Over the years I have owned a number of palmtops. It is almost unheard of that a week goes by that I don't wind up shopping for 'the next great palmtop.' I'd like to write about two great palmtops I used to own and lament the fact that the market hasn't filled the void they've left in my heart. But first some background.
My palmtop collection started in 2001 when I finally got a real money job (as opposed to the play money they give you to pay bills with when you're in school). Well, really it started it 1999 with the purchase of a used HP 95 LX. I went through some IBM handheld PC, a Psion Revo/Diamond Mako, a Palm Vx, an iPAQ h3765, an iPAQ h1940, and a Samsung SPH-i300 (think of a Palm Vx plus a cellphone packaged in a small brick). I've looked at just about everything in between those, and spent many hours at Office Depot drooling. I've used the iPAQ h3765 running Linux for the last three years (the other palmtops tended to last 6 months!). I'd like to switch to something else, but I've just been so unimpressed by recent offerings.
The Palm Vx is,
I believe, the best general PDA ever made. It is tiny, the battery
lasts forever, it is durable, it is sexy, and PalmOS 3.5 was just about the
pinnacle of PDA software. Let's go down the list and examine the
drool spots:
Why not just use a Palm Vx today? It's totally feasible. One downside is the batery is almost non-replacable (cracking one of them open without damaging it is a real pain in the ass) and finite lifetime, so very few of these units are honestly in "like new" condition. The other downside is that Palm is a pretty shitty company. There are numerous known defects (the touch screen almost always eventually refuses to calibrate, the LCDs tend to fade over time) that Palm won't even admit to. I've heard that they will provide warranty service for these, even used, but it is a grey area, and I hate Palm because of it.
Why do future products from this vendor suck? None are half as sexy (exception: Palm m505 and other Vx look alikes..maybe these are great too). New PalmOS flirts with being a big computer operating system. I understand being scared of WinCE, but that means emphasize your advantages, don't join them in suckitude! New Palms use a faster processor that I must believe is hungrier -- no way they could get a Palm Vx like battery life. But maybe I'm wrong. The OS alone has turned me off of new palms, but that old form factor is just hard to beat!
Now for the other great palmtop innovation that I haven't seen repeated much today. The Psion Revo/Diamond Mako. This one is a much more qualified success. I happened to get one cheap when they were discontinued and loved it for about 6 months before giving it to a friend once I got my Palm Vx. Particular sore spots for this palmtop are the OS (which is nice to use but extraordinarily shitty to program for), the battery (which is not bad in the modern scale, but is still not great), and durability (it has a hinge and the hinge causes a tight flex on a ribbon cable that just doesn't last long with that treatment). But there was one thing it had that I simply haven't seen at all since, period: form factor. This palmtop, in your pocket, was about 1.5 inches longer than a Palm Vx with leather protector, but it wasn't really any bigger in the other dimensions. And the screen was not exposed, so it didn't get scratched up by your house keys. When you opened it up, it had a totally respectable keyboard inside! Obviously not a touch typist's dream, but a far cry from anything on a non-clamshell palmtop.
That's the other thing the market is missing: a diminuitive clamshell palmtop.
So now I have the specifications for two modern palmtops which are both better, in many ways, than anything on the market today. Ready?
width | between 2.8in and 3.3in |
height | between 4.3in and 4.7in |
depth | 0.40in (palm Vx = 0.46in -- we must beat that) |
turn on time | less than 100ms |
pda app launch time | less than 100ms |
keypresses from turn on to app launch regardless of state | less than two |
memory for personal data | more than 1MB |
memory for reference material/books | more than 6MB |
standby battery life | more than 30 days |
power-on idle battery life | more than 24 hours |
power-on full tilt battery life | more than an hour |
integrated screen protector thickness | less than 0.2in |
Those specs are non-negotiable. Those specs are what it takes to make a good palmtop, something better than anything currently on the market hands down. None of those specs can be compromised on. Those specs may not be altered to give more features. You do not need more features. Do not ignore those specs.
I am personally a little bit addicted to running Linux on my palmtop (yeah, it sucks, but...), so if you can do this with an ARM or similar modern chip with an MMU, and a color display, and a zillion gigabyte memory, that is awesome, and will force me to buy it. But if you have to abandon any of the key specs, especially size or battery life or power on time, don't bother...you're no longer making a quality PDA and any amount of features won't change the fact that it's not a quality PDA.
Note that I don't specify anything about the processor. Maybe if I buy a PDA I care what processor it is, what it's like to program, etc., but for most people, a PDA is a consumer device. So I specify 100ms to power on. That may seem fast to you. It seems slow to me. I know that with a reasonable software architecture it is possible to reach that timing requirement with a 1 MIPS processor. 1 MIPS. Reasonable compromises, mostly when it comes to software complexity of controlling a display device, might justify a 10 MIPS processor. A 100 MIPS processor is not needed. If it can be included, hooray.
This is a clamshell palmtop.
width | between 2.8in and 3.3in |
height | between 5.0in and 6.5in |
depth | between 0.45in and 0.65in closed (psion revo = 0.66in) |
turn on time | less than 100ms |
pda app launch time | less than 100ms |
keypresses from turn on to app launch regardless of state | less than two |
memory for personal data | more than 1MB |
memory for reference material/books | more than 6MB |
standby battery life | more than 30 days |
power-on idle battery life | more than 24 hours |
power-on full tilt battery life | more than an hour |
MTBF for hinge | at least 100,000 opens |
For this palmtop, an OS like WinCE might finally make a little bit of sense (if you could meet the timing requirements and the battery requirements, hah hah), because with the keyboard you will find apps like Pocket Word to be a meaningful convenience. Without the keyboard you will not find those apps to be useful. Without the quality size and battery life and responsiveness you will not find these apps to be useful. So remember: make it good, then worry about features!
When the iPod Shuffle came out, I was quite impressed with it, though I would probably never buy one (if for no other reason than because Apple installed malware on my computer to advertise it). But immediately pundits everywhere pointed out that there are 'similar' devices on the market already, and they have more features! Dumbasses.
What is the iPod Shuffle? It is one thing: it is a 1 cubic inch MP3 player: 3.3in x 0.98in x 0.33in. Nothing else about it is particularly clever or new or grand. So along comes the newest competitor, and, I believe, the smallest I've seen yet: the Dell DJ Ditty. What is it? It is a 2 cubic inch MP3 player: 3.6in x 1.1in x 0.5in. It has features but who cares, it's not a 1 cubic inch MP3 player. To even compare it to the iPod Shuffle is to encourage insipient dementia. Do you get my point?
I wrote this in 2006. Since then, the phenomenon that I identified in the ipod turned into the iPhone -- immediate response to keypresses, small size, and decent battery life are now universally recognized as absolutely essential to a smart phone. I am impressed that reality caught up to my vision.
Though I'll note that I hinted that the device should be durable, and ultimately even Steve Jobs didn't understand that (see broken iPhone 4 glass).
I can't believe I was so optimistic in 2012. Really, everyone recognizes these things are valuable, but the progress towards those goals is so laughable. Looking at my phone right now, apps which I've just opened launch impressively fast, near that 100ms I specified above, but I know from daily use that sometimes I will wait multiple whole seconds for something basic like the dialer or text messaging app to launch. The phone has 2GB of RAM but can only hold about 3 active apps in memory before it starts unloading them, causing their next load to be slow.
In many ways, still, the Palm Vx is concretely ahead of modern devices.
And good god, y'all: batteries.