Turning a palmpilot today is like opening a time capsule. Its beeps, gray, a screen driven by the pencil and the grid of simple applications are pure nostalgia. However, this small organizer captured the essence of mobile computing long before there were iPhones and Androids.
Checking the palmpilot
My Palmpilot is Palm M105, which was launched around 2001. It was only a budget and entry level model, but it has remained incredibly well. Ironically, a more expensive device may not have survived more than two decades in a desktop, since it would have had a rechargeable battery. Mine takes two AAA cells and powers instantly.
Lighting it, it is a true explosion of the past, but also strangely familiar because the software was very influential.
The device is much of your time. There is an optical pencil in the housing on the back, and you must use it to calibrate the screen when you turn it on for the first time. There is no Wi-Fi, so you must also manually enter the time and date to complete the configuration. The constant beeps greet each tap.
However, when you are finally ready to use, what do you face? A home screen containing a grid of 12 application icons. It may seem difficult to believe that this platform is where iOS and Android have their roots, but it is there.
What still works (and what is not)
The PDA began as a digital replacement for Filofax, so the default applications are created around the management of personal information: addiction book, calendar, notes, memoranda and lists of pending tasks, together with a calculator.
It was possible to install third -party applications in a palm, although I had to do it through a desktop computer, and I no longer have the Hotsync cable to connect it. If I had done, I would trust community projects such as the Palm synchronization Software to work.
A rapid verification on the file site Palmdb It reveals the types of applications that I would have been using. There are titles in all types of categories, as expected from a modern application store: games (including a fatality port, of course), productivity tools, media applications, etc.
The text input occurs using the graffiti system, where you use the pencil to write on the panel dedicated under the screen. Graffiti uses similar forms, but not exactly the same as the letters you are writing, so some learning is needed. There is a small Qwerty keyboard on screen for those who could not master it.
In use, much is familiar. Touch the start button when you want to close an application; There is a global search option; an equivalent to the three -point menu to access the functions; plus a dedicated configuration section.
But without applications or the Internet, a palm is surprisingly limited in 2025. Technically, you could obtain Internet access in this, not through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but through infrared of all things. I could use it together with a receiver to go on a laptop to obtain what would have been an incredibly slow connection. Most likely, IR port is useful for those moments when you needed to transfer your presentation card to a user of a Palm user.
An even greater limitation was that these first palm trees had no permanent storage, but used volatile memory. When the batteries are exhausted, it loses the data that has not supported.
How Palm invented the smartphone
Innovation and influence were just visible throughout Palm’s history. Not only began and ended with the core palm interface.
Almost at the same time that the M105 came out, a small company called Handspring was doing the treo Palma -proof series. These were some of the first smartphones. Palm bought the company in 2003 and continued to develop the range, but the phones remained depending on the entrance of the optical pencil, and also acquired a blackberry -style qwerty keyboard. If Palm had hit the capacitive technology for the touch screen that Apple would use only a few years later, the entire history of smartphones could have resulted in a different way.
And then, in 2009, Palm was replaced by Webos on the smart phone Palm Pre. It was fantastic and miserably failed. But he still left his brand. His user interface based on button without button, where he slid to the left and to the right through his open applications and slid to close them, was raised almost wholesale by Android and iOS for his multitasking interfaces. Today, Webos is reduced to promoting LG intelligent televisions.
I would completely buy a new palm device
Palm is a great example of how a brand can totally dominate a market but that will have gone only a few years later, in this case, squeezed by Blackberry, then killed by Apple. It is also one of my favorite technological companies of all time.
Palm was perhaps the closest to the Apple of Steve Jobs, with a markedly different vision of what modern technology gives us. The devices delivered energy and innovation without excess things. If a modern palm device appeared tomorrow, I would not hesitate to buy one.
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