Palm Before the PalmPilot

Gammu writes "SiliconUser has an in-depth history of the Palm, starting with its humble roots. The Pilot (later PalmPilot and finally just Palm) saved Palm Computing. Before the release of the Pilot, the company was subsisting (barely) on revenue from connectivity packages for HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti for the Newton. This was because its first PDA hardware product had failed under the weight of feature creep and design by committee. The first article in a series follows the early days of this company-reforming product."

I miss Visor

Visor was what Palm should have been (and rightly so since the company was owned by many of the people who hated the committee design of the Pilot. I still think the Visor Edge is the greatest palm based PDA ever made. Its still thinner than my Tungsten E2.

Re:I miss Visor

There are free programs around which also fix it.
It involves changing the touch screen's refresh frequency.
Apparently it works well.

Dont know about the noise from the amplifier. My Lifedrive has great audio.

Re:I miss Visor

Palm did have the Palm V. That was perhaps the high point of my PDA experience. Today I have a $500 HP iPaq with Microsoft software which is incredibly sluggish, crashes constantly, and is about twice as thick and heavy as my Palm V. However that is all my company allows me to use, because it does have a fingerprint reader and encryption. Nevermind if it locks up 30% of the time you try to turn it on with those features enabled.

To be fair, the iPaq 1945 series with an earlier version of Windows Mobile was much, much better. I believe today nobody at Microsoft or HP actually uses PocketPCs. Everything has gone over to cellphones, leaving those of us who still need a non-phone PDA for whatever reason (generally, security policies) almost high and dry. I guess they have to follow the market, but I wish they would at least not advertise and ship stuff that doesn't work.

Re:I miss Visor

Indeed. To my mind, the Tungsten is a giant step backward. It's particularly stupid that Graffiti is what made the pilot in the first place but in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2, which is slow, unreliable and hyper-sensitive to small timing variations. I really hope they fired the idiot who thought that was a good idea.

With the Visor and Graffiti, I could take notes continuously without looking at the screen (great for meetings). With the Tungsten and Graffiti 2, I have to keep checking that it read what I wrote or that it hasn't interpreted an "i" as "l." or vice versa. I've never figured out how to get it to consistently read an "r" or an "h". The original Graffiti was fast and sure. Graffiti 2 is so bad that I'll probably be looking for something with one of those moronic little keyboards as my next PDA. I know that is really slumming in technological backwaters, but I don't see much choice.

Next PC a casio?

According to David Pogue, in his book Piloting Palm, Casio was a particularly difficult partner to work with. Their relative inexperience with software and hardware development (the company's major portable products were digital wristwatches, calculators and inexpensive pocket organizers) made them irrationally intolerant of any bugs, no matter how minor or how unlikely to affect the user.

Can you imagine what IT would be like if Casio had created the PC? Why, it might actually work.

Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.

Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly.

Re:Next PC a casio?

Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.

Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly

Which is why, in my next life, I will write code instead of designing hardware. I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.

Great thingies

I still own and actively use a Palm Pilot from 1996. No color screen, no wireless communication, no nothing. Works like a charm even today and I don't need more. Of course you CAN remove and change the battery yourself, which cannot be said of some other iGadgets.

If Palm isn't careful

they are going to die a slow painful death. they have a chance to re-invent themselves by bringing the Linux-based OS out (as they've been promising). until then we palm users are all faced with using a very out-of-date OS (with sketchy blue tooth on treos i might add) and no hope for any much-needed updates.

in the meantime the iphone is looking to totally overtake that market (if they start working on bringing out third-party apps). if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps palm may as well throw in the towel.

i would like to keep using my palm-based treo. but i am getting so tired of the crashes and horrific blue tooth that it's getting to the point where i might just jump that shark and go the iphone route.

well - i will when a linux app like jpilot can sync with the iphone. if that never happens i'll wait for the open moko. if that doesn't happen i'll just scrap the pda and get a regular ol' phone.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

A third party SDK for the iPhone won't be "game over for the entire handheld computer market". For corporations that issue portable computing devices to their employees no IT department in their right mind is going to make a wholesale switch from Windows Mobile based smart phones and PDAs that run on the corporate voice/data network of choice to iPhones with the only choice of voice/data service being AT&T and a necessary reliance on hobbiest software to supply necessary applications.

It might mean a sharp downturn in the number of non Apple PDAs purchased for personal use. That's a far cry different than the wholesale revolution you are claiming it will be, though.

Your Men Are Already Dead ...

if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps ...

And what exactly can Palm do to prevent this?

Palm has been dead for awhile. All that's left is for someone to unplug the life support system.

SteveM

The Zoomer and Pam Vx....mmmmmm.

