I went $300 into debt to my parents when I was 9 years old for a Handspring Visor Deluxe. It had 8MB of RAM, a 16-ish MHz DragonBall processor, and ran Palm OS 3.1H3. I vaguely recall the Handspring version (H3) of the OS having a few additional goodies like a world clock and better notes app. A year or two layer my buddy Will bought a Palm Vx at a yard sale and I beamed him the Space Trader PDB because it was my favorite game.
Good times. I remember reading about the Springboard modem modules that were available and thinking how cool it would be to have the internet in your pocket and chat with friends on the go... if only I knew :-P
Sometimes it would just drain the battery, and gone was all my data.
As a young adult, all my appointments would be gone and I was left wondering if I was forgetting an appointment.
I bought a m105 from my own pocket money. I used it for years. It was neardy but I loved this thing.
Later switched to Windows CE / Mobile. My God these things where powerful. First smartphone was a Web OS device for me. Never had a better Hardware keyboard device. I was SO fast on that thing. Sadly there is no up to date smartphone with a horizontal keyboard. I need it so bad for termux. Sad days...
Blackberry will introduce a new phone in 2022. The priv and the keyONE do not meet my expectations regarding power.
Ha, I started with Windows CE "Pocket PC". An HP iPaq H1930 iirc and then a Dell Axim x50v.
These devices were really niche, to say the least. I’ve never seen another than the mines. Still, there was an astonishingly high number of available applications. Some developers from this era, especially game devs, are now great mobile devs.
Talking about games, there were some real gems on those devices. Hell, there was even an Age of Empires port. It’s sad that they are mostly lost.
Windows CE was really interesting, but irritating to use.
The Start Menu on such a small screen was a very weird thing. It was clear that Microsoft was uncomfortable with anything that pointed away from their mainline desktop experience, they were always trying to reassure you that this computer in your pocket was a Real Windows™ Device.
But the cleaned-up API, and the Execute In Place, and exFAT were all to the good side, slimming down to fit mobile hardware. And their communications stack was far superior to PalmOS at the time.
I loved my Palm Pilot IIIx, though. Loved the Macintosh-like API. Dead simple to make the switch to that platform if you'd written a couple of Classic Mac apps.
I remember getting looks on the train on my commute to work playing Tomb Raider on my Pocket PC. You'd hold the device in landscape and use a combination of onscreen buttons and hardware controls. It behaved very much like the Nintendo Switch but a few years prior to the Nintendo DS (and with a larger screen too).
My mum had a blue Handspring Visor, which was great for playing Bejeweled on long car journeys in 1999! At the time I used a personal organiser from Time Magazine to note down homework assignments.
In 2006, a friend at my parent's Bible study group donated an regionalised HTC Himalaya (Orange SPV M1000) running Windows Mobile 5. It was so powerful! My favourite was pPod, an iPod emulator. It could also run MSN messenger, and even though it needed a separate SDIO WiFi card to connect, it was possible continue chatting to a certain girl in California even after my bedtime XD
Is there a place like MacintoshGarden/MacintoshRepository/WinWorldPC for old Pocket PC or Palm apps? I've got a small collection (Pocket PC below):
Sorry, I tried but it got taken down pretty much immediately. Feel free to reach out to me personally though! I think it's a pity that the excellent workmanship that went into that software is now no longer being recognised, because the legacy devices aren't for sale. They were good tools!
I had the Pre2 and Pre3, those were the best phones I ever had. I can't believe they failed. At the time I also had both an iPhone and a Nexus (I was developing mobile apps) and the Pre's were my daily drivers. I even got the HP TouchPad and used that as a daily driver as well. I worked some of my web development from that tablet. It was damn great. It is a tragedy that webOS for mobile devices is gone.
I too had an m105. I used it in school growing up. I was really proficient with graffiti, I could write just as fast on the graffiti system as I could write in print. It also meant I had very well formatted notes for all my classes backed up on my computer. I would also write up a lot of rough drafts on my pilot to be cleaned up and finally edited on a desktop for all the papers I had to write for classes.
I later upgraded to a used CLIÉ PEG-SJ22. It was an awesome upgrade. with the high-res (320x320) color scree Just having an actual USB port on it made it so much more useful as then I could easily transfer things from school computers to home.
I've heard good things about these mini chorded keyboards you can use with your phone to avoid on-screen keyboards. Obviously nowhere near as convinient as built in, but it seems its the best we've got.
Oh other than that pinephone keyboard case, but that requires you to change phone as well
When talking about battery life and general usability, nothing beats PalmOS yet. With weeks of battery life, it just took 3~4 key press/strokes to start jogging down something or checking schedules tomorrow, etc. Nothing on Android or iOS can beat it even without counting passcode clearance.
It was truly a golden age for handhelds. TONs of apps probably because of developer friendly plus the great eco system. I always wonder what would happen if national network coverage and web apps on Palm OS were better.
I loved my Palm device! The one thing I do think modern devices get better is text input.
When the iPhone was released, I was skeptical about its soft keyboard, but I was amazed at how much faster I could type on it than I could write with Graffiti. (And I was pretty good at Graffiti -- version 1 of course, not that awful Graffiti 2 trash-tier imposter.)
I cringe to recall that, on a date in a Manhattan restaurant, I once showed a woman my PalmPilot. She was deeply unimpressed, and went on to marry an A-list celebrity, which only pours salt on the digital wound.
Hah I remember my Palm Treo so fondly. 2008 was such exciting times. I was a Jr. SysAdmin and you just couldn't be cooler than some slick PHP/MySQL/jQuery work. The Honda Civic SI of all cars had the coolest motor around and tech was at its most optimistic.
Had the IBM Workpad c3 (Palm V with an IBM logo on the case). Got it second hand from a local IBM employee.
Read loads of books on it while walking to university (1 hour each way) with iSilo. Dropped it on the road once and it was barely scratched. Played too much SimCity during lectures.
And yes, some of my terrible handwriting bears a strong resemblence to Graffiti.
Upgraded at some point but didn't feel the later models were a great improvement. I really liked that monochrome screen!
I played that one before I knew what "Narcotics" meant, and I quickly found out why the police were so interested in my cargo.
There was also a game... Village Sim I think. You'd spend hours building up a village on a desert island (which ran persistently), hoping there were more people born by tomorrow morning. Only to find that a tornado had struck the island and all had perised except a single elderly man.
What framework is the UI built in (the emulator, not Palm itself)? I don’t know if it’s like this because I’m on an iPhone, but it’s the most app-like web UI I’ve experienced.
Here's the list of Palm OS installers from my parents' archives. Is there a site like WinWorldPC/MacintoshRepository/Macintosh Garden where these are shared? Let me know if you'd like any :)
Good times. I remember reading about the Springboard modem modules that were available and thinking how cool it would be to have the internet in your pocket and chat with friends on the go... if only I knew :-P