It's interesting how many false starts we had before the smartphone became ubiquitous. We had the Simon, Palm, then Nokia and Sony-Ericsson both with Symbian and different UI layers, WAP, various Windows CE devices, Blackberry pager descendants, and I probably missed a lot of them.
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
On a date, I once showed a woman I wanted to impress my Palm Pilot. Not only was she utterly unimpressed, she went on to marry an A-list Hollywood celebrity.
One day I was getting a haircut in my smallish Midwest hometown. Another customer was grousing about being unable to contact a friend, and just happened to mention someone I knew. I pulled out my Palm and said I had their phone number. The guy also pulled out the Palm that he was carrying, and I used the IR sender thing to share our mutual friend’s contact info. My barber was like “what in the Star Trek just happened”?
I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.
It was really the touch screen UI, which was brought to market by Apple. Always been curious if it was developed there or if like the desktop windowed UI it was pioneered elsewhere.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, cost, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch.
I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws.
Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers.
That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
The basics of PalmOS were fairly touch oriented but resistive rather than capacitive, which made a difference usability wise. Menus though could get desktop-y.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
The ad doesn't show me how the device works, there's just a person talking and making promises. I guess the device's resolution and contrast are so low and it looks a bit underwhelming in general that they didn't go with that first...
The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
It’s even worse than nobody having seen the Newton: it was actively ridiculed in the press, so a lot of people had never seen it but knew it as a joke.
This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton:
One of the more interesting corners of history is the Palm guys settling on honesty as a reaction to that.
You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.
PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.
One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.
I suspect it was rather the combination of cost (around $1000 1990's dollars), weight (>500g) and battery time (apparently only 30 minutes) which was the problem.
Wow, this ad is the living proof that the 1990s were just as terrible as any decade that came before or after - we just tend to forget the really horrible stuff (like showcased here, IBM desparately trying to be hip).
Back when I had VNC of my desktop on my Palm Tungsten T3, I thought I was living in the future. I'm not sure anymore that I was.
It's interesting how many false starts we had before the smartphone became ubiquitous. We had the Simon, Palm, then Nokia and Sony-Ericsson both with Symbian and different UI layers, WAP, various Windows CE devices, Blackberry pager descendants, and I probably missed a lot of them.
Japan's i-mode was a HTML-based smart mobile service that was very popular from 1999 to 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
At 80M subscribers, it was probably the most popular way in the world to access mobile internet pre-iPhone.
I-mode also introduced the original set of emojis that are now supported everywhere.
> I probably missed a lot of them
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
Psions were PDAs, not really in the smartphone arena until their OS (EPOC?) became Symbian and started appearing on Nokia phones.
Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.
I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.
> it wasn’t until the Treo series
This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
On a date, I once showed a woman I wanted to impress my Palm Pilot. Not only was she utterly unimpressed, she went on to marry an A-list Hollywood celebrity.
One day I was getting a haircut in my smallish Midwest hometown. Another customer was grousing about being unable to contact a friend, and just happened to mention someone I knew. I pulled out my Palm and said I had their phone number. The guy also pulled out the Palm that he was carrying, and I used the IR sender thing to share our mutual friend’s contact info. My barber was like “what in the Star Trek just happened”?
I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.
Don't mind. He probably had a Vx :)
Yeah, that will do it.
It was really the touch screen UI, which was brought to market by Apple. Always been curious if it was developed there or if like the desktop windowed UI it was pioneered elsewhere.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, cost, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch.
I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws.
Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers.
That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
> and awful capacitative touch.
I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
The basics of PalmOS were fairly touch oriented but resistive rather than capacitive, which made a difference usability wise. Menus though could get desktop-y.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:
https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30
I love stuff like this. There's a great episode of the 90s PBS show Computer Chronicles with a ton of these:
https://computerchronicles.tv/#episode/1103
(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn't load, that's why.)
They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)
I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
I have one in my basement somewhere but I haven’t tried to power it in years. I think it used Nicad batteries so the pack could probably be rebuilt?
I see no reason you couldn't hack an external power supply to run the device. You just need specs on the battery and a bench power supply.
How much did this bad boy cost?
The ad doesn't show me how the device works, there's just a person talking and making promises. I guess the device's resolution and contrast are so low and it looks a bit underwhelming in general that they didn't go with that first...
The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
It’s even worse than nobody having seen the Newton: it was actively ridiculed in the press, so a lot of people had never seen it but knew it as a joke.
This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
One of the more interesting corners of history is the Palm guys settling on honesty as a reaction to that.
You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.
PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.
One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.
About 2 minutes in they start showing the device being used and it's interface.
I suspect it was rather the combination of cost (around $1000 1990's dollars), weight (>500g) and battery time (apparently only 30 minutes) which was the problem.
> and it looks a bit underwhelming in general
...only from today's perspective.
Don't forget size. Didn't reasonably fit in any non coat/jacket pocket.
Just an Apple newton but not as good
Except, you know, the whole smartphone part which Newton never had.
that predictive key feature is hilarious. At 4.20 in the video.
How on earth can that be faster than typing on a regular qwerty keyboard.
Wow, this ad is the living proof that the 1990s were just as terrible as any decade that came before or after - we just tend to forget the really horrible stuff (like showcased here, IBM desparately trying to be hip).
You don't miss shoulder-pads?
No?
(But I'll fight you if you think the 1970's were a worse or even a bad decade.)
Ok yes, the 70s were less terrible (only because of Funk and Disco) ;)