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Over at PalmAddict, Peter J. Arts has an excellent article on the demise of Palm.  His retelling of Palm’s history will bring back a lot of memories.  I loved my Palms and I think my Treo 680 was probably the best smartphone I ever used.  Of course, I started reading ebooks on my Palm.  Peter says:

When I consider the demise of Palm (in its final, HP incarnation), two quotes come to mind:

The Palm Pilota successful design of human and computer interaction that remains all too rare…” (Stanford University computer science Assistant Professor Scott Klemmer: 2/21/06).

Never was such a valuable possession so stupidly and recklessly managed…”(Benjamin Franklin, in the Broadway Play and Motion Picture: “1776”)

Palm, in its earliest manifestations, inspired fanatical loyalty, created armies of developers and bloggers and provoked endless thoughts of what might be possible. Yeah, once upon a time, Palm was that cool.

The death of Palm while sad, is also a perverse victory of sorts. Many people worked diligently for years to bring it about…and, finally succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Its not a tale for the faint-of-heart…

Be sure to read the rest.

2 COMMENTS

  1. How sad, I too started my EBooks on the Palms, and loved its smaller and colorful iterations through time, as well as the phone. Such a short life when it could have been so much stronger. Mis-management for sure, because the software was always viable. Bye old friends!

  2. I started reading ebooks on the Handspring Visor, yea those many years ago in technology time. The Handspring devices (created by the original Palm design and development team, as pointed out in the article) were amazing devices. They had a Springboard module slot, where you could plugin extra memory or special-purpose modules like GPS or phone capability! Back then, “mobile” phones were huge, cumbersome things, but your Hanspring device with the phone plugin wasn’t much bigger than an iPhone. After the Visor, I bought a Palm Tungsten T3, but after that I switched to iPhone, because I didn’t like the design of the later Palm models (e.g. the Treo): they looked clunky and had a physical keyboard, which I didn’t want and which substantially reduced the size of the screen, especially when compared with the T3. Since I spent most of my time reading on my device, I wanted the screen real estate. It’s hard to believe anyone could take Palm from its enormous initial advantages in design and usability, to what appeared to be a sustained campaign of self-abuse in later years. All this time, Apple were building on the foundation the Palm designers created. Valete, my beloved Palm OS devices. The happy memories linger on (as do many of the ebooks, at least those not sabotaged by Amazon’s refusal to license the Mobipocket DRM for iOS: Mobipocket Reader was the best reading app on Palm).

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