6 ms·

I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's

I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.

rchaud 4y ago
I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
- zeppelin101 4y ago
  You can still get those batteries replaced. It's just a lot more work.
  - bitwrangler 4y ago
    There are many You-tube videos showing step by step. If you're slightly handy with small screws it's not hard. I've replaced my Samsung battery twice over the years. Look into it before you cast doubt and lose hope.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      I might go to a shop, but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video for something manufacturers themsleves let you do in 5 seconds. However, that does not leave me with workable alternatives. I respect what Fairphone is trying to do, but €500 for a replaceable battery phone with internals several years old isn't the right choice for me.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        >>but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video But.....why? It's hardly any effort. Saying "I won't fiddle around with a screwdriver" is a stance as respectable as someone saying they are proud of not being able to do maths or know basic geography facts.
    - tdeck 4y ago
      It depends on the phone. Some are constructed with glue as well as screws, or have plastic tabs that become brittle and can easily break when servicing the phone.
    - janef0421 4y ago
      That was likely true of models from the mid-2010s, but based on what I've seen of Hugh Jeffrey's work, most modern, high-end smartphones are held together with glue and require the disconnection of multiple fragile ribbon cables to replace the battery. It's a daunting task even for someone with experience working on computer components.
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  The Samsung XCover6 Pro has an easily replaceable battery (and water resistance and physical buttons and dedication to 5 years of patching). In fact, I think it uses the same battery as the XCover from a couple of years ago. I just ordered mine yesterday actually. Kinda excited.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    I'd buy one if it wasn't as slow and unperformant as all the reviews say it is. I want a Galaxy S10e in that package.
    - capitainenemo 4y ago
      Yeah, it's a mid-range phone, not a top-end one. But, eh, $600. And frankly, for what I'm doing, a mid-range phone is quite adequate. It has for example, 3x the memory and 2x the processing power of the temporary phone I'm using right now which is functional-but-annoying.
  - jbj 4y ago
    sadly it does not have support for /e/, graphene or similar. My 3 last phones have been samsung, and after using /e/ I have no intent of getting an original samsung software again
- huehehue 4y ago
  I have fond memories of rooting early Android devices, and having to constantly rip the battery out when the phone would inevitably lock up. I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.
  - unsafecast 4y ago
    I've never ever ran into a situation where holding the power button for ~15 seconds didn't reset the phone. This stuff runs at a _way_ lower level than the software you can mess with. Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.
    - whitexn--g28h 4y ago
      I have seen newer 1+ phones lock up and it fail to respond to the reset sequence. After receiving a call the modem crashes and it reboots. No other input can reset the device.
      - unsafecast 4y ago
        Interesting. Never heard of this.
    - womod 4y ago
      I recently managed to "hard-brick" my Motorola one 5g ace after updating magisk, getting stuck in a bootloop, and naively deciding to attempt to boot from the B slot instead. On qualcomm-based devices you can get into EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode where you have nothing that is actually bootable on the device, and the phone will remain entirely unresponsive save for appearing as a serial device when plugged in over USB. You then need to "talk" to the phone with the appropriate protocol (Sahara or Firehose depending on the age of the device) and you can gradually work towards recovery. In my case I was able to manually reconstruct a valid bootloader.img for my particular software version, re-flash it, and get back into a "soft-brick" state from there. However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering. Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  It's strange to me how 'newer' phones (referencing my iphone 5s) seem to have software control battery life? I got the battery replaced multiple times on an iphone and none of them really provided a sustained increase in the battery life of the device.
  - mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
    planned obsolescence
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    I've replaced my iPhone SE (2016)'s battery three times since I originally bought it. Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day. You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?
- dont__panic 4y ago
  As long as you have a phone that's reasonably well designed, it's usually not too much trouble to replace the internal battery every 2-3 years. I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap. At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    I believe the research would suggest 80% doesn't really make an especially good target. Its mostly a linear relationship between state of charge and speed of battery aging, other than a step change around 50-70% depending on the chemistry. source (one of many): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf I keep my EV charged to just 50% most days for this reason, get below that step change.
