Last week I went on eBay and bought a device that I thought I’d never have another use for: a Palm organizer. If you’ve known me for any amount of time (or perhaps even dug through the archives of this site), you’ll likely know that I’ve had a long history with these fantastic-but-sometimes-maddening devices.
I purchased my first Palm back in 1999 as a college student at CCM. I had been drooling over these devices for years, and finally was making enough money to bring the then-antiquated Palm Pilot within reach. Keeping track of a calendar with full time classes, a part-time job, and other church commitments really helped me justify the purchase. That, and I was already keeping fairly rigorous track of personal contacts in a .txt file on my PC, so this was the evolutionary next step.
About 18 months later (an upgrade cycle that would become pretty common for me), I dropped an additional $150 on a Palm M100. This brought me up-to-date with Palm’s offerings (leapfrogging over the Palm III and Palm V devices), but with very little benefit. Palm OS 4 was the latest and greatest at that time, and actually offerred some time-saving improvements that were difficult to explain to friends asking why I’d spent so much money. 
By this time, Microsoft was well on its way to attempt to overtake Palm in the handheld market. Offering more memory, color screens, and document tools, Microsoft’s apparent plan was to out-feature Palm. However, Palm was not willing to overcomplicate the renouned “simplicity” of their devices — indeed, a large reason for Palm’s inroads into corporate America could be attributed to the fact that these devices were drop-dead simple to use. Instead, the company responded by licensing out the Palm platform to third-party device manufacturers such as Sony and Handspring. In this way, Palm was in the priviledged position to have their cake and eat it, too: they could continue to maintain the simplicity of the Palm device, while generating revenue from innovators seeking to play in the handheld market.
And so began the feature war. Microsoft’s lumbering efforts towards featureful devices were beset by stability issues, where early WinCE users complained about system crashes on a regular basis. It’s interesting to note that early versions of WinCE were actually modified, pared-down versions of Windows 95 — an operating system that introduced the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” and made Ctrl-Alt-Del a household name. Meanwhile, Sony and Handspring — to the credit of the extensibility of the Palm platform — were rapidly catching up on Microsoft and, interestingly enough, crowding in on Palm’s own marketshare. It wasn’t long before Palm responded with their own color devices. I didn’t wait around, though, and got a Sony Clié.
The Clié T415, purchased in 2000 for $299, was a charmingly slim, aluminum-encased device. it was one of the first to include a Sony Memory Stick external storage slot (which later determined what digital camera we bought: point one, Sony), and a side scrollwheel. It also featured polyphonic sound effects, a flip-top cover, and a 16-bit grayscale screen. The Clié, however, was not without its issues. The grayscale screen was embarrasingly murky in most indoor lighting situations — such as, oh say, the flourescent light at my workplace. The cover had also not undergone much endurance testing, either, as its flimsy connection to the back of the device wore out within months.
2002 saw a new buying power of a dual-income, as it was the year in which Sarah and I were married. In a moment of weakness, Sarah admitted to me that she was interested in getting her own handheld and the chase was on. She graciously agreed to take my T415 and let me get a new device. After a couple solid weeks of searching, I found the ultimate geek machine: the NR-70. For only $300 on eBay, the NR-70 came with just about every feature you could imagine at the time (falling just short of making your coffee for you): MP3 playback, vibrant color screen with flip-top clamshell hinge, Memory Stick storage, collapsable Graffiti writing area for quarter-VGA fullscreen viewing, polyphonic sound, and, naturally, Sony’s brilliant scrollwheel. Of course, to use any of these features, the Clié came with a dozen custom applications, and the device was a monster. The hinge itself added a full half-inch of otherwise unusable space to the height, and it was almost three times as thick as the T415. The extra heft took a lot out of the gee whiz effect of flipping open the screen and was the source of a significant amount of buyer’s remorse.
But, for its time, the NR-70 reflected the state of the handheld market after the dot-com bust. Everybody was packing features into these devices — though none as haphazardly as Sony. Handhelds were becoming a technology solution looking for a problem. Gone were the days of simplisitic, easy-to-use, well thought-out architecture. The handheld market became a kludge of disparate functionalities crammed into a single device. It was at this time that Palm chose to completely re-engineer its PalmOS platform, which meant that developers had to wait about two years before being able to address any of these issues with a holistic approach. Stagnation abounded, cell-phones began to catch up with similar functionality (though I don’t know anyone who syncs his or her non-Palm based phone with their computer), and Sony — whose devices were getting downright user-hostile — saw sales drop in the US market.
It was also around this time that I landed a full-time job and was spending a lot of my time in a cubicle, obsoleting the need for mobility. That, and I found software that enabled me to download my contacts and calendars into my iPod. See, Palm had completed a study of their handheld user-base and discovered that 90% of the time when people use handhelds, they’re looking up information, and the other 10%, they’re entering it. I figured, if I wasn’t anywhere around a PC during that other 10%, I’d use my cell phone or a piece of paper to record a phone number. Wanting to be free of the extra bulk, I sold the NR-70 online.
Fast-forward one more year to today. The job search has forced me to get back out on the street and be just as mobile as I was in college. Over the past month of looking for new employment, I’ve become conviced that three-fourths of a good job search is follow-up. It’s all about taking that business card from that guy at that career fair three weeks ago and remembering to send him a very specific email about your conversation. Palms are excellent with this kind of thing. So, after consulting with the Walker Household Budget Committee, I went online and purchased a Palm Vx.
The Palm Vx dates back to 1999 as Palm’s cutting-edge device for that year — it’s aluminum case and slim profile made it a favorite among corporate-types. It totally embodies the “simplicity” of Palm’s original vision and does very little beyond contact and calendar management — though it does both very, very well. And, for $64 shipped, the price was certainly right.
Proud of having spent so little money on the handheld, I also purchased a Palm Keyboard for about $10, as well. With better tactile response than my klunky Dell at home, the Palm Keyboard folds up almost as small as the Palm and makes note-taking and “moblogging” really easy.
I have to admit that getting the Vx working wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped: most notably because USB wasn’t ubiquitous then like it is now, so I did need to get an expensive Serial-to-USB cable. So, all told, the total cost was about $104 — only $85 shy of getting the latest and greatest from PalmOne. But, who knows, if the Palm keeps proving itself as pretty handy, the next 18-month cycle puts an upgrade to right around next year’s birthday. 
