USRobotics PalmPilot Personal review | Hacker News Reader

USRobotics PalmPilot Personal review

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66 pointsshawndumas32 comments

While the palm pilots was an exceptional device, I had more love for the Psions (particularly the series 5) if anybody remembers them.

I had a Series 3, Revo and then the 5mx. Each one of those devices had an excellent battery life (uses AA!) that last for days on heavy usage, myriad of apps, memory cards, and for the 5mx, a fantastic keyboard.

The only reason why I had to move to a Palm device was because Psion screwed everything up when the colour screen PDA evolution came along.

I had a IIIx, Vx, M500, Tungsten something and tungsten something+1.

I remember how horrible the SDK was and the hoops you had to jump through to develop on the thing. It was after all a memory starved, M68K embedded system.

I also remember the fragmentation that was the "app store(s)" of the time. I feel no sympathy for developers today when they whine the apple app store isn't $whatever enough for them.

We have it fucking amazing today. Still, it was pretty good times back then.

Yeah, I remember (perhaps too fondly) selling software on Handango and the others in middle school and the amazing experience of getting my first royalty check from them ($500--an almost inconceivable amount of money at the time).

I remember Codewarrior and the Palm OS SDK less fondly (the GUI toolkit was sort of maddening), but still, those were the days.

I was doing development with PalmOS around 2003-2004 timeframe, and the SDK had tools I have yet to see in other platforms to date.

'Gremlins': Automated fuzz testing within the emulator. Still waiting to see this make an appearance in other SDKs

'Debug ROMS': I've seen some SDKs including debug ROMs, but the ones on the PalmOS were actually useful. The ROMs would actually tell you what functions needed to be invoked before the current one (PalmOS needed memory pointers to be locked before any writing/copying operations could be allowed)

Agree with you on the memory starvations. We were porting another application from Symbian, and we had to jump through many hoops because the default code segment was limited to 64k.

once upon a time (2001? 2002?) my whole office then (a semi national news agency in europe) got Sony CLIÉ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLI%C3%89 devices - a so called PalmPilot Killer, just like Palms, but from Sony, and so much better. The Sony CLIÉ would help us to become a real digital business (I was in the sales pitch meeting of the sony guy)

long story short, they complete fucked up the companies MS Outlook bases CRM system with one address book HotSync© action - by one employe.

That employe was me (I was just the first to push the HotSync© button...).

there was a backup of Outlook of course, sadly the backup could not get used to restore the CRM (don't ask...)

about 20 people were typing in address data for the rest of the week.

i now have 5 Sony CLIÉ at home, i hope the will be worth something sometime.

And to this day, two-way contact sync is still not a solved problem. Just the other week, iCloud duplicated all my GF's contacts...

Google contacts (within gmail) is great for this, for a single account. Never had a problem.

Though syncing between different accounts (my gmail account + my google apps account) is not trivial. There are some decent apps on the google apps marketplace, but none of them work as seamlessly as single account syncing. But I wouldn't call it an "unsolved problem" in any way.

> Never had a problem.

Are you using this with Android?

I stopped bothering after my 2.3.x phone insisted on "syncing" in one direction only from Accounts --> Phone and reverting any updated numbers on my phone.

Most things nowadays don't even sync. They just use the master copy and or a read-only cache if you are offline.

>And to this day, two-way contact sync is still not a solved problem.

Can anyone explain in simple terms why this is so?

When I was 12 or 13 (around the same time as above), I was told I was getting something "very special" for Christmas. I thought it was a drumset, and I was PSYCHED. Turns out it was a Sony CLIÉ.

Still though, it was pretty nice. I still remember trying to figure out how to develop games for it. My household didn't have the internet at the time and my access to the library was limited (we lived on a farm), so in the end I was just a 13 year old who had a machine with all of his classmates' names and birthdays organized on it.

What a time to be alive.

I hadn't touched one of these in well over a decade—there was quite a while that I used one daily—when a friend brought one by a few months ago.

If you haven't gotten a chance to play with one in a while (or ever!), it's startling. It's astonishingly simple, fluid, easy, and focused like few products in the history of computing have been.

Fun game: can you still draw all of the Graffiti symbols?

As I loudly and frequently observe, Graffiti still beats the pants off of modern touchscreen keyboards, especially if you want to type anything with punctuation. (Like code, for example.)

PalmOS also doesn't get enough credit for an amazingly "discoverable" UI. I've used an iPod Touch and an iPhone for over a year, and learning to do things like organizing app folders, deleting apps and how to show play time indicators in iTunes took a ton of frustrating trial and error. I still have no idea how to select text reliably, let alone copy and paste. Most of the time, I have no idea in advance if tapping on something will show more information, move to a different screen or start dialing a number.

On a Palm, every dialog has a help icon that provides detailed explanations. UI widgets are simple, consistently applied and convey exactly one meaning. The menu is always a tap away. PalmOS doesn't look flashy, but it's tasteful.

