Hacker News Reader

Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

Psions were PDAs, not really in the smartphone arena until their OS (EPOC?) became Symbian and started appearing on Nokia phones.

Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.

I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.

View on HN

There was also the Qualcomm pdQ and the Kyocera 6035 I think that combined a Palm and a phone/cellular modem. It’s surprising to me that it took as long as it did for smartphones to really get popular.

Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough.

Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.

> it wasn’t until the Treo series

This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?

Ahh correct, I forgot about that. And do I remember correctly that Handspring was founded by ex-Palm employees to produce PDAs with licensed PalmOS and a cellular modem/phone built in?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com