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Comment by tgmatt | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did but better?

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A totally valid question! I did adopt the smartphone for many, many years. My father had a gen-1 iPhone which captured my imagination. At the same time, I've also never really let them run my life. I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it.

I do own some, but they don't get used for much (browser-on-the-go, mostly).

Smartphones are definitely better all-rounders, but what I've come to adopt in recent years is a hobby of finding whatever tech/concept seems "best" to me (from any period in time) and then using that. Sometimes that means hardware from 1920, sometimes from today (e.g. I have a current-gen GPU to join the AI arms race). Sometimes that means a modern evolution of the concept without losing the spirit.

Easy examples:

* iPod -> Music player w/ FLAC + 1TB SD

* Gameboy -> Analogue Pocket (or sometimes original hardware)

* A modern standalone camera, etc.

It's sort of like living in the dream version of 2002 where tech stayed hopeful and fun (not sure if that's good or bad). Definitely brought me the most joy in tech I've had in years.

PDAs (and a _lot_ of tech from <2010) have the advantage of still being built entirely to serve the user. For my needs, I basically view it as day-planner or complement to a notepad and don't expect it to be a smartphone. My opinion is that these devices basically "solved" the digital calendar by ~1999 and that almost every calendar feature since (except maybe sharing) usually serves some other business need in addition to the user, or is just clunkier.

A PDA just wants to take good notes, manage the day's work, and be a simple extension of your mind. Most modern tasks (that don't require a network connection to be useful) have apps that still exist and don't spy on you: Food journals, encrypted notes, flashcards, project management, ebooks, cached news, Wordle, period trackers...

So, if your life today doesn't _depend_ on a specific vision of modernity, you don't miss out on much of it while benefiting from some forgotten UX benefits: Offline-first, great UI, week-long batteries (AAA if so inclined), Graffiti input, etc. :)

I aspire to implement this vision of modernity on my life as well. Perhaps it’s time to dust off an old UX40/UX50 and finally make this happen.

Wait until you see the prices on these for a working one.

That seems reasonable. I did pick up an old colour screen CompaQ a number of years ago for nostalgia reasons but haven't really fiddled with it much yet. I really should..

> * iPod -> Music player w/ FLAC + 1TB SD

Out of curiosity, which Music player did you settle on? I am in the market for one and looking for options (currently leaning towards a FiiO M11).

Currently a FiiO M3K and I've been super happy with it. Might be discontinued now, however.

The thought process for the purchase was that I wanted a standalone DAP without a touchscreen (iPod-esque), without wireless connectivity, with expandable storage, and not running Android. The M3K also has good Rockbox support including dual-boot, so I swap between that and the native Linux firmware at times.

I am considering getting a second device of some kind with Bluetooth because there are occasional but persistent times where it honestly would be nice. Ideally it'd still be running a pretty basic OS, though.

Thank you for pointing out that device.

I believe you are correct. I was only able to find a listing on Amazon for a used one of the M3K devices. Also found a listing on ebay.

I need a device with Bluetooth as my car doesn't have an auxiliary jack. Suppose that I could also make use of an low power FM transmitter also.

"I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it."

This is the model I use in my own life but with a slight variation:

My server at the datacenter is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it.

What are some examples of 1920s tech that you use?

Probably not a television, but radio was first invented in the 1920s so possibly that.

There's less the further back in time you go, of course, but a few 20s examples:

* Westinghouse desk fan. Tanky and moves a ton of air because it has essentially no grill, but I do have it on a kill switch to protect little fingers.

* As @zamnos mentioned, radio. I have several consumer receivers and amateur transmitters from the period. These fall less into the "best" category for obvious reasons, but are more for kids' historical context. I'm exploring arcane combos like a cassette player + tiny AM transmitter + antique radio. Sort of a [mono] stereo with a non-all-you-can-eat music library combined with experiencing the physicality of RF propagation. Also they have standard 1/4" headphone jacks!

* Many books around that age. Tom Swift, Oz, etc.

* A few kitchen gadgets like an electric waffle iron and a hand grinder (I do have modern ones too).

