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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
by 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 agoThat'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.