Palm and Pocket PC general - Those old handheld you used to use before smartphones?

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Turd Cow

Turd Cow

Sir, would you like a jawbreaker
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Jan 6, 2019
I've been comtemplating on getting a Palm device for some organization (calendars, to-do lists, etc) and reading some Gemini post about have picked up interest in these devices. Considering to modern day smartphone can do things a Palm can be but more expensive (at least today) and are basically spying machines. 2000s nostalgia is already here so it makes sense to talk about the Palm.
 
I have one, and it turns on. It thinks its 2000 though, so I'm not sure what the point is.
 
Just use your phone, bro. It's ${current_year}.

Or alternatively, if you're worried about privacy and/or you want some whimsy, just get a pen-and-paper diary. If it was good enough for your papa then it's good enough for you. And on the plus side, having a big fuck-off diary full of scraps of paper that you carry around and pull out whenever you need to literally "pencil in a meeting" makes you look like a bigshot with a lot of stuff going on.
 
I have an HP Jornada that still works. It runs MS Pocket PC 2002 and was one of the most powerful PDAs at the time of release. I remember having a lot of fun with games on plane/car rides. I tried using it as an organizer in college but I found just using a planner book was more suited for the task of organizing typical student type activities. Writing software for it sounds like an interesting challenge, I wonder what it would be like to try that.
 
I loved the Palm IIIc. It has a proper backlit display instead of a washed out front light.

I have a copy of NS Basic/Palm with the serial number if anyone wants to fool around making Palm apps.
 
Are you planning on entering The Zone, stalker?
1645559137936.png
 
This thread is worthless unless someone digs up the PalmOS apps of John Walker Flynt.
 
Unless you're spec ops, Google knowing where you are isn't exactly life-ending information. For almost everyone, they're at home during non-work hours and at work during work hours. If the government wants to come get you, they already know how. I'm fully on board the Nuke Google Express, but them knowing where I am at any given time is such a non-issue that it doesn't even enter my consciousness.

Just get a low end smartphone and jam an ice pick into the microphone if you're worried about being listened to. Or get a really old one and just take the back off and disconnect it. I miss being able to take the back off my phone.

And just to add some legitimacy to my post, I owned a Palm device ages ago. It sucked. It's slow, hard to use, and not very useful. It was early adopter tech and was only useful if you were a businessman back then. It would be like buying an IBM PC Jr. today. Yes, you could technically use it, but you might as well be using an abacus and parchment.
 
Megaton Punch said:
Unless you're spec ops, Google knowing where you are isn't exactly life-ending information. For almost everyone, they're at home during non-work hours and at work during work hours. If the government wants to come get you, they already know how. I'm fully on board the Nuke Google Express, but them knowing where I am at any given time is such a non-issue that it doesn't even enter my consciousness.

Just get a low end smartphone and jam an ice pick into the microphone if you're worried about being listened to. Or get a really old one and just take the back off and disconnect it. I miss being able to take the back off my phone.

And just to add some legitimacy to my post, I owned a Palm device ages ago. It sucked. It's slow, hard to use, and not very useful. It was early adopter tech and was only useful if you were a businessman back then. It would be like buying an IBM PC Jr. today. Yes, you could technically use it, but you might as well be using an abacus and parchment.
Click to expand...
Newfag lol.

In all seriousness, there's something weirdly novel about using old devices like a palm. Yes, it's better to use pen and paper because the two are always available no matter where you go, and smartphones are capable enough already. But, using old handhelds is a novel concept in todays world and having a palm would basicallly give you the looks from people.
 
A real nigga would just make a palm pc out of an arduino and an LCD touchscreen.

If I absolutely needed a palm PC I would just ditch the sim card in a deprecated cell phone and run a root kit on it. Galaxy S7 or earlier should do the trick.

Palm Pilots were absolutely useless even for business people. WiFi was spotty, cell networks even worse. They had almost no processing power and really limited software selection due to the OS they ran. Even as a mega nerd I could never justify one because the concept was half baked. BlackBerry was the real world implementation of what palm aimed for. Even if you got a palm online now it wouldn't display anything save for maybe bash.org correctly.
 
This thread just reminded me about the Palm 100 I used to have many, many turns of the earth ago. That thing was fucking great once you got used to writing palm grafiti

Idk why you'd wanna use a palm in the modern day though, back then it was a big fucking deal that you could sync your calendar through a serial port long before caldav or ical or any of that shit. Unless you're just trying to be a y2k hipster then you do you i guess
 
I remember in 6th grade I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot, it was great, you could write notes, access a calendar, and play a few simple games, like one that was kind of like Space Invaders, you were a ship that dropped torpedoes on various submarines floating by while avoiding their projectiles. I remember taking it on a church retreat of some sort, but I didn't use it for anything useful, it never saw use in school.

About five years later, I managed to get a color Palm (still out of date) that had a camera and color and all that...but battery life sucked, the camera saved in some bizarre non-standard format (and I ended up accidentally deleting all my video and audio), and because it had third party storage, wasn't good for much of anything. I think I got a NES emulator working but it had a limit on how big the ROMs were, so I was stuck with Donkey Kong (not that the controls were good).

The same year, I got an iPod touch, which solved the "write notes, listen to music, browse the Internet" problem well.
 
Cybertonia said:
Idk why you'd wanna use a palm in the modern day though, back then it was a big fucking deal that you could sync your calendar through a serial port
Click to expand...
I was thinking about this thread today. We all take USB for granted because back in the 90s god damn did it suck. Serial ports are massive, the drivers are a pain in the dick and they're slow.
Some things used parallel which is worse, imagine trying to move mp3s via parallel to some of the very early players, hope you booked some time off.

So some manufacturers did shit like try to use IR or weird optical codes flashed through the monitor. It was a dark time.

What I'm getting at is that since palm doesn't have USB, SD or any removable storage media, everything is just on the palm foreverially.
 
TurdFondler said:
I was thinking about this thread today. We all take USB for granted because back in the 90s god damn did it suck. Serial ports are massive, the drivers are a pain in the dick and they're slow.
Some things used parallel which is worse, imagine trying to move mp3s via parallel to some of the very early players, hope you booked some time off.

So some manufacturers did shit like try to use IR or weird optical codes flashed through the monitor. It was a dark time.

What I'm getting at is that since palm doesn't have USB, SD or any removable storage media, everything is just on the palm foreverially.
Click to expand...
I'm not no palm expert but later palms started adding SD card slots to them. But I don't know if their popularity were already waning by that point.
 
TurdFondler said:
A real nigga would just make a palm pc out of an arduino and an LCD touchscreen.

If I absolutely needed a palm PC I would just ditch the sim card in a deprecated cell phone and run a root kit on it. Galaxy S7 or earlier should do the trick.

Palm Pilots were absolutely useless even for business people. WiFi was spotty, cell networks even worse. They had almost no processing power and really limited software selection due to the OS they ran. Even as a mega nerd I could never justify one because the concept was half baked. BlackBerry was the real world implementation of what palm aimed for. Even if you got a palm online now it wouldn't display anything save for maybe bash.org correctly.
Click to expand...
M5 paper. Yes, chinese spyware included in hardware (ESP32) but gets you a relative powerful CPU, wifi, BT and a touchscreen eink.
 
I had 2 of the palm phones, the pre was okay but the VEEr was amazing for something i got for 50€ in a firesale.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom