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The PalmPilots That Never Were
harrymcc writes "Among the things that HP is getting in its $1.2 billion takeover of Palm are hundreds of patents for mobile technologies. Many are reflected in Palm's iconic products. But they also include odd keyboard designs, peculiar ideas like a stylus tip that converts into a joystick, and pre-Treo hybrids of phone and PDA that just didn't work. I rounded up some fascinating examples." It's worth clicking through the obnoxious slide-show format to see them.
I had a PalmPilot M100 in high school...that thing was AWESOME. Super useful for keeping track of homework, keeping study session schedules...I also used it to take notes, since my handwriting was atrocious but the weird Palm recognition alphabet was so easy to do quickly.
I miss having a need for one...I always felt like such a cool fucker whipping that thing out.
That's what she said.
Living With a Nerd
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Moveable Display Device for Three-Dimensional Image Creation
"Help us Obi Wan Kenobi, your'e our only hope!"
Am I the only one who thought of that when I saw #8?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
In an attempt to keep the Personal Systems Group viable, HP will bundle it with its new HeadDesk.
The total cost will be bruising. :(
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
... Didn't Palm buy the rights to BeOS a few years back...
HP could compete with Microsoft and Apple head-on, they now own an extremely efficient, multi-core, embeddable operating system...
Am I the only one who likes number 1? And what is patentable about the wall mount??
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
...considering how badly they got bit by a patent themselves.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I have a folding keyboard with palm cradle sitting right here, almost exactly like that sketch, from palmOne. It's actually really useful for when I need to type a lot (say, IMing). I still use my Palm TX all the time at school. It looks like this little guy is going to outlive its makers.
Are these patents of real inventions (as in, products at least made but not released) or just patents of product ideas? Some of these are extremely unlikely to have existed (did they have foldable displays back in 2001?), though I could be wrong.
Bummer - I was always hoping a chord-writer was in the works, but no sign of it from the posted diagrams.
I still own my foldable keyboard, although I got it wet and haven't gotten around to trying to fix it yet. It was awesome! I keep on wishing I had one for my current Palm TX...
No, it's not. I want my 5 minutes back.
It's worth clicking through the obnoxious slide-show format to see them.
It's worth installing autopager instead. If there's no existing preset for your site, (quite rare), you can roll your own, then contribute to the community. Takes a lot of the pain out of those damn 'click to see the next page full of ads' sites.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925
You know the thread the other day about Apple not suing Palm? How about this patent:
http://technologizer.com/2010/04/29/palm-patents/5/
Sounds a lot like the new iPhone to me...
http://technologizer.com/2010/04/29/palm-patents/3/ looks like a Handspring Visor module.
http://technologizer.com/2010/04/29/palm-patents/9/ looks like a ouija board.
the former is more interesting... I wonder how much of the tech unique to the Visor (i.e. the expansion system) was actually developed at Palm. Surely it was imagined there, but that's not the same thing
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Palm is totally dead at this point. The HP buy cements it. HP is where good technology goes to die off.
<big rant>
I used Palms for years and I'm sad that no modern smartphones or other gadgets can really replace them.
Even the old ones were pretty fast (they ran programs directly in-place, so you didn't have to wait for them to load from flash into RAM, I believe).
And so reliable (as long as you weren't running a crashy app on it). By that I mean the time between needing reset was MONTHS, not days like some smart phones.
But I moved to a Treo, and the newer OS had become unreliable (jt tried to keep old and new data files in sync causing both apps and PC-syncs to lock up).
I'm a big fan of my iPod touch, but my old 33Mhz Clie was much faster to use, but in response speed and reliability. For instance, to set a reminder, I'd press a hard-button set to launch diddlebug (http://diddlebug.sourceforge.net/) , scribble a note on screen (it was a "sticky-note" app, so I could just write directly on the screen), tap the alarm button and choose a time with two taps, from a UI full of buttons for hours and 5-minute intervals.
I could do that practically before you can even load up the iPod's clock app, let alone typing in the text and spinning the nice-looking but inconvenient time-spinners.
Oh, and I doubt that you can port diddlebug to the iPod Touch, due to lack of an alarm API, and you'd still have to wait for it to load to use it.
(While writing this, my iPod alarm went off, coincidentally reminding me that I get no choice about how to snooze alarms, either.)
"Segmented Keyboard for Portable Computer System" here
This one was. I had one for a few years. If you don't want to carry around a laptop, but want to have a full keyboard, the sj-series keyboards were great.
I bought an m100 (2MB, 16MHz, 160x160 greyscale display) on implulse for £50 when I bought my first mobile phone back in 2000.
The m100 was fun and surprisingly useful. It had a web browser that worked pretty well. I used to be able to sit in the pub with it and browse using the modem in the mobile phone over the IR link at a whopping 9600bps.
What was really cool, though, was the SDK which you could download along with all the documentation for free from Palm and use on whatever system you liked (Linux in my case) and develop whatever you liked for it. There was a pretty good emulator as well that you could test on. I spent a couple of hours one Saturday afternoon writing a little analogue clock program for it using the 16-bit floating-point. I had to write the trig. functions myself because the OS and SDK didn't have any.
Later I bought a Tungsten T3 which had a 400MHz ARM processor and a 480x320 16-bit colour display. The SDK was available for that but the cross-platform emulator went away. There was only a flaky "simulator" that only ran under Windows. I tried to get it running under Wine, but no banana. At that point, I gave up.
I've got a Tungsten E2 as well. They all still work and I used the E2 as an MP3 player and notepad. I broke the card slot on the T3.
I have a wireless card for the Tungsten ones and they have web browsers, but they're really flaky. Not reliable enough to use. No more sitting in the pub browsing my CVS on sourceforge...
Stick Men
Please tell me that patenting something doesn't just involve drawing a cool picture of it....
You actually have to make it work in rl?
As much as I appreciate my iPhone, my Palm Pilot from 10 years ago was a better PDA. You know, Apple, something like a week view in the agenda ? I am ready to trade the GPS against this...
Jeez, a Palm m100? Those came out around the time I'd given up on Palm. You're apparently pretty young, though, so you're forgiven.
Still, even TFA seems pretty lacking in genuine geek cred. Lots of gushing about vapor patents filed in 2001, "long before Palm made phones." Well you know what? In 2001 I had one of these, and if you didn't mind carrying around a brick it wasn't a bad device at all. It was just a Palm III PDA melded to a phone, so you got the benefits of the address book and calendar. This was long before mobile data, but there was a mobile browser available for Palms, and I was able to use that when I coupled the phone with a Ricochet modem.
Beat that, anyone?
Breakfast served all day!
When are they releasing FacePalm?
They're waiting for a super secret product called PalmPlant to be ready. Then they'll bundle FacePalm and PalmPlant as FacePlant.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
At least in some European countries: if you file a patent of an idea it's thrown out without being looked at, you have to file a patent of an application of the idea.
To me these 'patents' are nothing more than results of brainstorms which were then patented in case someone else created the idea in real life.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.