PalmPilot

Before smartphones put calendars, contacts, notes, email, cameras, music, maps, games, banking, shopping and approximately seventeen ways for your employer to contact you into a single pocket-sized device, people occasionally carried something called a personal digital assistant. The PalmPilot did not invent the PDA. It did something arguably more important. It made one genuinely useful. Palm Computing was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, with Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan becoming central figures in the company's early development. Palm initially worked primarily on software for handheld devices, including handwriting-recognition and personal-information-management software. That experience exposed the company to an important problem. Existing handheld computers were often trying to do too much. Apple's Newton MessagePad had attracted enormous attention after its 1993 introduction, but devices like the Newton were relatively large, expensive and ambitious. Jeff Hawkins approached the problem differently. Instead of asking how much of a desktop computer could be squeezed into someone's hand, Palm focused on the small number of things people actually needed a pocket organizer to do. Hawkins famously carried a block of wood approximately the size of his proposed handheld. He would pull it from his pocket and pretend to perform common tasks with it. The exercise sounds ridiculous. It was also considerably cheaper than manufacturing a terrible computer. The philosophy that emerged was simplicity. The device needed to fit in a shirt pocket. It needed to respond immediately. Battery life needed to be measured in weeks rather than hours. Common information needed to be accessible with very few taps. And synchronizing it with a computer needed to be extremely easy. Hawkins considered the Palm's real competition less a laptop computer than a paper organizer. That distinction shaped practically everything about the product. Palm developed a prototype internally called Taxi. The company needed additional financial resources to manufacture and distribute it, and in 1995 Palm Computing was acquired by modem manufacturer U.S. Robotics. That gave Palm the backing required to bring the handheld to market. The new device was unveiled in January 1996 as the Pilot. Two versions were announced: the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000. The Pilot 1000 was priced at $299. The higher-capacity Pilot 5000 cost $369. The specifications look almost comically modest today. The Pilot used a 16 MHz Motorola DragonBall processor. The Pilot 1000 contained 128 kilobytes of RAM. The Pilot 5000 offered 512 kilobytes. Not megabytes. Kilobytes. A modern photograph can occupy thousands of times more storage than an entire original Palm handheld possessed. Fortunately, the Pilot was not attempting to store photographs. Its purpose was organization. The built-in software included an address book, date book, to-do list, memo pad and calculator. Four physical application buttons provided immediate access to important functions. There was no waiting for a desktop-style operating system to boot. Press a button and the information appeared. That responsiveness was central to Palm's philosophy. If checking an appointment on an electronic organizer took substantially longer than opening a paper planner, there wasn't much reason to use the electronic organizer. The Pilot's screen was a 160-by-160-pixel monochrome touchscreen operated primarily with a stylus. Text could be entered using Palm's Graffiti system. Graffiti did not attempt to recognize everyone's normal handwriting. That was the clever part. Instead, users learned a simplified set of character strokes designed to be easy for the computer to recognize. The human adapted slightly to the machine rather than demanding that the machine decipher every possible version of human handwriting. It worked surprisingly well. Palm effectively looked at the extremely difficult problem of perfect handwriting recognition and decided that perhaps people could just write the letters differently. Another defining feature was the cradle. Place the Pilot into its desktop cradle, press the synchronization button, and Palm's HotSync software transferred information between the handheld and the user's computer. Contacts could be updated. Appointments could be synchronized. Notes and tasks could be backed up. The device wasn't trying to replace the PC. It was designed to accompany it. Palm called this concept a "connected organizer." That distinction mattered enormously. The Pilot could remain small and simple because the desktop computer handled the heavier work. The first units began shipping in spring 1996. Initial sales were not instantly spectacular. According to accounts from Palm's leadership, sales remained relatively flat during the first several months. Then word began spreading. People discovered that the thing was genuinely useful. The Pilot was small enough to carry everywhere. Its batteries lasted for weeks. The interface was fast. The synchronization worked. And at $299 for the base model, it was considerably more accessible than some earlier handheld computers. Sales accelerated. The Pilot became one of the defining technology products of the late 1990s. The second generation arrived in 1997 and introduced the name most people now remember: PalmPilot. The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional refined the original design and expanded its capabilities. By then the device was becoming sufficiently successful that "PalmPilot" was approaching generic shorthand for an entire category of handheld organizers. There was, however, a problem with the word Pilot. Pilot Pen Corporation already had a considerable interest in that particular name. Following trademark disputes, Palm moved away from using Pilot for subsequent devices. Beginning with the Palm III generation in 1998, the products increasingly became known simply as Palm handhelds. The name disappeared from the hardware. People kept calling them PalmPilots anyway. Technology has occasionally discovered that consumers do not read trademark settlements. The Palm III added features such as infrared communication, allowing Palm users to "beam" contacts and other information directly between devices. For a period in the late 1990s, beaming someone your contact information was extraordinarily futuristic. The Palm V, introduced in 1999, pushed the product in a more stylish direction. It was thin, sleek and housed in a metal case. The Palm VII experimented with wireless data connectivity. Palm also encouraged third-party software development. This transformed the handheld from an electronic organizer into something closer to a small computing platform. Developers created games. Databases. Expense trackers. Reference tools. Medical software. Calculators. Productivity applications. Utilities. Before smartphones had app stores, Palm users were already downloading applications to pocket-sized touchscreen computers. The corporate story became considerably more complicated. U.S. Robotics was acquired by 3Com in 1997, bringing Palm along with it. Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan became frustrated with Palm's direction under 3Com and left in 1998. They founded Handspring. Handspring then created Palm OS-compatible handhelds called Visors. So the people who helped create Palm left Palm and started another company making devices that ran Palm's operating system. The PDA industry was becoming interesting. Handspring also pushed Palm technology toward its eventual successor. The company's Treo devices combined Palm-style computing with mobile-phone functionality. Instead of carrying a Palm and a phone, users could carry one device. This was clearly where the industry was heading. Meanwhile, Palm itself became independent from 3Com through an initial public offering in 2000. The company continued producing handhelds through families such as the m-series, Tungsten and Zire. Color screens arrived. Processors became faster. Memory increased. Expansion cards added storage. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi appeared on later models. Palm handhelds became vastly more capable than the tiny monochrome Pilot introduced in 1996. And that gradually created a problem. The PDA was becoming more computer-like at exactly the same time that the mobile phone was becoming more PDA-like. Eventually those two categories were going to collide. They did. Palm reunited with Handspring in 2003, bringing Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan back into the corporate family and giving Palm control of the increasingly important Treo smartphone line. The company's future was clearly becoming the smartphone. Traditional Palm organizers continued for several more years. Models such as the Tungsten series targeted professional users while the less expensive Zire family brought Palm computing to mainstream consumers. The Palm TX, introduced in 2005, represented one of the final major traditional Palm handhelds. It offered a color touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and substantial storage. It was an impressive PDA. Unfortunately, by then the question was becoming increasingly obvious. Why wasn't it also your phone? BlackBerry devices were growing rapidly. Windows Mobile smartphones combined PDA functionality with cellular service. Palm itself was selling Treos. Then Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. The distinction between "phone" and "handheld computer" was rapidly collapsing. A separate electronic organizer no longer made much sense for most consumers. Palm discontinued its remaining traditional PDA products toward the end of the decade and concentrated on smartphones. The company attempted a major reinvention with webOS and the Palm Pre in 2009. The Pre introduced innovative ideas that would influence later smartphones, but it failed to restore Palm's former dominance. Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010. The company that had helped define handheld computing had reached the end of its independent existence. The original PalmPilot was long gone by then. But almost everything around it had become a PalmPilot. Phones had touchscreens. They ran third-party applications. They synchronized personal information. They contained calendars, contacts, tasks and notes. They were designed to provide immediate access to information from a pocket. The PDA disappeared largely because its ideas had escaped into everything else.

The PalmPilot and its descendants were ultimately discontinued because the stand-alone personal digital assistant became unnecessary once smartphones absorbed nearly all of its important functions. This is another Discontinued Stuff story where the product did not disappear because its fundamental idea was bad. Its fundamental idea became ubiquitous. The original Pilot solved a very specific problem. In the mid-1990s, most people did not have useful internet-connected computers in their pockets. A mobile phone was primarily a telephone. A desktop computer contained contacts, calendars and other information but generally stayed on a desk. The PalmPilot created a convenient bridge between those worlds. It allowed people to carry important information with them and synchronize changes with a computer later. For years, this was extremely useful. Then phones became computers. Palm itself participated in this transition. Handspring's Treo line demonstrated the obvious advantage of combining a Palm-style organizer with cellular communication. Palm subsequently acquired Handspring and made Treo smartphones a central part of its business. Competitors were moving in the same direction. Research In Motion's BlackBerry became enormously successful among business users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform appeared on increasingly capable smartphones. Phones gained better displays, web browsers, email, cameras, expandable storage and downloadable applications. The distinction between a PDA and a smartphone became increasingly arbitrary. For many customers, carrying two devices made no sense. Why carry a Palm to manage your calendar and contacts when the phone already in your pocket could manage the same information? The arrival of Apple's iPhone in 2007 accelerated the transition toward large touchscreen smartphones that functioned as general-purpose pocket computers. Traditional Palm handhelds suddenly looked less like the future and more like one component of the future separated from all the others. Palm therefore shifted its attention toward smartphones. The company introduced webOS and the Palm Pre in 2009 in an attempt to establish a modern smartphone platform capable of competing with Apple's iPhone, BlackBerry and Google's emerging Android ecosystem. Traditional Palm OS organizers were left behind. The classic PDA category effectively disappeared. Palm's later corporate difficulties should not be confused with the reason the PalmPilot itself became obsolete. The original concept had succeeded spectacularly. It had demonstrated that millions of people wanted instant access to personal information on a small handheld computer. The problem was that those same people also wanted phones. Cameras. Email. Web browsers. Music. Maps. Messaging. And eventually practically everything else. Putting all of those functions into one device was far more compelling than carrying a dedicated organizer. The PalmPilot didn't lose because people stopped wanting a computer in their pocket. It lost because people wanted an even better computer in their pocket that could also make phone calls.

