The optimal standalone PDA? Quick facts Introduction When Palm introduced the PalmPilot in 1997, the company was by no means one of the pioneers. Far from it. Companies such as Psion, Atari, Amstrad and AST, to name just a few, had already been making handheld computers for many years. Even so, Palm managed to go … Read more
Just your average, run-of-the-mill Windows CE 2.0 PDA? Quick facts Casio Cassiopeia E-11 Today perhaps best known for its line of G-Shock sports watches, Casio was once a consumer electronics giant, producing a wide range of devices commonly found in homes during the 1990s. In particular, it was well known for its calculators and digital … Read more
The perfect school computer Quick facts Introduction The Apple Newton eMate 300 is unlike any other Newton. It runs the same Newton operating system as the later MessagePads, but its form factor is completely different. Instead of a handheld organizer, the eMate is a rugged, clamshell computer with a built-in keyboard, designed primarily for use … Read more
The final model that truly delivered on the promise of being a Personal Digital Assistant Quick facts Introduction Over the course of just four years, Apple introduced no fewer than seven Newton models. The MessagePad 2100 was the last—and by far the most capable—of them all. Introduced in 1997, it ran Newton OS 2.1 and … Read more
Way ahead of its time – and still unlike anything else Quick facts Background The DataRover840 is an unusual device. It is one of the few PDAs that run the Magic Cap operating system from General Magic. General Magic started as a spin-off from Apple, where Marc Porat had some revolutionary ideas about how mobile … Read more
Everything You Need to be Mobile Quick facts Introduction While many of the PDA manufacturers of the 1990s and later had a background in making personal computers, Sharp had a different heritage. A long-time expert in display technology and power-efficient electronics, Sharp was one of the early companies to introduce calculators and so-called data banks. … Read more
What a tablet would look like in 1993 Quick facts Overview Before the arrival of the PalmPilot, Palm Computing was a software company. It developed the Graffiti handwriting recognition system and licensed it to various hardware manufacturers. One of these was Grid Systems, which used it in its GridPad line of handheld computers. The GridPad … Read more
A multimedia device in your pocket Quick facts Overview The iPAQ rx3115, introduced by HP in late 2004, is a PDA from the closing years of the PDA era. Smartphones already existed at this point, but had not yet become mainstream, and the iPhone was still several years away. The rx3115 runs the then-popular Microsoft … Read more
A hint of things to come Quick facts Introduction Sony, one of the largest companies in the consumer electronics industry, naturally wanted a share of the rapidly growing PDA market. By the late 1990s the market had expanded significantly, not least thanks to Palm and its highly successful PalmOS-powered devices. Sony had experimented with handheld … Read more
All-in-one affordable PDA, turn-by-turn navigator and media player Quick facts Overview A PDA born from the navigation boom By the mid-2000s, the PDA market was already in decline, squeezed between increasingly capable smartphones and dedicated in-car navigation units. Manufacturers that traditionally built GPS devices saw an opportunity to combine both worlds — and Microsoft’s Windows … Read more