My Ode to Palm February 11, 2011

HP has announced their first set of devices that will use the software engineered by Palm before HP bought them out.  With HP giving no credit to the company they have apparently completely absorbed, this looks like the end of Palm as we know it.  Now say what you will about the Palm Pre or the Palm Pixi (it’s already been said before, and there’s nothing at all I can contribute further about either device) but I have plenty about the company that I wish to say.

All this recent talk about hint books, guides and E3 got me to thinking about just how our society has evolved in just the last ten years, and just how powerful the computers in our pockets which call themselves phones have become.  I’d like to think that Palm is partially to thank for that, especially since a lot of what my iPhone can do is what my old Palm Pilot could do almost ten years before the iPhone hit a single shelf.

In 2000 I got a PALM VII as my first ever PDA. In the years before I had a cell phone, this thing was a serious precursor to the latest smart phones such as the Droid or iPhone.  It had tons of useful programs you could write notes with, or if you preferred you could use an optional keyboard attachment to type files up.  But its main draw was the wireless palm.net service you could pay fifteen dollars a month to access, and you could get e-mail or make use of free internet connected applications (apps!).

Now you’re probably going to tell me if you want to look up a phone number nowadays you just simply can download the White Pages app to your iPhone, run the program, and look up the address and phone number of whoever you’d like, what the Palm VII could do was certainly no different and nothing special.  Well, let me stress I was using this hardware across the country in 2001, this was easily 6 years before the release of the iPhone and 7 years before smart phones started to be used by the masses.

I took the VII everywhere, in 2001 the Delta Application had all my airport information ready for me when I flew out to Florida.  I took it to California, Nevada, and Massachusetts.  It worked everywhere and never had bad reception.  I could check my e-mail for the first time without needing to fire up my Personal Computer.  I could get the address of any business I needed on the go as well as their phone numbers, and I could even find out what meal I was getting on my flight before I even got to the terminal.

One of my favorite Palm programs at the time was an app that allowed me to download the headlines from gamasutra.com and read them on the go every time I synced my Palm to my computer.  However, when GDC was about to happen for that year, they included something special along with their headlines.  By tapping a new GDC specific option in the program, I could access a whole new area.  The new area provided the whole GDC schedule, and it was now on my Palm!  If I chose to attend, I would know exactly where everything was all at the tap of a stylus.  The entire schedule, a map of the show and a bunch of interesting interactive tidbits was at my fingertips.   This was my first exposure to what technology would eventually be capable of.

The downside was that it couldn’t make phone calls and it couldn’t play games, music or videos.  The processing power and the fact that it was a monochrome screen didn’t make me feel all that bad about it.  I was trading off that for the ability to have mobile internet functionality for the first time in my life.  Also, cell phones had not yet taken off in the States yet.  My mom’s was still very big and bulky with a large antenna, and the LCD display could only display what a simple pocket calculator could, numbers and that was all.

Palm would eventually start ushering in a new series of smart phones (the Treo) which offered Palm’s software along with phone capability.  They were manufactured by a company that would later be bought by Palm, but they would use Palm’s Operating System.  However they would eventually be competing with more than just the Blackberry.  By 2007, phones had become an enormous business.  Everyone had one, and even though the US was slower to adopt more advanced phones than the rest of the world (the cell phone companies held us back pretty good) a new company was ready to give the consumer the future, and it was Apple, who would eventually release a heavily functional cell phone with a consumer price in mind.

Being the first affordable major consumer device to market REALLY helped out Apple a lot.  Unlike PDAs or MP3 players, people are only going to want to have one cell phone.  The Pre released some time after the massive popularity of the iPhone 3G release, where many iPhone owners were unable to change their phones and cell plans without bringing about massive fines.  Their customers were people who were willing to wait for Palm.  By the time the Pre came out, they did in many ways have a superior phone to the iPhone (built in keyboard and OS level multitasking), but they also really shot themselves in the foot by making themselves exclusive with just one provider.  They also got a TON of bad press among many groups for the way they went around iTunes syncing, by falsely getting iTunes to identify it as an Apple product.  They solved most of these problems with the Pixi by the time of its release but it was too late, and the company was too far in debt.

With the purchase of Palm has come its end.  Its software will continue to live on through HP, who will be using it to power their new handheld devices.  Rest in peace, Palm, knowing you were the catalysts to ushering in the future.