    - gnramires 4y ago
      Interesting, just a note to someone reading that paper: I'm not sure what methodology they used (did they keep the cell SoC in storage?), but storing depleted cells can severely degrade them due to self-discharge (that's why the recommended storage SoC is usually 40%).
  - detritus 4y ago
    I had to bite my tongue seeing a young woman idly hoy one of those extremely wasteful ecigs in the bin on my way home earlier. I wa mentally working all the bits of complexity going to landfill. Still, perhaps I should buy ex-landfill sites on the cheap, so my descendants can mine them.
  - WanderPanda 4y ago
    Al Dente didn‘t really work for me. I used it constantly for 1.5-2 years (capped at 60-80) and my battery still went to 88% of design capacity. My iPhone‘s battery on the other hand has been tortured for three years (always charging 100%, fast charging, getting very hot in the sun) and is still at 85%. I feel like the batteries nowadays are just made to last 2-3 years to get to 85-80% capacity no matter how you treat them
- gibolt 4y ago
  You can get a replacement battery pretty easy online. I'm sure somewhere would be willing to do the replacement. It isn't impossible, just hard without the right tools
- pmontra 4y ago
  I opened my Samsung A40 two days ago and replaced a camera that didn't autofocus anymore. 20 Euros with shipping. The battery can be replaced too. Actually I had to disconnect it to remove the upper motherboard and access the camera. It seems a pretty serviceable phone. You should check YouTube for tear down videos about your model.
  - posguy 4y ago
    No Android 12 (released October 4, 2021) or 13 for the Galaxy A40 phone has been released by Samsung :c OS updates make or break devices long term.
    - pmontra 4y ago
      I'm still getting system upgrades. Actually I wish they didn't upgrade to Android 10 because it made Syncthing much less useful as it can't access all the files anymore (but file managers can, even open source ones, so maybe it's a problem with Syncthing itself.) Considering that I've got the phone in June 2019, I paid less than 100 Euro per year. If I had to buy a new phone to have Android 12 (and I don't understand why I should - I'd be fine with Android 8 or even 4 if I'd get security patches), 100 Euro per year is acceptable. The big problem with buying a new phone is that I'm not buying from Apple and I'm not going to find an Android one as small as the A40, which is already too big IMHO. I wish it was 3/4 or one inch shorter (2 or 2.5 cm.)
- andrepd 4y ago
  I'm in the exact same position. Only now that my 5-inch 16:9 from 2016 completely died (and I can't get replacement batteries anywhere) did I begrudgingly buy a Pixel 4a.
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  Palm Pilot lacked constant internet connectivity, and that's its real killer "feature" as it relates to longevity. It means you never have to update the OS, so the progressively more shoddy programming over time can go bloat someone else's device to death. "Non-replaceable" battery, as others have mentioned, is just non technical quitter talk in almost all cases.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. This is one of the worst design trends (perhaps the worst) of modern-day devices.
eddieroger 4y ago
I would love to do this. I'd be super curious to re-experience life with an offline device in a very online world. I loved every Palm I had up through the Pre, but there was a magic about trying to play Zork on a Palm, or syncing a day's worth of light reading for the (school) bus. I really miss this app Four Point Oh that tracked homework and stuff.
- nehal3m 4y ago
  You could pull the SIM out of a smartphone. Not the same, but similar?
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    I could, but a smartphone is built with the expectation of total connectivity, as are the apps on it. The Palm was built to be offline first, and makes different expectations around data transfer. It also had a different interaction model - stylus with Graffiti instead of a keyboard - which would be fun to revisit. So yeah, I could have an offline device, but it's not the same.
GloriousKoji 4y ago
I miss the old Palm Pilot and even Windows CE devices. Despite the massive amounts of computational power and an endless library of software I find modern smart phones PDA inferior.
- jhatemyjob 4y ago
  Yea, all the iPhone did was make PDAs palatable by the masses. I wonder how much further we would be as a species if it was never released.
thepasswordis 4y ago
Dang that's really cool. I remember having a palm and loving it in high school. There was a utility that would crawl a website and then package it up to a certain link depth, and put that on your palm pilot for offline viewing. I used to crawl fark.com so I could read the stories and comments later.
jonny_eh 4y ago
I got a Palm in 2002 for school, but only every played games on it. Sold it and bought a Gameboy Advance. I still have it and use it :D
rootusrootus 4y ago
Seeing all the comments in this discussion makes me think I should break out my old Zaurus and put it on eBay. It never even got used more than a few minutes. I just haven't had the heart to recycle it yet.
rkagerer 4y ago
That's awesome. I'm tired of how Android and iPhones seem to keep getting shittier and haven't ruled out reverting back to an old PalmOS device.

