cross-posted from: https://mamot.fr/users/thibaultamartin/statuses/113879452911907737
Palms were offline devices that only synced with your computer when put on a docking station.
You could read and reply to emails offline, book or cancel meetings, and sync with your computer later. The latest versions allowed you to snap pictures and listen to your music.
No servers running constantly. No data spilled everywhere. Days worth of battery on a single charge.
The future stole our cables, and it took our attention span and our privacy with it.
#privacy #offline #data
they (or at least the later palm pilot) had a surprisingly robust system for recognizing handwriting! individual characters had to be single strokes, and you needed to write each one a buncha times to calibrate initially so it has something to compare against, but i remember it being notably faster to type with than other contemporaneous tiny keyboards.
I had the Palm VII, which had a mobile data connection and an antenna you would flip up. I felt like a god. When i “upgraded” to the Compaq ipaq i felt that the world was my oyster!
Now i hate my phone.
I had the Palm VII, which had a mobile data connection and an antenna you would flip up. I felt like a god.
The Palm VII was the first device that was even theoretically obtainable by me (I didn’t buy one because shit was expensive yo) that could provide mobile internet access in a form factor I considered usable.
I lusted over it like I’d lusted over no device before.
It feels like i didn’t have the VII for a solid year before the service got turned off. The iPAQ had a docking sleeve for a cf wireless card. That was when i felt like a mad pimp. 🤓
Laptops were offline devices that only synced with any computer when put on a phone cable.
The good old days of screaming through the house not to pick the phone up, dialing in, downloading emails and usenet messages, cutting the connection and screaming the all clear through the house.
And everything was “federated”. You sent email to a local email server and it synced with other email servers. You connected to your chosen Usenet server and it synced with other Usenet servers. Same with IRC for chat. Very few things were centralised.
Same with IRC for chat.
Ah the chaos of netsplits, trivia bots and XDDC. Good fun.
The boss already had wifi. But it was a large external antenna and the speeds were terrible.
Yep, I had a B wireless setup in 1999. Poor performance, but I wasn’t tethered!
Not to spoil the nostalgia vibes but wanted to share the Palma2, popular enough that they made a second version. Briefly: its an e-ink reader, in the form factor of a 6 inch smartphone. It runs Android for compatibility, no cell data only WiFi and even has a basic camera for document scanning. It’s definately not privacy protecting but it is resistant to endless online slop traps, which I think is part of what makes a modern smartphone problematic. I’m not recommending it but just noticed the similarities to some of the classic PDAs, especially the high contrast interface and reduced animations.
Octacore cpu? That’s more than some of the new HP laptops out there, which have gone backwards to dualcore lol
Edit: cpu, not vpu
I have a palma, and I enjoy it, but don’t use it as often as I should. I had intended it to be what I carry around with me more than my phone, to help restrict myself to mostly e-reader or podcasts/audiobooks. The palma 1 annoyingly would output only when the screen was on by default, so you couldn’t lock it and listen to an audiobook. If you muck around in settings you can make it stay on for 1 hour after locking, so you can mostly listen to audiobooks/podcasts uninterupted ifyou turn it on briefly every so often.
But in my experience, the use of Bluetooth/playing podcasts/audiobooks pretty drastically increased battery consumption. It really brought it back to being a phone battery (e.g. 1 day) with an eink display.
So I use it almost exclusively as a small e-reader I can always have in my povket or bag, etc. I basically always listen to podcast songs my phone.
That said, it is actually pretty incredible little device, and you can watch youtube videos or even play games on it of you let its refresh rate go high
My palm treo 650 was the most badass phone ever
Yep. While Android can do far more, the Treo keyboard kicked ass.
Sick ringtones too
http://onj3.andrelouis.com/phonetones/unzipped/Palm/Treo-650/
Ooh, midi tones!
Though the Treo could use MP3 for tones too. It could also play video files, I remember watching Mars Attacks on a flight. Ate the hell out of battery, but I always carried multiples.
It was truly the first viable smart phone. With a wifi SD card, I could browse the web (albeit with terrible speed and a pitiful browser, but better than other mobile devices at the time) and sync to my laptop over wifi.
I had an sd card with a horribly compressed version of the first season of aqua teen hunger force on mine. People were so jealous, probably (they weren’t)
I have a IIIXe (very similar to the one in OP) somewhere. Really limited in what it could do, but very cool for the time. I also have a later model Zire somewhere that had enough horsepower (with a mild overclock) to play Quake.
It really is too bad that commercial solutions for true privacy focused syncing and wireless backups will only get worse if they were ever good at all. I think of products like the Ring Doorbell where there’s no reason the doorbell itself can’t be it’s own local server. The only reason to tie you to a cloud is to implement monthly fees while also harvesting your data. The idea of an open standard where multiple devices could connect to any cloud service (self hosted Next Cloud or commercial solution etc) will likely disappear with the direction we’re going. It’s a sad time for tech and an even more sad time for society worldwide.
My t5 tungsten didnt have wifi, but there was bt and ir. and you could buy a wifi card.
Loved my Palm III. Simpler days.
