Just how important is the new Pre smartphone to Palm? It’s a fantastic phone, a true iPhone rival. But then it has to be. Palm is now a shadow of its former self, a company that’s a million miles away from the innovative PDA-builder that ruled the mid-1990s.
An article I wrote for TechRadar charts the fortunes of Palm, from its first steps with pen computing to missing its ride on the lucrative netbook boat when it cancelled the Foleo. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s a far cry from Palm’s golden years, when Palm Computing Inc. revolutionised mobile computing with a string of must-have PDAs that ruthlessly killed off the Filofax, inspired Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and defeated a plucky British company called Psion. Let’s rewind 17 years…
1992 Palm Computing was founded by Jeff Hawkins, an electrical engineer who’d previously worked on pen computing technology for GriD Systems.
1993 Palm’s first real product was the ‘Zoomer’ – a $700 pen-based handheld (sold as the Casio Z-7000 and Tandy Z-PDA) that was launched just after Apple’s Newton. Neither the Zoomer or the Newton were hugely successful (although the Newton is still fondly remembered).
1994 Hawkins concentrated on developing more advanced handwriting recognition technology, which he saw as key to a better user experience. The result was the speedy and surprisingly accurate Graffiti system.
1996 The Graffiti UI is built into Palm’s first own-brand PDA – the Palm Pilot 1000. The Palm Pilot 1000 had a 16MHz processor, a 160×160 monochrome screen and 128K of memory – enough to hold 500 addresses and 600 appointments. Palm sold more than a million of them in the following 18 months.
You can read the rest of The highs and lows of a pre-Pre Palm on TechRadar.