I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.

rchaud 4y ago

I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.

zeppelin101 4y ago
You can still get those batteries replaced. It's just a lot more work.
- bitwrangler 4y ago
  There are many You-tube videos showing step by step. If you're slightly handy with small screws it's not hard. I've replaced my Samsung battery twice over the years. Look into it before you cast doubt and lose hope.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I might go to a shop, but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video for something manufacturers themsleves let you do in 5 seconds. However, that does not leave me with workable alternatives. I respect what Fairphone is trying to do, but €500 for a replaceable battery phone with internals several years old isn't the right choice for me.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      >>but I'm not going to fiddle around with a screwdriver and a YouTube video But.....why? It's hardly any effort. Saying "I won't fiddle around with a screwdriver" is a stance as respectable as someone saying they are proud of not being able to do maths or know basic geography facts.
  - tdeck 4y ago
    It depends on the phone. Some are constructed with glue as well as screws, or have plastic tabs that become brittle and can easily break when servicing the phone.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    That was likely true of models from the mid-2010s, but based on what I've seen of Hugh Jeffrey's work, most modern, high-end smartphones are held together with glue and require the disconnection of multiple fragile ribbon cables to replace the battery. It's a daunting task even for someone with experience working on computer components.
capitainenemo 4y ago
The Samsung XCover6 Pro has an easily replaceable battery (and water resistance and physical buttons and dedication to 5 years of patching). In fact, I think it uses the same battery as the XCover from a couple of years ago. I just ordered mine yesterday actually. Kinda excited.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I'd buy one if it wasn't as slow and unperformant as all the reviews say it is. I want a Galaxy S10e in that package.
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    Yeah, it's a mid-range phone, not a top-end one. But, eh, $600. And frankly, for what I'm doing, a mid-range phone is quite adequate. It has for example, 3x the memory and 2x the processing power of the temporary phone I'm using right now which is functional-but-annoying.
- jbj 4y ago
  sadly it does not have support for /e/, graphene or similar. My 3 last phones have been samsung, and after using /e/ I have no intent of getting an original samsung software again
huehehue 4y ago
I have fond memories of rooting early Android devices, and having to constantly rip the battery out when the phone would inevitably lock up. I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.
- unsafecast 4y ago
  I've never ever ran into a situation where holding the power button for ~15 seconds didn't reset the phone. This stuff runs at a _way_ lower level than the software you can mess with. Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.
  - whitexn--g28h 4y ago
    I have seen newer 1+ phones lock up and it fail to respond to the reset sequence. After receiving a call the modem crashes and it reboots. No other input can reset the device.
    - unsafecast 4y ago
      Interesting. Never heard of this.
  - womod 4y ago
    I recently managed to "hard-brick" my Motorola one 5g ace after updating magisk, getting stuck in a bootloop, and naively deciding to attempt to boot from the B slot instead. On qualcomm-based devices you can get into EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode where you have nothing that is actually bootable on the device, and the phone will remain entirely unresponsive save for appearing as a serial device when plugged in over USB. You then need to "talk" to the phone with the appropriate protocol (Sahara or Firehose depending on the age of the device) and you can gradually work towards recovery. In my case I was able to manually reconstruct a valid bootloader.img for my particular software version, re-flash it, and get back into a "soft-brick" state from there. However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering. Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.
dieselgate 4y ago
It's strange to me how 'newer' phones (referencing my iphone 5s) seem to have software control battery life? I got the battery replaced multiple times on an iphone and none of them really provided a sustained increase in the battery life of the device.
- mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
  planned obsolescence
- dont__panic 4y ago
  I've replaced my iPhone SE (2016)'s battery three times since I originally bought it. Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day. You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?
dont__panic 4y ago
As long as you have a phone that's reasonably well designed, it's usually not too much trouble to replace the internal battery every 2-3 years. I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap. At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!
- jackmott42 4y ago
  I believe the research would suggest 80% doesn't really make an especially good target. Its mostly a linear relationship between state of charge and speed of battery aging, other than a step change around 50-70% depending on the chemistry. source (one of many): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf I keep my EV charged to just 50% most days for this reason, get below that step change.
  - gnramires 4y ago
    Interesting, just a note to someone reading that paper: I'm not sure what methodology they used (did they keep the cell SoC in storage?), but storing depleted cells can severely degrade them due to self-discharge (that's why the recommended storage SoC is usually 40%).
- detritus 4y ago
  I had to bite my tongue seeing a young woman idly hoy one of those extremely wasteful ecigs in the bin on my way home earlier. I wa mentally working all the bits of complexity going to landfill. Still, perhaps I should buy ex-landfill sites on the cheap, so my descendants can mine them.
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  Al Dente didn‘t really work for me. I used it constantly for 1.5-2 years (capped at 60-80) and my battery still went to 88% of design capacity. My iPhone‘s battery on the other hand has been tortured for three years (always charging 100%, fast charging, getting very hot in the sun) and is still at 85%. I feel like the batteries nowadays are just made to last 2-3 years to get to 85-80% capacity no matter how you treat them
gibolt 4y ago
You can get a replacement battery pretty easy online. I'm sure somewhere would be willing to do the replacement. It isn't impossible, just hard without the right tools
pmontra 4y ago
I opened my Samsung A40 two days ago and replaced a camera that didn't autofocus anymore. 20 Euros with shipping. The battery can be replaced too. Actually I had to disconnect it to remove the upper motherboard and access the camera. It seems a pretty serviceable phone. You should check YouTube for tear down videos about your model.
- posguy 4y ago
  No Android 12 (released October 4, 2021) or 13 for the Galaxy A40 phone has been released by Samsung :c OS updates make or break devices long term.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    I'm still getting system upgrades. Actually I wish they didn't upgrade to Android 10 because it made Syncthing much less useful as it can't access all the files anymore (but file managers can, even open source ones, so maybe it's a problem with Syncthing itself.) Considering that I've got the phone in June 2019, I paid less than 100 Euro per year. If I had to buy a new phone to have Android 12 (and I don't understand why I should - I'd be fine with Android 8 or even 4 if I'd get security patches), 100 Euro per year is acceptable. The big problem with buying a new phone is that I'm not buying from Apple and I'm not going to find an Android one as small as the A40, which is already too big IMHO. I wish it was 3/4 or one inch shorter (2 or 2.5 cm.)
andrepd 4y ago
I'm in the exact same position. Only now that my 5-inch 16:9 from 2016 completely died (and I can't get replacement batteries anywhere) did I begrudgingly buy a Pixel 4a.
QuarterReptile 4y ago
Palm Pilot lacked constant internet connectivity, and that's its real killer "feature" as it relates to longevity. It means you never have to update the OS, so the progressively more shoddy programming over time can go bloat someone else's device to death. "Non-replaceable" battery, as others have mentioned, is just non technical quitter talk in almost all cases.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. This is one of the worst design trends (perhaps the worst) of modern-day devices.

