Privacy

Oh, I remember those sexy boyos!

If you pointed two of them at each other, you could play multiplayer games over IR. It was pretty janky.

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.

The boss already had wifi. But it was a large external antenna and the speeds were terrible.

My Zire71 had a LiIon battery that did require charging.

I don't recall for sure with all of them. Mine was 2 AAA, my boss had a rechargeable in 1999. I still have this one.

About 2005 I picked up a Treo, almost positive that one was lithium (it was a cell phone). Though it may have been NiCd.

Yep. While Android can do far more, the Treo keyboard kicked ass.

This guy palms

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.

I used to take notes on paper in graffiti cause it was kind of a pseudo shorthand.

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

I used to be an avid TealScript user, which allowed you to tweak recognition of individual characters and even create entirely new gestures. It was magnificent.

Went through a lot of Palm devices, from a Palm III to a V to a Tungsten T3 (the most elegantly designed device ever, perhaps save the Mac SE) and eventually a Treo 680. It was a sad day when the ecosystem shut down and I had to downgrade to an Android phone.

I still miss so many features of those older devices. In fact, I still keep a Palm V in my nightstand because of its comfortably backlog screen and flawless handwriting recognition for those midnight thoughts.

You had to write your letters in Graffiti, but yeah, it worked great.

I still have the dock, but it's got a serial port, and I can't manage to connect it even with a serial to USB adapter. Doubt the software would run anyway, that was under Windows 3.11 I think? 95 at best.

I think the Palm m125 is the best case scenario for running a PalmOS device nowadays because it was the last one that ran on AAAs. The m100 does as well but it has a quarter of the RAM and a slower processor, plus no SD card slot, though it's REALLY hard to find SD cards small enough to work in a Palm anymore.

Also, they made a USB sync cable for the m100 but I haven't been able to track one down, there's a guy on eBay who has a pallet of their RS-232 sync cables but virtually none for USB. The m125 came with a USB docking cradle so it's a lot easier to sync with a PC, though good luck finding 64-bit drivers.

Carrying two gadgets was just too much

Which is why the Treo was such a game-changing big deal

Smartphones are nothing more than gentrified PDAs…

Less any semblance of privacy? We can still have the impression we've some control over what it does but for how long?

My last PDA was a Palm Tungsten T5, liked it a lot ;)

Literally the first phones labeled "smartphones" were things like the Handspring Treo that ran PalmOS.