cross-posted from: https://mamot.fr/users/thibaultamartin/statuses/113879452911907737
Palms were offline devices that only synced with your computer when put on a docking station.
You could read and reply to emails offline, book or cancel meetings, and sync with your computer later. The latest versions allowed you to snap pictures and listen to your music.
No servers running constantly. No data spilled everywhere. Days worth of battery on a single charge.
The future stole our cables, and it took our attention span and our privacy with it.
#privacy #offline #data
My t5 tungsten didnt have wifi, but there was bt and ir. and you could buy a wifi card.
I miss my Newton. :(
Those were cool! I inherited my pop’s old one when he upgraded.
On a single charge? The Palm Pilot used 2xAAA batteries. You could use rechargeables, I suppose, but they would have been NiCads, not Lithiums, in the 90’s. More likely you were using disposables.
My Zire71 had a LiIon battery that did require charging.
I don’t recall for sure with all of them. Mine was 2 AAA, my boss had a rechargeable in 1999. I still have this one.
About 2005 I picked up a Treo, almost positive that one was lithium (it was a cell phone). Though it may have been NiCd.
I still have my m100
I think the Palm m125 is the best case scenario for running a PalmOS device nowadays because it was the last one that ran on AAAs. The m100 does as well but it has a quarter of the RAM and a slower processor, plus no SD card slot, though it’s REALLY hard to find SD cards small enough to work in a Palm anymore.
Also, they made a USB sync cable for the m100 but I haven’t been able to track one down, there’s a guy on eBay who has a pallet of their RS-232 sync cables but virtually none for USB. The m125 came with a USB docking cradle so it’s a lot easier to sync with a PC, though good luck finding 64-bit drivers.
They’re shockingly useful today as a tool to manage ADHD, since they have a buncha organizational software baked into the OS, with plenty of other productivity apps still available for download off of PalmDB, without the connectivity nor distractions of a modern smartphone. I’m using a Sony PEG-UX50, which uses PalmOS 5, has a built in keyboard, and expandable memory (in the form of Sony Memory Sticks, cause Sony was addicted to format wars at the time.)
Oh, I remember those sexy boyos!
It’s smaller than I was expecting, but in fairness modern smartphones are gigantic. It’s perfectly sized for comfortable usage of the keyboard, and is genuinely worth grabbing one if the interest and budget are there for it.
The III had an IR sync as well, but you had to initiate it and it was line of sight with the IR port on your computer.
I had it working with my Rev. B iMac.
Man, I miss my Palm III. Left it in a jacket pocket too close to a wall heater. :(
Laptops were offline devices that only synced with any computer when put on a phone cable.
The boss already had wifi. But it was a large external antenna and the speeds were terrible.
Whoa, that sounds interesting!
(I should have clarified that I meant like the first laptops, at the dawn of computer intraconnectivity)
My palm treo 650 was the most badass phone ever
Yep. While Android can do far more, the Treo keyboard kicked ass.
Sick ringtones too
http://onj3.andrelouis.com/phonetones/unzipped/Palm/Treo-650/
Loved my Palm III. Simpler days.
I used to take notes on paper in graffiti cause it was kind of a pseudo shorthand.
My handwriting went from perfect block lettering (engineer/draftsman) to unintelligible scrawl when I learnt graffiti.
I still try to use graffiti when I try to “type” on my AppleWatch.
Me too!
I tried using a Graffiti keyboard on Android, without a stylus it doesn’t make sense.
