I could not believe it, but apparantly the mother of all cool organizers – the US Robotics Palm Pilot – has been around for 10 years! Off those 10 years I have been a Palm user for 7 years. The first one I ever bought was a ’97 US Robotics Palm Pilot 5000. To me it was actually the start of my gadget addiction. The 5000 series originally shipped with a whopping 512kb of memory. Like all Palm Pilots it had the annoying habbit that you lost every bit of information the moment your batteries were drained. After a while I upgraded it with a 1mb memory expansion. Soon I bought a Palm IIIe special edition (transparent) which I later gave to my girlfriend. It was a real piece of junk because it had an irritating bug that made it’s batteries drain in no time (so my girlfriend learned). The last Palm I owned was a IIIc with a color screen, 4mb memory and – most inportant feature for me – build-in rechargable batteries. I used this puppy a long time, until the screen died on me (it just wasn’t lit anymore) and I finally bought a SonyEricsson P800 (both organizer and phone). That meant: 1 less gadget to carry around. Recently I replaced the P800 by a T-Mobile MDA Compact (or QTek S100).
Ps. to avoid flames: I do know that the real mother of (modern) organizers or PDA’s is the Apple Newton, who was way ahead of it’s time (and it’s users). Off course before the Newton there already was the Psion and even the Sharp.
Pps. You can even own a Palm Pilot as a watch: check out his gadget: The Fossil Wrist PDA FX 200x