PalmOS Page
Howdy doody! Welcome to my very own PalmOS page.
And... NO! I will not get into a mud-slinging debate whether PocketPCs (ex-WinCE) devices are better. It's a no-contest. Palms win, hands down... *grin*
Contrary to popular misconception, a "PalmPilot" is not really every handheld device that exist. It was the original name of the original handheld device produced by US Robotics-Palm joint venture, called the Pilot ("the first", as in "the pilot episode of a new series"). Hence, the name at the time (1996) was "USR Palm Pilot", because the Pilot was made by the company, Palm Inc, and was funded and backed by an even bigger company, US Robotics.
As a quick aside, USR was bought out by 3COM some years later. Those of us old fogeys who started playing with modems back in the mid-80's still remember that USR Modems were considered the best and the most innovative in the world... at the time, that is. So, for a while, these handheld devices were under the 3COM brand, and hence were called 3COM Palms.
So there you have it. Since 1996, people have been referring to the range of devices produced by Palm as "Palm Pilots" after the original device. Kinda like in the West, people say "hey man I just xeroxed this article" when they wanted to say that they have made a photocopy of the article (Here in Singapore we just say "hey man I just zapped that article"). So, if you ever see a friend holding one of these things and you casually ask "Hey, is that a Palm Pilot?", expect the answer to be "NO" since not many people still have an original Pilot that is still working anymore. It has too little RAM (256K I think, I'm rusty on Palm's history right now), no Infra-Red beaming capabilites, and most newer software out there cannot run on the old OS versions. Chances are that they will be using a very modern model, like an m500 or a Vx. Then again, he might really not have a Palm device at all. and may own one of those PocketPC devices like iPaq, Journada and a whole host of others. Not everyone likes the look and feel of Palms, sad to say. Some are just too tied to Windows and hence, their preference for PocketPC devices.
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My History with Palm devices
I first got my Palm device on 5th Sept 1999. I had been putting myself off getting one for a long time, because before that time, PDAs (this should be the generic term used to refer to handheld devices, not "Palm Pilots") or "Personal Digital Assistants", were still somewhere up there in terms of price. In other words, not everyone can justify to themselves to get one. Casio and Sharp "Digital Organisers" were much cheaper, about S$100, compared to PDAs which typically go for $600 or more
 Palm IIIe, Special Edition |
The one fine day, my Casio decided to die on me. Getting new batteries did not revive it, so I thought to myself "It's time to check out the Palm Pilots" (See, even back then I was like you guys, errorneously referring to a PDA as a Palm Pilot). So I did. I found out that the prices had fallen alot, and now it was within reasonable budget. A 2MB model, the Palm IIIe was only S$369.00, which was okay for me. So I went out and got that (see the pic on the right).
After mucking around with it, I remember hearing people telling me that I can go out on the web and download lots of cool software for it, something which I could not have done with my old Casio and Sharp Organisers. So off I went. Pretty soon, I stumbled across the Singapore Palm Users Group. SPUG is what they call the organisation, and SPUGGIES the members. Personally I prefer it if it was SPUGGERS, but then again I am not the one running the show :) You should check it out, and join it. They gather periodically at Coffee Bean or Starbucks etc and just talk about Palms and stuff. Old birds will teach newbies how to work the Palms. It's a very nice and relaxed bunch of people. Try it... you won't regret it! It was also at one of these that I learnt that I can hook up my Palm to my handphone via Infra-Red and surf the web and retrieve emails. Technically, you can say that we were doing "WAP" way before WAP-enabled phones started appearing in Singapore :) For how to do this and other interesting stuff, check out my COOL STUFF page.
