Today it sounds almost like a mester of minstrelsy, but there was a time, decades ago —not so many, actually—, in which the opposite happened to telephones than now: they had a lot of phones and little of smarts. If you wanted a “smart” device, one with tools to help you organize your contacts or prevent you from forgetting your cousin’s birthday or that last-minute Wednesday appointment with the dentist, you had another tool: the Personal Digital Assistant ( PDA).
If the ’90s and early 2000s caught you at the right age—that and with the necessary cash in your pocket—you probably remember them well. Also that there was a time when talking about PDA was almost synonymous with doing it from Palmone of the brands without which the consumer technology of 20 years ago can hardly be understood.
Palm is a magnificent example of the accelerated changes experienced by technology in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century and, incidentally, of how some Silicon Valley business chronicles have little to envy the script of Game of Throneswith sales, splits, reunions, ruptures, golden years and falls into oblivion, disappearances and rebirths.
Doubly pioneer
In the case of Palm we are left with a curious reading: it was a pioneer of PDAs and smartphones and its devices can be considered almost the missing link Between both. True, she was not the first, nor the only one —in the Psion Organizer dates back to 1984—, but she achieved indisputable fame.
The most complex long history of the company begins in 1992 at the hands of Donna Dubinsky, Edward Colligan and especially Jeff Hawinks, his real “father” and who had previously accumulated significant experience in the ranks of the company. GRiD Systems. In the early 1990s, Hawkins had developed PalmPrint, a handwriting recognition program, and embarked on the Zoomer project with the multinationals Tandy, Casio, and GeoWorks.
The Zoomer experience was not complex and the device was forced to fight against Apple’s Newton; But that didn’t deter the Palm team from the potential of portable assistants. After shaping Graffiti and integrating with USRobotics, in March 1996 the company launched its first PDA: the Palm Pilot, a product that allowed it to combine its own hardware and software and that over time would make the brand launched by Hawkins almost a universal synonym for PDA.
Pilot and the first Palm devices were comfortable, practical: they fit perfectly in one hand and could be easily put in a bag or pocket. They also had 128 KB of memory (Pilot 1000), a capacity that increased to 512 KB in the Pilot 5000. As Low End Mac points out, they ran Palm OS 1.0 and had a 160×160 pixel screen. That mixture convinced and during its first two months the company managed to sell some 10,000 Pilots.
It was the starting signal for what was to come: in the years following that first model, it was followed by the PalmPilot Personal and Professional, Palm III, V, VII, VX, IIIc, Palm m100, Zire… The technicians at the company developed new versions while Palm gained fame and gradually improved its features, with more memory, speed, infrared and wireless communication, removable batteries and even color screens, with the Palm IIIc in 2000.
Palm products win fans. Its range of features, attractiveness—you may still remember the Palm V’s aluminum casing—and it even outlined its pricing, making decisions like cutting costs at Zire with a monochrome, backlit display. It improved its own system, which with Palm OS 3 began to offered to other manufacturers.
In Palm’s offices, however, there were as many novelties as in its catalogue.
At the turn of the millennium Palm became an independent publicly traded company and just two years later, in 2002, it established a subsidiary to develop and market its OS, PalmSource. The biggest change, however, probably happened in mid-1998, when Hawkins and Dubinksy decided to pack up, resign and start a new company: Handspring. The reason? The decision came after clashes over the direction of the business project between the original team and 3Com, the firm that had acquired USRobotics.
Handspring – which would eventually become one of the main licensees of Palm OS – wasted no time in releasing Visor, a device that was well received by the press, with two lower-end versions cheaper than Palm’s own and improved PIM software. Two months after the launch, Low End Mac points out, Handspring had already taken about 28% of the market for portable devices and shortly after went public.
The competition evolved. And the industry.
At the end of 1998, Qualcomm pdQ arrived on the technological market, the first Palm PDA that integrated a telephone. Not long after, the VisorPhone and Treo came out.
Times were changing and in 2003 Palm took another two unexpected turns. Or not. The first was the merger of Palm and Handspring. The second, just as momentous and in the opposite direction, the decision to turn PalmSource into an independent firm. Hardware and software were divided. And the company, in a way, resumed the scenario that had marked the development of Zoomer.
Palm’s efforts to keep improving its products got a boost with the fifth generation of hardware and the Palm OS. The Palm Tungsten, Zire, Treo —Palm brand after the merger with Handspring— followed one another… and the company even starred in some movement that still surprises today. As a result of that 2003 movement that separated the software and hardware branch, in 2006 a Palm was launched that instead of the house OS incorporated Windows Mobile 5.0: the Treo 700w.
Times kept changing, however, and not long after, at the beginning of 2007, Apple launched the iPhone and marked a before and after in mobile telephony. Palm put up a fight with his Center. Within a few years the market had turned around. And with it the taste, needs and customer service. Fewer and fewer buyers were interested in Palm PDAs and the features they could offer. At the end of 2008 it disappeared from store shelves.
That gadget that years ago had triumphed and won the favor of the public, was simply displaced by the new mobiles and his growing fan of functionalities.
One of its last PDAs was the Palm Tx, launched in 2005 and still produced until March 2009. Was that the end of Palm? No. The company would still pass through the hands of HP, its brand ended up in the power of TCL and in 2018 it revived to present a small Android device.
But that is another story.
Pictures | Albertas Agejevas (Flickr) and Tomás J. Sepúlveda (Flickr)
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism