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."

Comments

I miss Visor

[falcon5768]

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

[thethibs]

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?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Great thingies

[El Lobo]

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

[maryjanecapri]

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.

The Zoomer and Pam Vx....mmmmmm.

[jbarr]

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.

Almost like Woz pining for early days...

[PhotoGuy]

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

[captainboogerhead]

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!