Palm OS and the gadgets that ran it: An Ars retrospective

Enlarge (credit score: Aurich Lawson)

“Devices aren’t enjoyable anymore,” sighed my spouse, watching me faucet away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the sofa along with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch.

And it’s true: The smartphone has all however eradicated whole courses of devices, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 gamers, GPS maps, and even flashlights. However arguably no model of gadget has been so completely outdated as the private digital assistant, the hand held laptop that dominated the late ’90s and early 2000s. The PDA even set the template for how its smartphone successors would render it out of date, transferring from easy private data administration to embody video games, messaging, music, and pictures.

However simply as smartphones would do, PDAs supplied a dizzying array of working techniques and purposes, and an amazing lots of them ran Palm OS. (I purchased my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no method we might enumerate each single such gadget on this article. So on this Ars retrospective, we’ll look again at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm working system and the gadgets that ran it—and the way they paved the best way for what we use now.