Palm OS 1.0
===========

Today we (me and my wife) have tried to do some cleaning. We have found
lot of  things what we  already forgot about -  a new lamp  (two lamps,
actually: a desk one and a  free-sanding one), some shoes, some CDs and
even two old Palms.

I thing  that a  good desk  lamp we be  more useful  than a  couple of
vintage  handhelds  but the  Palms  can  be  more interesting  for  the
readers.

One of them is somewhat boring:  a non-working IBM Workpad (a Palm IIIe
in black color)  but the second one  is a Palm Pilot  Personal (made in
Singapore). It  refused to work so  I tried to replace  its memory card
with one  that I have got  recently as a  spare part for my  Palm Pilot
Professional.

After this change  the device started to work. The  screen back-light no
longer works but  all of the rest  is OK. But the interface  has been a
bit  strange -  the "Applications"  screen  does not  occupy the  whole
screen area and  so. An the Prefs  include only a few  countries to set
formats for numbers, time and date.

Why? Because the operating system is "System 1.0"! So the card probably
belonged to an older device than is  my Palm. But if works also in this
newer one. That's excellent! It is  actually very similar to the OS 2.0
but  it is  even simpler  and some  controls are  a bit  different: for
example, repeated tapping on a Datebook  icon does not switch the views
(it must be done by a button inside the application).

Thus Now I have three working old (pre-Palm III) Palm Pilot machines:

- a Personal (made in Singapore, RAM 512 kB) downgraded to OS 1.0
- a Professional (made in U.S.A., RAM 1024 kB) with original OS 2.0
- a Personal (made in Malaysia, RAM 2028 kB) upgraded to OS 3.0

Funny stuff, isn't it?

But my  main handheld (that  one which I  actually use on  daily basis)
still is the Palm IIIx with 4096 kB of RAM.


I only hope that jynx [1] will not follow my example... I'm curious how
much satisfied he will be with the Sony UX-50 [2]. Is is a well-specced
machine but its memory life is not the best (with an additional battery
it can be  acceptable) and the keyboard is terrible.  And the designers
decision to use a big and  unpractical dock just for charging is simply
a stupid one (the device cannot be charged without a dock which has the
same footprint as  the device itself and  about one half of  it width -
but that dock  cannot be used for  syncing!). I tried to  use the UX-50
for some time and then returned to the IIIx :-(


References:

[1] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20181019.post
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_CLIC_PEG-UX50