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USRobotics PalmPilot Personal review
It's 1996. You might have a cellphone, but it doesn't do much more than make phone calls. You might have a laptop, but it's likely too heavy to carry with you everywhere you go. Or you might only have a phone that's plugged into a wall and a PC that's confined to a desk. That's the environment that gave rise to the Personal Digital Assistant (or PDA), a new type of product that first arrived in the late 1980s but really came into its own in the mid-90s. 1996 also saw the release of the first PDAs developed by USRobotics subsidiary Palm Inc., the Pilot 1000 and 5000, which had more in common with today's smartphones than many of their contemporary devices. They had a touchscreen with only a few physical buttons at the bottom. They had apps you could download. They could sync data with your computer. And they were small and light enough to carry with you at all times. They just didn't make phone calls. A year later, Palm released the slightly upgraded PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional (with 512KB and 1MB of RAM, respectively), and the ensuing years would see a regular stream of new devices -- not to mention an acquisition by 3Com, and a new spate of Palm OS products from Handspring, a company founded by the folks behind the original Pilot. But it's those first few devices that come to mind when someone mentions "Palm PDA," and with good reason -- they set a mold that wasn't deviated from much until Palm made the jump into smartphones.
Switched On: Pen again
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Last week's Switched On discussed how some next wave notions from a decade ago were trying to reinvent themselves. Here's one more. Surging smartphone vendor HTC is seeking to bring back an input method that many wrote off long ago with its forthcoming Flyer tablet and EVO View 4G comrade-in-arms: the stylus. A fixture of early Palm and Psion PDAs, Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile handsets, slim, compact styli were once the most popular thing to slip down a well since Timmy. Then, users would poke the cheap, simple sticks at similarly inexpensive resistive touchscreens. After the debut of tablet PCs, though, more companies started to use active digitizer systems like the one inside the Flyer. Active pens offer more precision, which can help with tasks such as handwriting recognition, and support "hovering" above a screen, the functional equivalent of a mouseover. On the other hand, they are also thicker, more expensive, and need to be charged. (Update: as some have pointed out in comments, Wacom's tablets generate tiny electromagnetic fields that power active digitization, and don't require the pen to store electricity itself.) And, of course, just like passive styli, active pens take up space and can be misplaced. The 2004 debut of the Nintendo DS -- the ancestor of the just-released 3DS -- marked the beginning of what has become the last mass-market consumer electronics product series to integrate stylus input. The rising popularity of capacitive touch screens and multitouch have replaced styli with fingers as the main user interface elements. Instead of using a precise point for tasks such as placing an insertion point in text, we now expand the text dynamically to accommodate our oily instruments. On-screen buttons have also grown, as have the screens themselves, all in the name of losing a contrivance.
Snow Leopard takes a bite out of support for legacy Palm OS devices
Still rocking that Palm Zire with your new Intel-based Mac? Then you might just want to reconsider that upgrade to Snow Leopard, as Apple has apparently decided to ditch its support for legacy Palm OS devices in the latest incarnation of iSync. That, as you may be aware, had previously acted as a conduit for Palm's aging but still available Palm Desktop software, and let folks easily sync up their contacts and other data from their Centro, Treo, Zire, Tungsten, or even a venerable old PalmPilot. Of course, that doesn't quite rise to the same level of controversy as the whole Pre / iTunes situation, especially considering that Palm itself has mostly moved on from said devices, and there are still some third-party sync solutions available for folks that want to keep the Palm OS dream alive.