The PalmPilot is one of those discontinued products whose legacy becomes harder to see precisely because so much of it became normal. Take out a modern smartphone. Tap a calendar icon. Look up a contact. Open a notes application. Check a task list. Install a third-party application. Touch an icon to immediately access information. Synchronize your personal data with another computer. None of this feels particularly remarkable. That is the point. The PalmPilot helped establish an expectation that personal computing should work this way. It demonstrated that a handheld computer did not need to reproduce a desktop operating system in miniature. A pocket device could have its own interface built around speed, simplicity and the kinds of tasks people actually performed while mobile. That philosophy was one of Palm's greatest contributions. Jeff Hawkins famously approached the original device with strict limitations. It had to be genuinely pocketable. Common operations had to be extremely fast. Battery life had to be excellent. Synchronization had to be simple. The operating system had to remain lightweight. The result was a device that could accomplish relatively little by modern standards but accomplished its intended tasks remarkably well. This was especially apparent when compared with more ambitious early PDAs. Palm did not need the Pilot to recognize everybody's handwriting perfectly. It created Graffiti and asked users to learn simplified strokes. Palm did not need the Pilot to become a replacement desktop computer. It made HotSync and let the desktop computer remain the desktop computer. Palm did not need the device to contain every conceivable feature. It needed users to be able to check tomorrow's appointment immediately. This restraint proved extraordinarily influential. The Palm ecosystem also anticipated modern mobile software culture. Thousands of third-party applications appeared for Palm OS. Users installed games, utilities, databases, productivity tools and specialized professional software. Doctors carried medical references on Palms. Salespeople tracked customers. Students stored schedules and notes. Business travelers managed expenses. And plenty of people installed games when they were supposed to be doing one of those other things. The stylus became inseparable from the Palm experience. Pull it out. Tap the screen. Write in Graffiti. Put it back into its little silo. Lose it. Find it under something. Repeat. HotSync created another ritual. The Palm went into its cradle. A button was pressed. The handheld and desktop exchanged information. Today synchronization happens invisibly across cloud services. In the 1990s, watching your Palm and PC successfully agree about your calendar felt like technology accomplishing something. Palm's corporate descendants also directly helped shape smartphones. Handspring's Treo combined the Palm experience with cellular communication and became an important early smartphone family. Palm's later webOS platform introduced ideas such as card-based multitasking and sophisticated gesture-driven navigation. The Palm Pre never achieved the commercial success required to save the company, but elements of its interface philosophy would appear throughout later mobile operating systems. Hewlett-Packard purchased Palm in 2010 for approximately $1.2 billion, largely betting on webOS. That strategy subsequently collapsed. HP discontinued its webOS hardware in 2011, and the remnants of Palm's software and intellectual property passed through additional corporate hands. The original Palm company was gone. The world it predicted was arriving everywhere. PalmPilots also became artifacts of an extremely specific technological era. They belong to the period between paper organizers and smartphones. For a relatively brief window, it was perfectly normal for a technologically enthusiastic person to carry both a mobile phone and a PDA. Perhaps also a digital camera. And an MP3 player. And maybe a pager slightly earlier. Pockets had responsibilities. The smartphone eventually consumed almost all of them. That makes the original PalmPilot particularly fascinating today. A Pilot 1000 had a 16 MHz processor. A monochrome 160-by-160-pixel screen. 128 kilobytes of memory. Two AAA batteries. No camera. No Wi-Fi. No cellular connection. No GPS. No streaming video. No social media. It couldn't order dinner. It couldn't summon a car. It couldn't spend six hours showing you increasingly strange short videos because you made the mistake of watching one raccoon wash a grape. It remembered your appointments. It stored your phone numbers. It kept your notes. And it did those things extremely well. That was enough to change personal computing. The PalmPilot ultimately disappeared because the industry moved beyond the PDA. But the direction it moved was exactly the direction Palm had been pointing. Jeff Hawkins wanted a small computer people would actually carry everywhere. Today nearly everyone carries one. We just call it a phone.