Granted, Apple’s Newton was there before Palm, too, and that work fed into the iPod and iPhone designs. I think it’s a great lesson in how some ideas need time

Granted, Apple’s Newton was there before Palm, too, and that work fed into the iPod and iPhone designs. I think it’s a great lesson in how some ideas need time to gel – in this case, you needed multiple generations of improvements on the hardware to get not only viable CPUs but also things like screens with accurate and responsive digitizers to make the UI feel right. PalmOS had some nice features but it was also an old design with unprotected memory so it crashed enough to be annoying and even when the mobile CPUs were ready the software was a huge undertaking. On the social side, we also needed a big shift in usage. When the Palm or Newton designs were being made, wireless networking wasn’t common the way it is now and especially people weren’t used to using software the way we take for granted now. Email was a novelty for most people, business documents were exchanged physically, and mobile gaming was a kid’s pastime. The big thing which made the iPhone 1 so appealing was that everyone had spent the previous decade finding things they wanted to do on the web and then you could take that with you anywhere. People who were looking at the traditional PDA usage thought it’d fail since it didn’t have a Blackberry keyboard.