'Tis the season: Verizon first in line to flog Palm phone resurrection Easter is a time for resurrections and so El Reg noted with interest that Palm, after an eight-year hiatus, has signed up Verizon as the first telco to stock the device when it launches this year. Word of the development was first broken by Android Police. Palm owner TCL, which also has a licence to use the Alcatel and …
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I could put a small, thick, sturdy Pre or Treo in my back trouser pocket and expect it to come out without damage at the end of the day.
WHY can't I do that with modern phones ?
BECAUSE they are large, thin and fragile, and manufacturers refuse to offer us small, thick, sturdy alternatives.
The new Sony "Compact" is heavier than a number of 5.5 inch phones and doesn't look nearly as durable as the last Palms.
I picked up a Pre 3 in a fire sale and used it as a non-work phone for a couple of years. It was Good Enough, had magnetic charging and a better keyboard than the company BlackBerry. The problem wasn't lack of apps per se but very specific things like banking. Unfortunately it got internally damaged by an acute attack of clumsiness. But externally the only thing that broke was the HP logo on the back which lost the inside of the P.
I loved my (original) Palm. I used it travelling in conjunction with my Psion - mainly because the connectivity/sync on the palm was extremely good in comparison with the Psion. My last Palm was their first colour model. I still have that and it still switches on and syncs. I didn't fall for the phone.
Every time that I use my Android for a calendar or to find a contact I'm reminded, sadly, of how well, and how simply, the Palm Pilots did these things. Plus they backed up onto my PC, not to "the cloud."
And I don't recall Palm hoovering up my data to inflict ads on me. If you can get me a Palm Pilot with GPS, phone, and email I'm sold.
Can't do phone, but I have the GPS module for my Palm Pilot.
It was a great system, but I'm it would have to be pretty damn impressive to get me excited for a revived Palm. If they could create a launcher and apps that duplicate the best parts of the Palm then maybe. A custom skin on a mid-level Android phone would not do it.
My palm pilot can do phone calls. Unfortunately only via the land line modem module while plugged into my phone line or else I might be using it today.
I'm hoping that the Raspberry Pi 4G hats start to get cheap. I expect iPhone and Android's days would look numbered if we could get real hackable phone hardware into the hands of lots of creative people. Too bad the price of a 4G embedded module tends to run around £250.
In my college job I appropriate the boss's untouched Palm III for my own use until I graduated and got a HandSpring Visor Deluxe. To this day when I am filling out paper forms that require you to put letters into individual boxes I find myself writing in Graffiti.
A friend of mine got a Palm VII when those came out - I remember being impressed that he could look up movie showtimes on it. This would have been in the summer of 1999 so instant access to data from basically anywhere was still a pretty big deal.
When I show it to my Nokia-addicted colleagues telling that was the future of mobile phones, they laughed. It was too big... and who could be interested about "applications" on a phone, but maybe Snake?
Of course the same people running to buy iPhones five years later... thinking they were "pioneers"...
Probably the first time a decent "handwriting" recognition software was shipped for a mobile device. When you look at how modest it's hardware requirements are, you realize that it's truly a feat of software design and implementation.
Other than my HP-48 calculator my palm was my only truly indispensable piece of kit in the late 90's. And do NOT get me started on the death of HP calculators...
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