Retro PDAs Aplenty

A Psion of the times

I was in London at the end of April, presenting in a conference and one of the attendees knows I’m a huge retro fan. Being from Europe, he brought a collection of some of his retro PDAs to share with me (because they are all small and would travel well). Thanks, Dirk!

I remembered some of these, but several I had never seen in person.

Palm Vx

Everyone knows about Palm. I owned several starting with the Palm III and then the Palm IIIc (the first color Palm) and then a Palm Tungsten. The Palm Vx was monochrome, but had a sleeker design than the III-series. I never had one of these, but it is interesting seeing one now.

Palm Vx

The Vx had 8MB of memory, which was a lot for the time (1999 or so). It had no built-in internet connectivity or wireless. You transferred data to it over serial or USB. Although it was a touch screen, you woud mostly just tap on things. There was no built-in keyboard and instead you used Graffiti to write one character at a time in the “pad” area at the bottom. In the photo you can see the template for Graffiti characters. For example, an “A” was drawn as an upside down “V”. Everything was done in one stroke to improve entry speed.

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