4 ms·
In 2000 (or, at least, by 2001) I had a palm v with a CDPD wireless "modem" thing. The minstrel, (I kept mis-spelling it in ways that looked like "menstrual,"
by lsc 14y ago
In 2000 (or, at least, by 2001) I had a palm v with a CDPD wireless "modem" thing. The minstrel, (I kept mis-spelling it in ways that looked like "menstrual," to the great amusement of my friends and co-workers.) It worked fine; the only problem was that the palm V only had one serial port... if I used the CDPD modem, (which doubled the thickness of the palm v,) I couldn't plug in the keyboard, meaning SSH wasn't really practical. (on-screen keyboards have never worked for me; not then, not now.)
The external keyboard for the palm V was pretty nice, though, assuming you had a flat surface. The serial port made a pretty solid connection and held the phone up at a reasonable angle; something I haven't been able to reproduce with a modern smartphone and external bluetooth keyboard. (To be clear, the bluetooth keyboards work fine; I just haven't figured out how to hold the phone at a reasonable angle while typing with both hands.)
So yeah, really? I wasn't all that less mobile then than I am now. I mean, I had a thinkpad running linux then, just like now; sure, it was slower, but it ran linux just fine. Configuring wireless, sure, was a pain in the ass then, and it's easy now, but eh.
- rz2k 14y agoCombine that hardware with Vindigo, Avantgo and Paypal, and you had a lot of what you get today as long as you were in a city. It got a little easier with the Kyocera 6035 Palm phone, but I suppose that wasn't until a year later.
- Ogre 14y agoI had a minstrel modem back then for a little while too. But I didn't have it very long before I cancelled it. I also had a phone with limited email and other online capability around 2003, and a work-provided PCMCIA cell modem around 2004, but I didn't have mobile internet again for real again until the iPhone arrived in 2007. For me, the future paid a visit in 2000 and a few times afterwards, but it wasn't here to stay until June 29, 2007. (I didn't have to look that date up)
- jnw2 14y agoAre you including 10" tablets in your comments about on screen keyboards being unusable, or just 4" phones? (I've spent very little time actually using 10" touchscreens, but got something like 90% accuracy on the first sentence I ever typed on one, with it having the same size keys as a normal qwerty keyboard.)