Palm was incredible. Enyo, webOS, the list is a long one. It's hard to overstate Palm's effect on handhelds, how they successfully challenged Blackberry to the benefit of both companies, and the tragedy of its demise[1]. Jon Rubinstein, Palm's creator, is bitter about its fate to this day.

I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with my Palm TX, dutifully logging my thoughts and ideas on the two thousand mile walk from Georgia (USA) to Maine, saving them to a tiny SSD, then beaming them all to a journal when I hit a wifi spot in a town library or somewhere.

I still think back on that thing, and the absolutely AWESOME folding keyboard I had for it (2 oz, smaller than a pack of cigarettes folded up, folded out into a rigid keyboard that had a tray for the Palm, really useful typing on your elbows on the floor of a tent). It was a full commodity computing environment: calculator, cached wikipedia, word processor, email, pdf maps/guidebooks/almanacs. Honestly, if you added Maps to that thing, I would still use it today, no question.

Palm was - once Elevation Partners sucked all of the cash from the place - hoovered into the giant value-destroying machine of HP, where it promptly died, as do all things that enter HP post-HPUX.

[1] The moral of which: "Do Not Trust Private Equity. Ever"