If you ask me, new devices have become much prettier, gained better battery life and obtained faster CPUs, but we've slid backwards substantially in usability.

There is a Graffiti keyboard available on Android.

but the stylus available for android and iphones are horrible (at least the 2-3 i've tried).

my sharp zaurus had a neat learning mode which allowed me to teach it graffiti.

one of the main reasons i gave up palm (had a iiix, iiic, visor neo, m125 and palm e) was when they moved to graffiti 2 due to the lawsuit as it's accuracy was less no matter how much time i spent with it.

Yes, the PalmOS UI was very good. I think the Palm team really asked themselves 'What would be a good interface for a handheld device?'

In contrast, their competition at that time was Microsoft PocketPC. MS just had a terrible UI. It looked like they had shoe-horned the desktop UI onto a tiny device. I mean, 'Start' button on a handheld device ??

It might have been comforting to 'enterprise' customers to have a familiar interface, but it just sucked compared to the elegant PalmOS UI which looked like it had been designed for a tiny screen.

We have tons of later models (E2s, Tungstens, plus older models) floating around the office, and we still support a fair number of Palms still in use in the field (we do data collection diaries for drug trials). Some of our clients really love these devices (as opposed to the smartphone product we currently offer).

I had a Newton that I was given in 2000 after a relative's company decommissioned them (a medical services company that had rolled out hundreds of them to home healthcare nurses). Frankly, it seemed pretty amazing even then. The built-in character recognition wasn't very good, but Graffiti on the Newton did work quite nicely.

Then, when I first got an iPod Touch (3rd gen), I tried out the notes app and hit delete, and was delighted to see the EXACT same animation for throwing the doc away as the Newton used. iOS definitely has several things that were influenced by the Newton OS.

I never had a palm. I had an iPaq running windows mobile... worst device ever!!! The windows mobile experience was so flawed that I decided it was better to return to my Newton 2000. The newton never failed me, I used it regularly until about 2 years ago when I left it on the sofa and someone sat on it breaking the screen... still, it worked for enough time for me to dump its ROM...

I last used my Palm Vx... this morning, as it acts as my alarm clock, 10-11 years after I first got it. BigClock is one of the only apps I needed to get to improve this excellent little device.

These days, the pick up for where you're tapping the stylus often gets out of sync with reality, so I've aliased one of the physical buttons to the menu that lets you re-set it as I had to do a hard reset once when it got really out of sync.

It's feeling it's age, but is still a wonderful little machine and has it's own simple charm. Brilliantly focussed on getting things done - and I believe it was used by David Allen in Getting Things Done as it came with all the apps you would need to use his system effectively.

The Palm V series was also very pretty, with the previous plastic case replaced with aluminium and all the rough edges rounded over.

I used to love the auto-scroll feature on my Palm eReader and find it baffling that none of the major eBook platforms on iOS (iBooks, Kindle, Stanza) support this feature.

Until I got my first iPhone (3GS), the Palm V remained my favourite and most used PDA (and I've had a Psion, an iPaq and a BlackBerry).

It was small, quick, had good battery life and did the basics really well which (aside from the battery life) are the reasons I like the iPhone. Sure it's great that I can do loads of other stuff on it too, but the core stuff is still what makes it work for me.

My Palm IIIe has 2 mb RAM and 16 mhz CPU. But it was much less laggy than most modern android devices with dual core CPUs and gigabytes of RAM while doing same tasks.

I even used internet (through irda gprs phone) on it.

Unfortunately now its touchscreen is broken and I haven't managed to find another compatible touch panel on ebay or dx.

As a PalmPilot 5000 owner (and Pro, and V, and a few Clies).. when the iPhone came out, I screamed

"THIS is what we meant!"

I was the same way.

Could somebody make a custom shell for Android that makes it feel like Palm?

Ah... the days of futzing around for a few minutes to experience the magic of IR "beaming" a couple lines of contact detail to a colleague sitting a foot away.

What I find disturbing is that exchanging contact data between mobile devices has become more complicated rather than less.

My favorite user experience/prototyping story comes from the development of the Palm Pilot. From Wikipedia: Before starting development of the Pilot, Hawkins said he carried a block of wood, the size of the potential Pilot, in his pocket for a week.

I used and programmed for a IIIx. It was snappy, had a full productivity suite built-in, and there was some sort of Instapaper-like app that would bundle web pages and sync them onto the Palm. It was revolutionary for bathroom reading. ;-)

I still carry my old Tungsten T when I'm in Japan, since the JEDict (dictionary/character lookup) implementation is way better than on any other device I've tried.

AvantGo. I remember it well. And I remember thinking how cool it would be to have cell service built in one day.

I'm still looking for an AvantGo equivalent for my iPhone. I don't know why AvantGo never came out with an iPhone app. Sure it has 3G but there are advantages in having content local to a device, especially on a commute where data is spotty at best and load times are long.

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