In 2000 (or, at least, by 2001) I had a palm v with a CDPD wireless "modem" thing. The minstrel, (I kept mis-spelling it in ways that looked like "menstrual," to the great amusement of my friends and co-workers.) It worked fine; the only problem was that the palm V only had one serial port... if I used the CDPD modem, (which doubled the thickness of the palm v,) I couldn't plug in the keyboard, meaning SSH wasn't really practical. (on-screen keyboards have never worked for me; not then, not now.)

The external keyboard for the palm V was pretty nice, though, assuming you had a flat surface. The serial port made a pretty solid connection and held the phone up at a reasonable angle; something I haven't been able to reproduce with a modern smartphone and external bluetooth keyboard. (To be clear, the bluetooth keyboards work fine; I just haven't figured out how to hold the phone at a reasonable angle while typing with both hands.)

So yeah, really? I wasn't all that less mobile then than I am now. I mean, I had a thinkpad running linux then, just like now; sure, it was slower, but it ran linux just fine. Configuring wireless, sure, was a pain in the ass then, and it's easy now, but eh.