classes beaming Strategic Commander game turns between my friends.

My teachers loved that I did this, because when you printed out notes from the Memos app it put a big white-on-black header at the top of the page. So teachers put my assignments front-of-line in their paper stacks and treated them as dividers between assignments.

Working this way was great for my ADHD brain. My elementary school gave me an AlphaSmart, speculating that I performed poorly or acted out in class because I got bored in the time it took to handwrite a sentence. Using Palm devices worked great because I could capture more of what was in my brain, and could edit and reorder my scattered, disorganized thoughts.

Those devices were excellent for what they were. I like what modern devices can do, but Palm devices felt like an extension of myself in a way modern smartphones don't.

I do nostalgically miss the one PalmOS and one Windows Mobile 6 device I had of each. That might be mostly nostalgia though. Not sure. My love for webOS OTOH is still being sad it didn’t become a distant 3rd mobile OS. I’d likely be rocking a webOS phone. Possibly tablet right now. Instead of going from Windows Mobile 6 -> iPhone -> webOS -> Windows Phone 7 -> Samsung Galaxy Note -> iPhones since then. I used to mess up or break my phones frequently so some of the switches were because of that.

—- Related. I have a lot of nostalgia and actual usefulness from jailbreaking iPhones too. That seems like it may barely be a thing now with iOS 15 changes.

Even an M1 Mac won’t run iOS/iPadOS apps if any of the SIP securities are disabled.

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