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 If it were a charity foundation, there might be a reason to buy one of these outdated devices; but since they are not, there is no reason to purchase a Palm Pilot anymore.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.

Palm’s Software Singularity

It’s no secret that the place has been going downhill. But because there hasn’t been a dedicated handheld release in two years (no Treo business), the technology is quite outdated. Needless to say, it was outdated even when it first came out. It seems like Palm never moved far away from its original Tungsten T model, which I envied way back in 2002 after I purchased my m515. That m515 was the older sibling to my m105, Palm’s student-targeting device that practically ran my 6th grade life (and offered an entertaining alternative to Ancient History class). That m105 was brilliant, and had everything; the m515 was the ultimate improvement, and a worthy Bar Mitzvah gift that lasted me until just last year. The TX was meant to supersede them all, but I underestimated Palm’s newest operating system, Garnet, an OS which also was excruciatingly out-of-date by many, many years. Not only was it far more unstable than OS4, it seemed to have a far more limited software library. But that wasn’t the OS’s fault.

Palm’s decrease in hardware development invariably led to a decrease in software development, both from Palm itself and from third-party developers. I found myself browsing through the same software I had used several years back on my m515, and even loading up classics I had on my m105. Why was there no software? The most exciting application I added to my TX was the new Documents to Go software, a stripped-down version of Microsoft Office (now also facing competition from OpenOffice.org). The new feature? A spell checker.

The market hasn’t even budged. Palm has attempted Vista support, but utterly fails at providing a proper customer experience. Those of us with older Palm handhelds (which is everyone, literally) are suffering due to lack of compatibility with Windows Vista, lack of software, lack of willing developers, lack of hardware, and lack of a recent OS that actually gets the job done. I’ve had more problems in a single day with my TX than I’ve had in the entire life of my m515. The m515 was rock solid stable – it never crashed once. However Palm, instead of upgrading their OS to make it more crash-proof, seemed to crash-proof the way the Palm crashes. Every time the system crashes, it seems as though it was prepared for it to happen. The OS cleanly resets, making me wait a minute before resuming my previous task.

At times, I have lost very important word files when Documents to Go crashes, and have felt thankful that the file on my Palm was just a copy of the one on my hard drive.

It’s Not Just Palm

Dell recently dropped out of the handheld race. Their Axim line is no more. What’s left? Here are some choices:

- Blackberry,
- HP iPaq,
- and, eventually, the iPhone.

…that’s about it, and two of those aren’t really dedicated PDA’s (Blackberry and iPhone). Wanted to take that touch screen with you? In a few years the world probably won’t know what a dedicated PDA is anymore. Now I just need to figure out how to salvage what was on my TX and put it on another device once all development ceases and the mobile companies are down the toilet.