Goodbye Palm, it's been a great 11 years

For more than a week, my Palm Tungsten T3 has been laying the bottom of my backpack, instead of my pants pocket where it used to be. Upon writing this post, I recovered it to see if the battery had died, and it had not. It was very low, but I had not lost all my data, a nice change from a couple weeks ago when I went through several full restores after total data loss due to the battery running out.

This T3 is almost 5 years old. And for its age it's a very respectable little gadget. But I need something I can rely on. I'm using more and more my Moleskine notebook to take notes, but I don't store in it my often changing calendars, my growing list of contacts, and a lot of the information I want to keep handy. For this I still use the Palm, as a read-only data viewer. And it's of course not very satisfying.

The normal course of action would simply be to go and buy a new model. I started using Palms 11 years ago, and the T3 is my third one. There is room in my heart for a fourth! But the problem here is Palm, the company. None of their products is what I need. The Treo comes close, but it's using the same single-task OS as my old Palm. I could switch to Windows Mobile, but I really don't want too. And there is the question of synchronization as well: I really don't want to deal with MarkSpace anymore, after the fiasco that was the (lack of) free upgrade to use their software with Leopard. (If you're curious about it, go check the archives of their forums around November 2007.) So a new Palm is not a solution.

What's a little sad in this story is that they really had it, 5 to 7 years ago. They were making great innovative versatile devices, with a thriving community of developers. I've read books, listened to music, played games (even “Dungeon Master” on an Atari ST emulator), and kept track of many things on these little beasts. I quickly learned that a Palm was worth as much as one puts into it, and much I did! Lists of books, appointments, phone numbers, notes from meetings, recipes... It would be my small computer away from my real computer. The only thing it was lacking was some form of connectivity, in this very wired age. The other thing that was tiring was to carry a separate cell phone, and a separate iPod.

So I'm going to take the logical step. In a couple weeks, when the craziness has subsided, I'll go buy an iPhone. Till then, I may keep looking up a phone number once or twice a week, when I'm away from the computer. But most probably my T3 will run out of battery at the bottom of my backpack, forgotten.

Then it will really be “Goodbye, Palm.”