Palm Pilots

Posted: July 9, 2018

A few weeks ago, spurred by my continuing facination with technology that we have otherwise left behind, I purchased several small, touch screen, pocket computers manufactured by PalmOne. Calling them ‘palm pilots’ is a bit of a misnomer, but it’s close enough. Specifically, I got a tx, an e2, and a lifedrive. What follows are impressions after several weeks of hands on use.

The Good

The first device I recieved was a Lifedrive. It’s a 4GB external HDD with a screen. I paid about $12 for it. Can’t beat the price. I followed that up with a TX and two e2s, all in great working order, for an average price of $15/unit. I carried one of each for at least a week, before landing on the TX as my model of preference.

These are fun little devices, and they have a lot going for them in terms of utility:

In standby, the battery lasts weeks
In active use, the battery still lasts several days
There is a surprising amount of interesting and useful software still available (and almost always for free)
The TX and the Lifedrive make solid little video players, all three make passable music players
Did I mention the battery lasts for days? We are talking about batteries that are well over ten years old, and they still last for 3-4 days of multiple hours per day use.
Palm desktop is a treat to us, and is very well thought through.
The lifedrive is the slowest of the three devices, and even it was often more responsive than a modern PC. The e2 and the TX practically sing.
Games! Zork and the infocom library work a treat. Emulators exist for Gameboy and c64.

The Bad

It isn’t all roses. Some stuff doesn’t work well, or takes some extra work to set up:

Bluetooth is available on all three models, but it is hit and miss. I managed to get one keyboard (out of four) to work, and I haven’t had any success with networking or audio devices.
Hotsync was a pain to set up, but works well now that it is configured (and even works wirelessly.)
Finding the right tuning for video encoding has been an exercise in frustration.
Most of the best software is very hard to find. I frequently had to resort to delving deep in to the wayback machine.
Low resolution screens with resistive touch overlays.
Propritary power and accessory connector that is no longer manufactured (though widely available for a few dollars)
All three have SD slots, but they only support classic SD in sizes up to 2GB. 2GB SDHC cards are not supported. These can be hard to find.
Handwriting recognition is worse on these later models than on earlier models for patent reasons.

The Ugly

Some things don’t work at all:

WiFi is WEP or WPA1 only. Useless.
Many peices of software are frustratingly unfinished, and others are only available in shareware versions with bizarre limitations
Bluetooth rarely works as expected
Even if I could get networking working, no modern encryption protocols are available that I am aware of.

In Conclusion

I’m using palm desktop to manage my address book and appointments. I configured a simple script to download my RSS feeds and convert them to a format the palm can understand (plucker), which I sync wirelessly every morning. I recently started managing podcasts on the device with gpoder (also syncing wirelessly.) I have a small ebook library, and a small game library. Once a week or so, I load an SD card up with 1 or 2 films and a few TV episodes from Archive.org, to watch in my idle moments.

The devices show their age in myraid small ways, and not all of them are negative.

All in all, I find myself reaching for my palm more often than I read for my phone in my spare moments.

Once I figure out how to get my email on to and off of the device, and I get it reliably working with a wireless keyboard, I could see the palm (and the slower, asymetric workflow it demands) replacing my other mobile devices in many situations.

It’s not for everyone, but it has made for a nice change of pace for me.

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