3 ms·

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.

canadianfella 4y ago
Better than what? What was the competition back then?
- jadinvt 4y ago
  Day planner, paper, hipster pda: https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster... [edit, another e.g.]
- brookst 4y ago
  People have kept day planners and contact books since forever. Just being electronic isn’t enough of a value prop.
muyuu 4y ago
Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here. Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough. I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables. The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management. Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking. It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    WinCE was nice in terms of kernel but it was really begging for a decent UI. Palm and Psion did have that part covered.

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.

canadianfella 4y ago

Better than what? What was the competition back then?

jadinvt 4y ago
Day planner, paper, hipster pda: https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster... [edit, another e.g.]
brookst 4y ago
People have kept day planners and contact books since forever. Just being electronic isn’t enough of a value prop.

muyuu 4y ago

Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here. Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough. I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.

stephc_int13 4y ago
Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables. The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management. Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking. It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)
- wkat4242 4y ago
  WinCE was nice in terms of kernel but it was really begging for a decent UI. Palm and Psion did have that part covered.