Two weeks ago I visited a local flea market and discovered two Palm
devices my humble collection was missing: Sony Clie PEG-UX50/E and IBM
WorkPad C3. I bought both of them and as I have no special feelings
for IBM devices, I put the WorkPAd into the box with my other Palms,
the Clie is however quite a different story.
Back when the UX50 was new on the market, I was using almost decade
old Psion Series 3a and I just loved it. For me there were three
things at which nobody could beat Psion: integrated database,
programming in OPL and of course the keyboard. Even the Series
3/a/c/mx, which had sort of calculator-like chiclet keys, were better
than anything else in the price range.
Then I upgraded to Series 5mx, the best pocket handheld with a QWERTY
keyboard ever made, period. Very nice keyboard, wide touchscreen and
microkernel operating system with full multitasking. Windows CE were
laughable even five or six years later, with ten to twenty times
better hardware. I could have twenty apps running at the same time in
16MB of RAM and on 33MHz CPU and still nothing was killed in the
background and task switching was smooth. Plus there was a POSIX layer
addon called emx with gcc, grep and all the other stuff I loved on my
desktop. And all this had no problem running 25 hours on pair of AA
2000mAh NiMH accumulators.
After 5mx there was only one better thing to get, Psion Series 7 /
netBook. Color VGA display, even better keyboard, PCMCIA slot, four
times faster CPU. I did almost all my college courses just with the
netBook and was using it daily as late as 2012. But netBook wasn't
exactly pocketable, as it had almost six by six inches and solid two
pounds. That was exactly the time I bought my first Palm device - a
second hand Tungsten T.
It wasn't as capable pocket device as my first two Psion computers,
but it was more durable (it still works another eleven years later and
three lost styluses later, still with the original battery) and quite
quickly I got the graffiti thing so well, I could write blog posts on
it while commuting. Tungsten T was replaced after two years with
Tungsten T|X and that with Centro smartphone. That's when I've got my
first Palm with a hardware QWERTY keyboard built in and changed my
perception of Palm PDAs as just companions to full computers.
Then modern smartphones came and even though I tried badly (Xperia
Mini Pro, Blackberry), the rest of the world decided, that it's not
necessary to have a hardware QWERTY keyboard and devices quite quickly
disappeared from the market.
So now I have another one - the famous UX50. It has everything
Tungsten had and on the top of it, it has a keyboard. I have to buy a
new battery and an AC adapter and the WiFi doesn't exactly seem to be
working correctly, but it simply is a great everyday carry device.
This post was typed on it and it's for sure not the last one, UX50 is
and will stay in my phlogflow.
