4 ms·

I dabbled in handhelds in that era, and always wanted a Psion but never got around to it. The main issues in that era for me were that they devices were dead e

I dabbled in handhelds in that era, and always wanted a Psion but never got around to it. The main issues in that era for me were that they devices were dead ends for data. At the time, the main competitor for something like this was a paper planner, of course, which are ALSO dead ends, so it was a reasonable approach. Newton happened, though, and initially -- and people forget this -- it came with the Newton Desktop, which gave you access to your data on Windows. It synced! This was huge! And then, for reasons I've never understood, Apple dropped the Newton Desktop with the rev to NewtOS 2.0, which was really really great otherwise. Unfortunately easy desktop sync turned out to be a killer app in this space, because Palm came to market with that as their foundation and ruled the whole market for quite a while. I loved the Newton -- and if you've never touched one, you don't actually know how useful they were; it was really pretty amazing -- but the sync was what pushed me to Palm, where I stayed until the 2000s.

andix 3y ago
I played with some of those PDAs as a kid, and honestly I never really got what they were used for. There was no Wi-Fi and internet connection via infrared was not really awesome. Using it while traveling abroad was extremely expensive. You were able to sync the email from your desktop PC, answer them offline and send them on the next sync. And you could do spreadsheets. But honestly, who really uses spreadsheets on their smartphone? (Which is a comparable user experience) So the only thing left is calendar, contacts and notes. A paper planner was probably more useful back then.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  That's the rub. They're from a world that was, in very meaningful ways, "pre-connectivity." Doing meaningful work on a portable presupposes the ability to continue that work when you're at a better device. We have that NOW, but 20-25 years ago we really didn't. People today talk about how bad handwriting rec was the death of the Newton, but it really wasn't. The HWR was pretty stellar under 2.0, even with my objectively terrible penmanship. What killed it was (a) its price and (b) its lack of connectivity to the desktop. Palm entered the market with a $299 device that was dead cheap, fit in your pocket, and synced with either the Palm Desktop or Outlook. That's what killed the Newton.

andix 3y ago

I played with some of those PDAs as a kid, and honestly I never really got what they were used for. There was no Wi-Fi and internet connection via infrared was not really awesome. Using it while traveling abroad was extremely expensive. You were able to sync the email from your desktop PC, answer them offline and send them on the next sync. And you could do spreadsheets. But honestly, who really uses spreadsheets on their smartphone? (Which is a comparable user experience) So the only thing left is calendar, contacts and notes. A paper planner was probably more useful back then.

ubermonkey 3y ago
That's the rub. They're from a world that was, in very meaningful ways, "pre-connectivity." Doing meaningful work on a portable presupposes the ability to continue that work when you're at a better device. We have that NOW, but 20-25 years ago we really didn't. People today talk about how bad handwriting rec was the death of the Newton, but it really wasn't. The HWR was pretty stellar under 2.0, even with my objectively terrible penmanship. What killed it was (a) its price and (b) its lack of connectivity to the desktop. Palm entered the market with a $299 device that was dead cheap, fit in your pocket, and synced with either the Palm Desktop or Outlook. That's what killed the Newton.