I still think the Palm V (and Vx) series was Palm's greatest achievement. Combined with its hard case, they had a true, front-pocketable PDA that performed well. Unfortunately, Palm PDAs have become so bloated and energy-graining that they simply aren't innovative anymore. I REALLY liked measuring battery life in weeks, not hours. And the Zoomer was a killer device at the time. It was PC-compatible that would run DOS apps, had full GUI interface thanks to Geoworks' GEOS, and it had a great implementation of an early version of Graffiti that, at the time, provided real "heads-up" stylus entry (where you could actually look at the person you were talking to while still taking notes. And what was important was that because the Zoomer and early Pilots promoted Graffiti as an input/navigation method, not handwriting recognition, it took of very effectively. The big difference with other HWR implementations was that with Graffiti, the user had to adapt their strokes to what Graffiti expected instead of the HWR engine adapting to the individual user. If you got past all that and just wrote how Graffiti wanted, it was surprisingly fast and accurate. Unfortunately, the Zoomer was overshadowed by the Apple Newton, so it never really grabbed any market share. Fortunately for Palm, (US Robotics at the time) its launch of the Pilot was successful beyond expectations, and the rest was history.

Every hacker should use a palm

As seen in Die Hard 4, this devices can be plugged in high tech suitcases and process in parallel to crack passwords and that kind of stuff.

Bottom line:

When any company makes an OS that has text messages, calendaring, contacts and todo lists as easy and *fkin fast* to use as Palm, I'll switch.

Period.

Until then, it's Garnet all the way, troubles or otherwise.

Almost like Woz pining for early days...

I bought one of the first palms, and remember disassembling the ROM, and looking through it. It was lean, elegant, and straight forward enough that one could do that. Try that with Windows Mobile, or probably even the newer palms (oh wait, they are windows mobile now, aren't they?)

Now, I do appreciate the greater flexibility of Windows mobile devices, and prefer it over the palm, but the speed, elegance, battery life, and so on, just aren't there. Too bad we can't have the best of both of these worlds...

Awful Article

Man, for once I read TFA and what do I get? A barely coherent, unedited swamp of words. Did anyone else find this article a slog to read?

Palm's buyer (and a secure feature for the Touchdown) was secured in a surprising way. During product development, Donna, Jeff and Ed were traveling the country promoting the Touchdown as the platform of choice for hardware and sofware developers.

It's never explained what Touchdown is. It's never explained what the "secure feature" is. I'm assuming Touchdown is the orginal name for what was to become the Pilot. But I don't really know. The word is just used suddenlty out without preamble, as if it had been previously introduced.

How about the following:

A simple benchmark of the efficiency or inefficiency of was to count the number of taps to create an appointment or add an entry to the adress book. This required that all of the most used features be easily accessible, not buried behind menus or in dialog boxes. This concept of ease of use had eluded many of the early PDA's.

Perhaps it's just me, but the whole article read like the above excerpt.

Another reviewer, in Macworld, found that his 'typing' speed on the Newton was "up to 20 words per minute at 0 to 95 percent accuracy."

Really? Zero to 95% accuracy? That's pretty, uh, fucking awful. Somehow I doubt that's what Macword published.

It took ten to fifteen seconds to boot up and to switch between applications, seriosuly hampering its usefulness as a serious business tool.

Wow, spelling mistake and redundancy in the same sentence.

A paper planner was much smaller and allowed the user to see his or her entire day. Little quirks like this also turned off business users.

See how the second sentence here should not follow the first? It should have followed the sentence preceeded the excerpt. This kind of construction left me rereading the same few lines several times over.

A few major candidates were considered (Motorola, Compaq and Nokia), but none of the comapnies were willing to give Palm control...

Guess that woulda bin bad fer bidness.

Hey Silicon User, hire a fucking editor!

Lookout!

HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti

An apostrophe mean's, "Lookout! Here come's an S!"

Re:Lookout!

The usage of an apostrophe to indicate plurality is actually correct in this context (i.e. following a word/acronym in all caps).

Uhm, what is new here?

"Piloting Palm" was published in 2002 and pretty much covered all of this. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Someone missed the point of tagging

It's in the Hardware section of Slashdot. It's right there in the address: hardware.slashdot.org. Why would you tag it hardware?

Ah, the Vx

I owned a Palm Pilot 1000 (I think, the one with extra memory) that promptly became one of the first to be repaired. Broken screen. They did not survive a 3-foot drop onto tile.

I wore it out. It worked, and Grafitti was just wonderful.

Then I got a Palm III. And a modem. Having HandMail was a blessing. I was much more self-sufficient.

Finally, I got a Vx to replace my tired III... Sleek and wonderful, another modem of course, slick apps, and yes shirtpocket capable.

But I always had a Day-Timer, and used both. Having a Palm saved me from weekly (or more frequent) printings of a dynamic phonebook in Filemaker Pro. And cutting pages to fit...

I'm hoping things at Palm get back to the lean and mean days of old, where the product seemed to be king, and where good decisions were made.

Until then, Windows Mobile. Ugh.

Palm is still around?

I can't even tell you what operating system the most recent Palm's run. There must have been half a dozen attempts to modernize the platform...

I used my Handspring Deluxe for 6 years, it was good for it's time, and the interface is still pretty good, but it just doesn't have the features I want in a PDA today. When it came time to find a replacement, I didn't even consider Palm. I didn't have confidence that I'd be able to find modern apps to run on a new Palm device.

Fact checking, anyone?

