I remember investing in Palm thinking that they'd eventually be the ones to build something like the iphone. Sadly, they didn't and when apple did that was it for them.
Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.
Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270
As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.
Nokia's N-series had GPS, Wi-Fi, and good cameras years before that and it was hard to lose all of that; Symbian had proper multitasking, persistent storage, and Unicode support; and between native Symbian and J2ME apps, the software ecosystem wasn't half bad either.
Aesthetically, I'll always be a fan of Palm OS, but I couldn't bring myself to actually use it as a daily driver due to all of these limitations.
Yeah, well people are misinformed. Unless there was something for the Newton that turned it into a phone, IBM was first to market in 1994 [1] The IBM Simon made calls, did data, had a paid 3rd party app, etc.
Besides Palm, Symbian (Mostly from Nokia, but some other companies made Symbian handsets), RIM's Blackberry, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile (with handsets from many OEMs) had established smartphones before Apple. Of course, the iPhone had much better sales, and changed the market in many ways, but the category was 12ish years old when Apple entered. Hardly inventing or first to market.
https://www.rappler.com/technology/features/95144-keitai-jap...
I can't count how many useless WAP development conferences my company sent me to.
Unfortunately, the Palm VII was only available in the US, and having to dial up via serial cable or infrared using a mobile phone kind of ruined the spontaneous information lookup aspect of it.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
[edit: referring to Treo specifically, not the rest...]
Nice documentary about this with interviews:
I loved that thing. Audibl.com player app, 3rd party apps to integrate phone dialer and contacts db, internet... 14.4k internet but internet! email, browser, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client, thousands of random apps for every little thing like today, color grid icon home screen, touch screen, sdcard, in 2000 or 2001.
Then Palm developed webOS, which made some weird hardware decisions and couldn't compete with iPhone and Android. But it could have been a contender, better than Blackberry and Nokia that didn't make jump to capacitive screens.
I think Palm's problem was being too late, but if they hadn't split and made PalmOS successor, they would have missed capacitive smartphones.
I think webOS could have been the iPhone if Apple didn't exist. I think they could have taken the second spot from Android if had been earlier, open, and released conventional hardware.
Apple had the iPod - and, crucially, customers - could bring these customers to the carriers, and so they could dictate more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw (the part I'm referencing is about 20 minutes in).
They were no iPhone, but they were extremely efficient work tools.