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Palm Tungsten T3
Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor, Sony Clie, etc. were all wonderful little devices in their own right. The original Palm Pilots were solid organizers, Visors had crazy amounts of expansion options and a Clie would doom you to the world of pain and suffering that is the Sony Memory Stick.
Previously I looked back on Handspring's Visor and what a cool little handheld tool it was in the early aughts. Could it be a daily driver or accessory today? Probably not, thought it does have battery life and expandible storage going for it. It was especially fun to tinker and getting working with J-Pilot on OpenBSD and get Palm Apps running on it. I honestly don't mind the Palm calendar and there are halfway decent Gameboy emulators out there for it but the real fun came in getting the "IR Blaster" Palm app up and running. It's understandable why modern devices don't continue to tout IrDA ports but it's entertaining and downright handy to change channels at home, turn down the volume on overly loud store TVs and, as an added bonus, print via IR to equally archaic HP Laserjets.
Along with the vast library of Palm applications for download, there are some nice built-in applications such as the Office document viewer. Back in the era of plain ol' flip and feature phone, having a device to read Work & Excel docs would have been a very nice alternative to digging out what was almost certainly a Gateway or Compaq laptop only slightly smaller than an aircraft carrier. Simpler times.
Final thoughts: A well-built, metal-housed device running a solid version of PalmOS with an SD card reader, nice color screen with the ability to read Office documents? In some alternate timeline where everyone ignored the iPhone and Android was relegated to a hobby OS, we're all using the latest iteration of Palm devices and simmple phones.
Palm-related links:
https://www.lounge.se/PalmPilotOpenBSD
http://www.jpilot.org
