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Lang before Smartphones computer vendors tried to sell us Personal Digital Assistants. The vision was there, but the hardware was too big and too slow to make it work.
Apple’s Newton was a brave experiment hardly anyone know anymore. I owned two Newtons, because I though the technology was fantastic. But for daily use it was crap.
Only a black & green display – but already with funky special effects. You could expand the Newton with special cards …
For text input you had to learn to write special characters so Newton could understand what you were trying to say. Apple scrapped that feature completely with the touch screen keyboard in the iPhone. You always needed that special pen to operate all these PDAs, which was pretty stupid. Although I am not a big fan of today’s touch screens, but they are much better than those pens.
The Newton died a quick and miserable dead. Apple didn’t try very hard to make it work.
Graffiti Gestures – bit odd at first, but it really worked after some training.
The Palm Pilot a few years later made the PDA market really fly. This was in a time, when cell phones were too stupid to be used to remember addresses, appointments or be synched with Outlook.
Some of the apps for the Palm (and Newton) were really great! The iPhone still hasn’t the same amount of good office applications and synchronization tools the Newton and the Palm offered. That is why I still consider the iPhone a lifestyle product and not a true mobile business tool.
I owned also a Handspring Edge – a small, but brilliant Palm clone. You could attack a pretty good portable keyboard to it – something the iPhone completely lacks as well.
In the end the Palm died as well. Better cell phones supplanted the address book and time management for which the Palm was mostly used.
And they offered eMail and Internet access the Palm struggled with for a long time. Plus cheap notebooks finally became lighter and affordable, so a bastard device like the PDA no longer made sense: there is no real middle ground between a good cell phone and notebook/netbook.
