I love stuff like this. There's a great episode of the 90s PBS show Computer Chronicles with a ton of these:
https://computerchronicles.tv/#episode/1103
(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn't load, that's why.)
... except in that combination, you could see your battery level dropping in real-time...
... fun times...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
At 80M subscribers, it was probably the most popular way in the world to access mobile internet pre-iPhone.
I-mode also introduced the original set of emojis that are now supported everywhere.
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.
I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.
Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough.
Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.
This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws.
Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers.
That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
(Incidentally, this is the tablet I worked on: https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett - nothing to make you feel old like having tech you've worked on catalogued by a museum; the early versions ran NanoX with a custom Opera port)
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.
I did a double-take at that.
False starts? The Palm? Blackberry?
These things sold in the tens of millions and I saw them everywhere. I'm a Brit: I used a Psion. My PDA didn't sync with my desktop; I didn't do that stuff on the desktop, I did it in a better, far more reliable computer in my pocket.
As Palms caught on, I blew the owners' minds by IRDA zapping them contact details.
The point being that there was a time everyone with an office corporate job carried them.
To a lesser extent, Nokia, WinCE, Sony-Ericsson etc. Those gadgets sold in vast numbers, too.
I mean, yes, compared to the modern smartphone industry, which is 10-100x the size of the entire PC industry including servers...
But "false starts"? $ multi-billion companies with household-name products?
I would be extraordinarily happy with a "false start" such as that!
It strikes me as like saying bicycles were a false start because more people do more miles in cars.
You were. But the future got hijacked along the way.
I had the same thought about living in the future around 2007 when I was on a hydrofoil skimming across the South China Sea doing payroll on my SonyEricsson M600c. I thought "the future is going to be great!" It isn't.
It was an exciting time, and I cherish those warm memories, that feeling of a wide open future that I was going to be a part of.
It feels like I got screwed out of those dreams.
Technology framed my life - I loved all of it! Computers, programming, videogames, taking everything I could apart and trying to figure it out and fix it when it failed. I eventually got into IT, and have had a good career.
The last couple years - it feels like it's all being taken away. There's a lot more to say, but I wasn't really planning on a super long rant here. Maybe I just wish the enshittification of it all had an ending that didn't feel so bleak.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.
PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.
One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.
"Eat up, Martha!"
/ob Simpsons
> and it looks a bit underwhelming in general
...only from today's perspective.
How on earth can that be faster than typing on a regular qwerty keyboard.
No?
(But I'll fight you if you think the 1970's were a worse or even a bad decade.)