eddieroger 4y ago

I would love to do this. I'd be super curious to re-experience life with an offline device in a very online world. I loved every Palm I had up through the Pre, but there was a magic about trying to play Zork on a Palm, or syncing a day's worth of light reading for the (school) bus. I really miss this app Four Point Oh that tracked homework and stuff.

nehal3m 4y ago
You could pull the SIM out of a smartphone. Not the same, but similar?
- eddieroger 4y ago
  I could, but a smartphone is built with the expectation of total connectivity, as are the apps on it. The Palm was built to be offline first, and makes different expectations around data transfer. It also had a different interaction model - stylus with Graffiti instead of a keyboard - which would be fun to revisit. So yeah, I could have an offline device, but it's not the same.

GloriousKoji 4y ago

I miss the old Palm Pilot and even Windows CE devices. Despite the massive amounts of computational power and an endless library of software I find modern smart phones PDA inferior.

jhatemyjob 4y ago
Yea, all the iPhone did was make PDAs palatable by the masses. I wonder how much further we would be as a species if it was never released.

thepasswordis 4y ago

Dang that's really cool. I remember having a palm and loving it in high school. There was a utility that would crawl a website and then package it up to a certain link depth, and put that on your palm pilot for offline viewing. I used to crawl fark.com so I could read the stories and comments later.

jonny_eh 4y ago

I got a Palm in 2002 for school, but only every played games on it. Sold it and bought a Gameboy Advance. I still have it and use it :D

rootusrootus 4y ago

Seeing all the comments in this discussion makes me think I should break out my old Zaurus and put it on eBay. It never even got used more than a few minutes. I just haven't had the heart to recycle it yet.

rkagerer 4y ago

That's awesome. I'm tired of how Android and iPhones seem to keep getting shittier and haven't ruled out reverting back to an old PalmOS device.