Mereja

Farewell Palm

Written by

John Gordon

in

I work in an IT shop. I can almost always find a home for my old gear. Tomorrow will be a real test though, I’m bringing in my Palm stuff to give away …

The five PalmOS devices shown above are probably 1/2 to 1/3 of the total Emily and I bought between 1998 and 2006. I underwent the exquisitely painful Palm to iPhone transition in Aug 2008 (in some ways it’s still continuing).
I don’t think anyone will want the devices, but the chargers and accessories might be of interest. I have zillions of styli.[1]
One SONY made device uses AA batteries. It’s the only one that would still work; I might keep it around for grandchild show and tell (I bet there’s still an AA equivalent in 30 years. If there’s civilization.) The others had LiOn batteries that are pretty dead by now.
Ahh, Palm. They were great in their time, but they peaked in the 90s with the Graffiti One Vx. Even after they lost their way, the company was sustained by some terrific developers like Pimlico Software (DateBk).
I’m not tossing everything. I added the Vx manual and Pogue’s PalmPilot book to my shelf of computer book honor:

Even though Palm Inc’s WebOS seems to have no relationship to PalmClassic, I’d hoped it would provide some inspiring competition for Apple. Judging by their share price, however, that seems unlikely …

They fell of a cliff in the past week or so. I assume the price was being sustained by hope of a Nokia or Microsoft acquisition, but that news of Windows Mobile 7 made that unlikely. Instead the key people are likely to go to Microsoft or Google and someone will buy up any useful patents.

Farewell Palm.

See also:

Update 3/23/2010: The best pre-iPhone smartphone was the PalmOS Classic Samsung i500. Also, the Palm Vx pioneered the non-removable LiOn battery.

[1] Update 3/24/2010: My coworkers took almost every accessory, but nobody wanted a device. I love Minnesota — the home of geeks who hate throwing things away.

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