Early palms had a lot of issues - I remember swapping AA batteries very frequently for example - but the products and company showed an incredible balance between technological vision and practical reality. The glyphs are a great example; most of the letters mirrored the English alphabet but a few were quite different. With a little practice you could write accurate notes quite quickly. Compare this to the oft-mocked Newton. Sync also worked quite well. I wrote a number of apps that hooked into the sync process and uploaded data to web-based systems. I still find it kind of incredible that in ~2000 I could take notes on my palm and then dock, sync and view it in a web portal. Pretty underwhelming now but not when most websites were still geocities homepages!

For me my Pilot was a better organizer than any current phone. It was lean and very fast. The Newton 2000 was also very good.