My Original Palm Iiix
Posted5 months agoActive4 months ago
goto10retro.comTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
20/100
PalmpilotRetrotechPersonaldigitalassistants
Key topics
Palmpilot
Retrotech
Personaldigitalassistants
The author shares their experience with their original Palm IIIx, sparking a discussion among commenters about their own experiences with Palm devices and other retro tech.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
3d
Peak period
29
84-96h
Avg / period
14.3
Comment distribution43 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 43 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Aug 20, 2025 at 2:31 PM EDT
5 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Aug 23, 2025 at 11:31 PM EDT
3d after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
29 comments in 84-96h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Aug 24, 2025 at 9:52 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 44964731Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:35:57 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Some folks in the community even have upgraded PalmCards (the replaceable CPU board in these) that run PalmOS 5 now, hack the display to show more bits, etc.
I'm pretty sure I had a PalmPilot Professional, a Palm V, and a Tungsten T (which slid open). The Palm V was easily my favourite, it was a very good looking device that worked very well. In comparison, the Tungsten T was somewhat clunky.
I think it still was one of the best handhelds ever produced.
Slightly amusing - you only had about 5 keyboard layouts to chose from, and one of them was Dvorak (which I'm using).
I eventually wanted to carry only one device, and went for the Treo line of phones, which I stuck to until 2010.
I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Graffiti and how quick it was to use it. Not as fast as typing, but better than hunting and pecking on an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. I didn't like how the stylus felt on the screen when you wrote so I cut a little piece of a post-it note and put on the area where you'd do the Graffiti strokes.
I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I was able to save some web articles onto the device. When I was on a lunch break, I'd read through the articles on that little thing. It truly felt like living in the future.
I used it with Scrapbook in Firefox, to save a bunch of articles I wanted to read and export an index file that could then be used by Plucker to import those articles.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=937292
It looks like there's a fork at https://github.com/desrod/pilot-link, but I don't know how functional that is.
[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pilot-link-git
There are only a few I really loved and consider well-rounded and beautiful while useful.
My Commodore 64 comes to mind, my 2010 aluminum unibody Mac Book Pro has a place in this list and certainly my Palm III.
The first time I saw one was with one of my superiors at a Siemens R&D facility where I interned at the time. I knew I had to have one. A little later I bought mine from a dude who brought it from a work trip to the US. I still have it, I keep it together with my copy of the O'Reilly Palm Programming book.
I used the Palm a lot in everyday life and had it always with me, so for a brief period of my life it was an invaluable tool. Its real value for me however was how it foreshadowed what was about to come. I think the looming smartphone revolution was really obvious for us Palm users. We might not have foreseen every detail (Steve Jobs ditching the stylus) but the broad strokes of what was about to happen were crystal clear.
Edit: Hawkins = inventor of the Palm Pilot
Its original $499 launch price was a shock to the market because all other tablet computers were priced like luxury laptops. Apple came out with a large touchscreen device for the price of a PDA.
It’s a stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro which is barely useful at a $3000 price point.
Tablet computers at that time ran full Windows, came with a keyboard and had pen support which the iPad didn't for many years. In fact iOS didn't even have a file manager until 2017, or mouse support until 2019.
There was the big expensive Newton, and chunky Windows CE devices with keyboards that looked like micro-laptops. The Palm initially felt more like a toy compared to them, and it never got all the features of the Newton for example.
It's definitely just a high priced concept, and maybe that's all it'll ever be, but I'd push back on the barely useful bit.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/imax-emulates-palmpi...
If I'm not very much mis-remembering, this Palm actually did have a backlight? I think you had to long-press the little green button to activate it.
(Sigh) I really miss tech that wasn’t actively trying to exploit my brain, empty my wallet, or both.
Also one of the best were Psion's. Very well designed keyboard and the software was also good.
Now with so much hardware capabilities the usability can be much worse. I don't know how they did it, but the limited hardware functionality made the interfaces hard to do the UI.