Palm Tungsten

Ha, I didn’t in primary school but people still thought it was nerdy. I had a Palm Tungsten T5 I used throughout high school. Mobile calendars and reminders were a lifesaver for me. I couldn’t organize myself on paper if my life depended on it.

I wrote code for PalmOS back around '99. One thing that stands out in my memory is the way that applications were tested. I think it was a feature of the emulator, which would fire events at your software. I forget the details, but if you could make, say, 1,000 events without crashing, it was passable, 10k was good, and 100k was excellent. Well, I thought I was a reasonable competent C++ programmer and I was shocked at how quickly my application would crash using this tool. It was an extremely humbling experience that really opened my eyes. I often think of how effective that simple tool was at revealing bugs, but it's obviously not something that works in today's multitasking, Internet-connected devices. The other thing I remember is CodeWarrior being the first IDE I used that had a drop-down box with all the functions in the current source file. That was a pretty big step forward in productivity. Incidentally, I was still using a Palm Tungsten as late as 2010, when I was in Japan. There was a very simple Japanese dictionary application for Palm. Once you learn the basic rules for stroke order and direction, you could mimic any character you see using the stylus and do a dictionary search for matching Kanji. I was able to figure out a lot of navigation just by mimicking unknown Kanji that I saw on signs.

Back when they actually paid attention to hand-feel. No smartphone has ever felt as good in the hand as my Lifedrive or Tungsten TX.

I loved Palm since my first, the IIIe SE and have had many of their other later devices too. I was even invited to the launch party of the Zire 71 with it's cool slide out mechanism! Oh and the Tungsten|T when it could finally play MP3s was very neat, and another sliding mechanism making it more compact. Ah memories, well back to my non-distinctive slab of glass. I was also interested in the Sony CLIÉ's running PalmOS but never tried one. And of course the Psion's also seemed really cool but never landed its way in my hands.

There was a palm pilot version of Lights Out that I used to play a lot when I had my Tungsten E. At the time I felt like I was pretty good at solving it, but now I've completely forgotten the strategy.

You could and the experience was even pleasant with an external keyboard (I used a Palm Tungsten with an IR foldable keyboard) https://onboardc.sourceforge.net/