Palm Pilot

3Com's series of HandHeld computers that run the PalmOs.

http://www.palm.com/

See PalmOs, which lists more such computers, and discussion/links about wiki and programming on the OperatingSystem.

Note that Palm, Inc. has not sold anything under the "Pilot" brand for a few years, due to trademark conflicts with the company that makes Pilot pens.

The markup on the hardware in a PalmPilot must be on the order of 1000%. This is a particularly good example of the ValueDrivenPricing that applies to most high-tech goods and services. (I'm not making a value judgement, it's just a phenomenon.)

I have to question the 1000% number. Palms sell in the range of $100 to $500 USD and that just does not jive with what I see as the cost of goods sold. --ScottElliott

This is interesting because technology people sometimes assume "objective" measures (MIPS, storage, speed) correlate directly to value to the customer. In this case, most of the figures of merit for the hardware are fairly unimportant.

DaveSmith notes that of course there are other costs to be recouped, including

licensing fees for portions of the OS that Palm licensed to help get the product to market faster,
amortized software development expenses, to pay down the ongoing expense of developing and extending the PalmPilot platform,
the cost of maintaining a support organization,
the cost marketing and public relations, so that the world knows what the Palm Pilot is
the overhead necessary to maintain the organization then that number may be about right.

The PalmIII did well in the ZDNet "destructive tests": http://web.archive.org/web/*http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,368951,00.html

Because MyMindKeepsWandering, I have to WriteItDown, where "It" is pretty much everything. I tried to WriteItOnaCards (apologies for wiki-mangled grammar) as a PersonalAnalogDevice, but I kept forgetting about the cards. I tried the LilaChapterTwo approach, but just couldn't make it stick. So, despite resisting handhelds for a long time, last year I bought a second-hand Palm Vx. I had great time with PalmWiki as a PersonalWiki, using it as an organizer and digital JunkBox. It was good for writing spur-of-the-moment haiku in, too. I never forgot to take it with me, because it had an excellent permanent, physical quality - it was a chunky little machine. Unfortunately, only a few months later I got burgled, and it was one of the things they took.

Fast forward to this January and I'm now the happy owner of a Palm m505. Much the same thing but faster, with more memory, UniversalSerialBus connection, and a color screen no less. It even has a SecureDigital? slot for memory cards, which makes the limited internal storage a non-issue. It's five years out of date, but I love it. Generally I'm not very keen on devices, and I dislike the current trend of integrating everything - I don't want a camera in my phone, I have a perfectly good one already. On the other hand, I have my Palm, which seems to fall firmly into the slot of sophisticated enough to be useful - I can install real software on it - but not over-complex and junk-laden. Its essential simplicity - calendar, notebook, ToDo list, contacts database - is superb, in addition to its satisfying shape. I firmly believe that it has the QualityWithoutaName. IsAnythingBetterThanPaper? In this case, yes.

-- EarleMartin

CategoryHandheld CategoryPalmOs CategoryPersonalInformationSystem