I can't even find anything which works as the simple Palm "ToDo" application. No free ones at least. PalmOS had this developer requirement that nothing should take more than 3 clicks. I used the ToDo tool as a shopping list. I kept all my common groceries in that list and used a single tap to indicate that I was out of something, and a single tap when I bought something I was out of. Whatever I try to do on a phone is just too much hassle so I end up not using it. My old Tungsten T3 was easier in so many respects.

Strongly agree that so many more features lead to more friction and the tool becoming less useful. The original Palm devices were really awesome. Dedicated todo button, push it, and your todos instantly come up, one tap to drop down the category selection, and one more to select a category, and you're there.

The iPhone has historically been really bad at this, and even regressed. A year ago I had to wake the phone, point it at my face, wait a second, then go to the home screen, open the app, wait a couple of seconds, then navigate to where I wanted to.

Recently, lock screen widgets, shortcuts, and even some siri features have started to make this a little better.

I don't use non-smartphone PDAs anymore, but I really miss:

1. Their ability to do absolutely everything offline. No need to worry that I won't be able to access something because somewhere without data service

2. The ability to have all the PDA features at my fingertips without being hooked up to the world's biggest attention-killing distraction network.

Also the “search entire device” feature. It used to be so easy to find something across contacts, calendar, and memos.

you just described an ordinary smartphone with wifi/data turned off.

I wish that were true, but unfortunately some apps do not seem to be designed well in the case of data being turned off.

3. For the "big 4" applications at least, the Palm was significantly faster and significantly more usable than anything I've seen on smartphones.

They have a much better stand-by battery life on AAA batteries, and they are not as distracting because they are offline-first (or even offline-only, for the early models). Or, you can just use them if you find them neat (which I do). But ckz’s answer is a very good glance into the kind of mindset that I share for the most part as well.

I wish I could remember which phone it was, but there was something absolutely magical about using IrDA to connect a Palm to a cellphone and get a 56kbit Internet connection on the go. In my mind it was a Nokia 3310, but it seems those didn’t have IrDA.

In 2018, I read James M. Tabor's Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth (pub. 2010), which particularly focused on Bill Stone's and ALexander Klimchouk's respective explorations. (Contrary to perhaps popular understanding, as evidenced by an answer I saw on Quora that asserted that the temperature got hotter and hotter the farther Klimchouk's team descended in "their" cave, Stone's and Klimchouk's teams started out high in the mountains and temperatures were freezing throughout the descents; furthermore, Stone's and Klimchouk's deepest descents still ended above sea level. [The Quora question had something to do with digging deep into the earth.])

Anyway, this was the first I'd read much about caving and, in browsing around the web, I discovered that Palm Pilots were(/are?) used by serious cavers for mapping caves. Auriga (https://auriga.top/) was the most frequently referenced Palm app I saw; its latest update was in December 2022. Obvious advantages as I understand them are: (1) long battery life coupled with replaceable AAA batteries; (2) a display that can be read in low light without battery-draining backlighting. Phone and wi-fi are useless underground. (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that ~80Khz radios for use in caves were being developed; equally vague memory: I believe initial prototypes were based around audio amplifiers that happened to reach up into that frequency. Okay, a 2018 Hackaday has links to more information, although not about what I [mis]remembered: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/11/ham-designed-gear-used-in-th...)

Also, sometime I saw an article about automotive performance afficianados using a Palm App to interact with their engines' onboard computers -- in the PalmOS Emulator (POSE) on Windows laptops. Obviously they liked the app and I imagine they had a considerable intellectual investment (e.g., historical experimental settings and performance results, etc.) that made them loathe to switch to more modern apps.

But yeah. I cleaned the battery crud out of my Palm M105 last month, put fresh batteries in, and the digitizer is shot. So, back to my phone ... :)

Re. automotive, I've also heard there is/was an overlapping group of Palm + auto enthusiasts. Quite possibly they're using something like OBD Gauge: http://www.weidefamily.net/vanagon/Pending_Content/Engine_Co...

Getting that working up is on my to-do list. Today I use some Python scripts to read engine codes and such, but it's not like I always have my phone or laptop on me. :)

I see a lot of value in having the "smart" airgapped away from the modem

They don’t spy on you

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