Top 10 PDA "Failures" Named

Penpoint: handicapped by the then state of hardware, smothered in it's cradle by Microsoft.

Cheers

My experience with the Wizard did lead me to be an early adopter with the Palmpilot - as technology and innovation had finally caught up to the potential of a truly useful handheld organizer. Graffiti was the secret to efficient and accurate handheld input. Too bad we've come full circle back to keyboards only (and/or the horrendous Graffiti 2!) on many PDAs.

These devices may have been "failures," but only in the sense that they didn't catch on to the point companies made tons of money with them.

Out of their ashes, many of their innovations have been resurrected into present day PDAs ie: the lack of a vibrating alarm on the Tungsten 5 was an innovation taken from many early failed PDAs, the 16MB of useful internal memory in the modern-day Treo 650 is possibly PalmOne's homage to the "failed" WINCE "Palm PC" specifications.

Palm PC had a very bad UI (like using double taps everywhere) and was very slow in the hardware available at the time. Pocket PC had a better UI (more like PalmOS and less like desktop Windows) and was used in faster machines with more memory. Palm III and Palm V were not only cheaper than Palm PC, but they were also faster, easier to use and a battery life greater by one order of magnitude. It is a shame that Palm could not evolve PalmOS as fast as processors speed, memory density and battery life increased. Microsoft bet on Moore's Law while Palm bet against (remember the "there is no need for color displays" era?).

The Helio had great hardware specs and a good price, but the software was terrible. Bugs everywhere. They tried to get the comunity to fix the software for them, but it did not worked out.

Daniel

I owned a Magic cap for a few months - They're not kidding about 'Big' - It's about the size of your average bible and a half-inch bigger, and ran on camcorder batteries - To the tune of about an hour of solid runtime on a charge.

I'm also kind of surprised that they didn't include the Franklin eBookman - some of the really hair-raising bugs it exhibited on release (complete information wipe with a gentle bump that broke momentary contact of the batteries) combined with the software problems (Microsoft never released the version of Reader they promised - the most intrusive DRM system, ever - a RAM-installed OS that required you to redownload it in it's entirity every time you wiped the machine - a 6MB OS download onto machines that only had 8MB RAM....) pretty much smothered this thing in it's cradle. It was a much bigger flop than the Helio, which actually worked fairly reliably.

1000->Personal->IRUpgrade->TRGPro->HE330->Treo 180

Here's a "corrected" list of the top 10 PDAs that should never have been killed off:

1) Apple Newton

2) TRG TRGpro

3) Psion Series 5

4) Sony CLIE UX50

5) Palm Vx

6) VTECH Helio

7) Handspring Visor (or more accurately, Springboards in general)

8) Xircom REX

9) HandEra 330

10) Sony CLIE TH55

Honorable mention goes to the Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 (actually never really lived in America. Reincarnated in Japan as the Zaurus SL-C860.)

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

http://www.canalpda.com/displayarticle279-flat.html

regards

CLIE S320 with color screen
(don't throw the 320x320s at me -- they had lousy styli!)

A color HandEra with a shell that didn't look like it was done by high school design dropouts.

Xircom REX running PalmOS
(hey, p1, there's still time to snap up those assets from, I think it might be, Intel!)

Sharp Zaurus with slide/hide-away keyboard running PalmOS