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Palm OS — How does it look today?

The first Palm PDA was introduced in 1996 and it was a huge success. How did Palm OS really work? Let's test it and figure it out.

Dmitrii Eliuseev
UX Collective

Before we begin, it can be useful to remember the technological level of that time. The typical mobile phone, available for the customers in 1994, was a Nokia 2110, which had a 236g weight, a 25mm thickness, and a small monochrome 96x96 screen:

Nokia 2110 © https://www.imei.info/phonedatabase/3506-nokia-2110/

Laptops were heavy and expensive, smartphones were not invented yet, and nobody was even thinking about iPhone or Android at least for the nearest 10 years. Thus, an appearance in 1996 of a Palm Pilot device, that was relatively cheap and lightweight, that could be held in a palm and could work as a personal digital assistant, was a huge step forward. These devices became really popular and were on the market for about 10 years.

Palm V © amazon.com

From the tech perspective, it is also interesting to see how it works. Nowadays nobody will be surprised by having a smartphone with an octa-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and an AMOLED screen. On the contrary, the typical Palm OS device was having a single core 16MHz Motorola Dragonball processor…

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Responses (12)

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Fun read!

EarthLink was (still is?) an Internet service provider. One could setup an account to be used with a dial-up modem (i.e. a 56kbps modem that plugs into a standard phone line) to access the Internet.

Of course, nowadays it looks like a huge waste of screen space, but the technology in 1995 probably did not allow to make a touch screen, sensitive enough to recognise the hand-written ...

Actually, Graffiti was extremely accurate as well as fast. I loved it. I find Apple Scribble to be slower in recognition for each letter than Graffiti was.
The best feature of Graffiti that I miss using Apple Scribble? The return stroke ("Ret" in the…

I actually don’t know what is the “Earthlink” and what connectivity features it was providing.

EarthLink.net. It’s a web service provider in the States. They provide web portal access and email to people who subscribe. Why would you do this in a world of gmail and other free email?
Email wasn’t always free. Early broadband providers couldn’t…