Let’s face it. A Palm Pilot just isn’t fun anymore. The company seems to be on its knees, begging for survival, and I, with my Palm TX, feel like I’m now forever trapped in a cage with this doomed company. After a year, the TX screen has broken, and I’m wary of sending the Palm back for repair. I don’t want a used TX in worse condition than my own. But then again, I don’t have the money to get out of Palm’s grasp.

The problem with watching this company wither away is that so many customers have stuck with the Palm standard for years, even a decade or more, and to see all that get washed down the drain is heartbreaking, if not only because all of our worldly mobile data is stored on these devices. The Palm Standard, as I will call it, does not cross over to Windows Mobile – we cannot get the same software, hotsync our existing data into a Pocket PC, and we can’t keep anything that we’ve kept on these devices for the last umpteen years. But it seems in time we’ll be forced to move. There’s no new handheld since 2005, and there doesn’t look to be one. The Lifedrive was recently taken off of the market. Palm, as far as we all know, is a dead company. It’s even losing the Smartphone race – it seems like Blackberry dominated long ago. Convergent devices aren’t specific to Palm anymore; the iPhone is probably the best recent example, and will more than likely sell far more than any Treo in history has.

What, then, is the incentive to buying from Palm? If it were a charity foundation, there might be a reason to buy one of these outdated devices; but since they are not, there is no reason to purchase a Palm Pilot anymore. And when students are bound on purchasing such a device, as I did, for schooling as other purposes, several students may fail to take into account the technology factor.

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