Since when did GEOS come out in 1985? Yes, the Commodore 64 version came out then, but I seriously doubt that any of the code created for that was used in any of the designs discussed in the article. Try 1990, for the IBM version...so how old was that code again?

Oh, and the editor for this piece should be flogged for drinking on the job. What a steamer for readability!

I knew it....

In the old days, when I had a HP 100LX PDA, I once beta tested a synchronization tool for a company named Palm. I always wondered if they went on to produce the palmpilots (which were known for their excellent synching).

I owned a Palm V briefly, but I never could get used to the stylus text input, so I went with the Nokia Communicator line. I now have a Nokia E90.

X.

Palm desktop PIM

For normal PIM the Palm desktop software is pretty good. It also used to race on slower PCs. It is still free for download:

http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/windesk414.html [palm.com]

And, if you feel like it you can get a cheap Pilot off of Ebay and sync it so you can carry all the data that you entered into your PIM with you at any time. Or even sometimes try and enter data on the road (I am kidding).

US Robotics?

If I am not completely mistaken, the company was back then known as US Robotics and of which Palm was a division (that eventually split into a seperate company). Is that correct?

If so - Palm was by no means a weak player. US Robotics had strong dominance in the modem market (I still remember how I dreamt of getting a flashy new 33.6Kb US Robotics modem instead of the crappy Taiwanese 9600baud modem I had at home).

Since the Palm III

I have been a loyal customer of Palm since they released their Palm III under U.S. Robotics. The one favorite feature that I think is still overlooked by many of today's PDA competitors (including Palm themselves) is the utter simplicity of it. All of the programs were dead simple to use. You entered your agenda in the Calendar. You synced and checked your e-mail. It had a (relatively) powerful calculator. It came with the bare essentials, and that's it.

I think it was these concepts that made the Treo 650 such a great and revolutionary mobile PDA device. The form factor was ingenious like their classic Palms, but the interface was simple, yet extremely robust. Anyone could learn how to use it, and anyone could make it as complex as they wanted (without pushing the software's limits, of course). Now thinking back on it, it's rather sad that their management went down the tubes like it did.

Now that Palm's out of the game, we have PDA operating systems that focus on bringing the PC to the mobile device, which I think was never the point of the PDA. That's why Windows Mobile has been able to get away with bringing out its mobile platform, which is, for all intents and purposes, a mobile version of their Windows operating system, but with more fluff for a mobile. Then there's Apple with their mini OS X, which is a whole different ballgame.

When Palm updates their OS, I hope that they keep their original model of simplicity intact. This concept is quickly becoming an afterthought.

Bah. SiliconUser is on drugs...

...or at the very least, never used any Newton past first gen.

I still use my Newton 2100 daily. The screen real estate is large enough to actually work with, I can use the English alphabet (instead of, for instance, an inverted V when I mean A), and ooooo! I can do "inking" just like the article attributes to exclusively to PalmPrint. WTF?

The article states, "Even after complaints about the complexity of Newton Intelligence, Apple added more features with the 2.0 release of the software which did little to improve the user experience. Instead, the Newton gained a slight speed bump and new communications tool. It was still painfully slow to search for a contact or to add a new appointment."

WHAT? Users LOVED the new OS! Newton OS 2.0 is still, even today, one of the most intuitive interfaces ever created. "Painfully slow to add a new appointment?" How so, when all it takes is writing (or printing) this: "Lunch w/ John tomorrow." Voilà. Done. Suddenly a new appointment has appeared, with John's address and phone (if he was in your address book) set for 12 noon the next day. 1.5 seconds. Too slow? Did the author ever even USE a Newton? Or did he see Gary Trudeau's cartoon and figure Trudeau was the end-all be-all reviewer? (BTW, Trudeau's famous "Egg Freckles" cartoon was incorporated into later versions of the OS as an Easter egg, and a later model Newton was given to him, where he soon pronounced it as very nice.) This article seems based more on popular misconceptions of the time, rather than on any hands-on familiarity.

Now, one thing my Newton cannot do...is translate this sentence from the article for me:

"Palm eaked out an existance selling connectivity software to existing Zoomer customers and (after a rewrite) to users of the popular HP palmtops that rand MS-DOS."

I assume the author meant "eked" and "existence," but what is "rand?"

Looks like they went back in and fixed the "0 to 95 percent" thing since last night, yet still couldn't figure out how to run a spell checker on that "article." Maybe I should tell them about the Newton's spell checker...

Or maybe they'll discover them if they ever take a high school English course.

Z22

before I accidentally (I swear) drowned and decided to hop on the iPhone bandwagon, the Z22 was a very great machine... cheap cheerful and effective., even at the lower screen rez I liked it better than the higher end Sony Clie it replaced, in part because of the great feel form factor (too often in hardware, Palm designers aimed for slim without sacrificing screen width, leading to uncomfortably "sharp" devices.

But enjoying my iPhone - despite the current lack of TODOs, and my bad feelings about Outlook meaning I'm not actually synching my data to my PC - it makes me sad at how blatantly Palm dropped the ball.