There used to be plenty of room for innovation. General Magic made a PDA to compete with the Apple Newton Messagepad (the first "Personal Digital Assistant"). The Newton had a lovely pen-based user interface, and with the second revision, a handwriting recognition engine that worked perfectly. But sadly the early version failed to meet expectations (google "Beat Up Martin!") and Steve Jobs killed the project when he came back to Apple.

So both the General Magic and the Newton Messagepad sadly lost out to the inferior-in-nearly-aspect Palm. (curiously, Palm got its start writing an alternative alphabet interpreter for the Newton. So if not for Newton, Palm would have never been born, and would not have defeated Apple.)

The Newton also failed because it had a much shorter battery life than the Palm devices and was a great deal larger. And was a lot more expensive.

Palm devices shipped out of the box with a docking station and ability to sync calendar/data with almost any Windows 98 or NT4/2000 PC.

Also, Graffiti was fast once you got it down. Newton's handwriting recognition, even when it wasn't a total disaster, was kind of laborious.

But mostly it was the price tag. Palm Pilots really did almost everything a Newton could do at half the price or less. The Outlook sync feature made sure they had a place in business as well.

I actually never used a graffiti palmos device as my personal every day pda. Bought a handspring Treo 180 with the physical keyboard. When it was new, it was one of the best wireless pda available... I still miss that keyboard.

> inferior-in-nearly-aspect Palm

worse is better https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

x86 was worse than RISC, Linux worse than BSD, Windows worse than MacOS, etc

Palm got the the things right that mattered to adoption (price, simplicity, data syncing) even if you think Newtown was technically superior. Focusing on technical superiority is a common trap.

For anyone less than enthused by that webpage's anti-HN redirect to a photograph of a testicle in an egg cup, here's an archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180322163944/https://www.jwz.o...