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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 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.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I used my TX daily for about a month until it developed the dreaded screen squeal. It sounds something similar to a TV flyback transformer @ 15khz or so.
Sent to palm 3 times at my own expense; they claim there's nothing wrong with it.
In addition, there's a lot of noise coming from the amplifier in the unit - using it with 32 ohm headphones (which most consumer headphones are at) is very very noisy.
All in all, I really loved the unit; the web browser worked well and it played divx/xvid movies with ease. But once you've heard the squeal, it can drive you nuts. Wish I could find a solution. There's a software package out there that is 20$ that is an overclocking utility (warpspeed?) that has the ability to eliminate 95% of the screen noise, but I hadn't dug into my wallet to fix it. I shouldn't have to spend more money to enjoy a product my wife got me for my birthday......
Karnal
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.
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.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
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...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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?
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:
Perhaps it's just me, but the whole article read like the above excerpt.
Really? Zero to 95% accuracy? That's pretty, uh, fucking awful. Somehow I doubt that's what Macword published.
Wow, spelling mistake and redundancy in the same sentence.
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.
Guess that woulda bin bad fer bidness.
Hey Silicon User, hire a fucking editor!
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I used to suffer from this same problem with my Zire 71. I found myself using it less and less as the noise became more and more bothersome. And then, one day, the display went all wonky and intermittent in an unrelated case of a bad internal connection.
Palm fixed the connection under warranty, apparently by replacing the entire front half of the unit.
Ever since then (it's been about 3 years), it has been totally silent. So, clearly, not -every- unit has this problem, and it can be fixed.
Kid-proof tablet..