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News -- My Love Affair with the PalmPilot

by Tim O'Reilly
06/01/1998

The mail from literary agent David Rogelberg of StudioB came out of the blue:
Are you interested in publishing a book on the PalmPilot? David Pogue has a nice proposal, and I was wondering if you'd like to see it.
I didn't know much about the PalmPilot, but David Pogue's proposal said all the right things:
US Robotics (now 3Com) has sold 1.5 million Pilot handheld computers in its first 18 months on the market, making the Pilot the first home-run PDA. An online/workplace cult of Pilot-adoring fans has sprung up nearly overnight, recalling a passion not seen since the early days of Macintosh.

...most people who use a PalmPilot become fanatics, spreading the gospel to their friends and scrabbling at the Web looking for new information. Walk down a plane aisle on your next flight, or whip open your own Pilot at any convention, and you'll see what I mean: these things are everywhere, and Pilot owners feel a sense of community and underground togetherness.

I was intrigued. A passionate user community is one of the things that I always look for when evaluating book possibilities. David's experience with the Mac community (and the fact that Mac books have always far outsold PC books in proportion to the size of the user community) resonated with my own experience with UNIX and the early days of the Internet.

David went on:

I'm proposing a substantial, funny, intermediate-to-advanced, in-depth Pilot "bible," along the lines of Macworld Mac SECRETS, and with the same focus on the undocumented, the time-saving, and the surprising. This market is completely untapped; both the Pilot manual and Que's Pilot book cover little more than the basics.
Music to my ears. At O'Reilly, we've always tried to avoid documenting the obvious; instead we try to write down the hard stuff that people really need to know. David was clearly an author who had the same idea.

Still, I didn't want to commit O'Reilly to a new market without some hands-on experience. I knew the PalmPilot developer's conference was coming up, so I went down to check it out. Sure enough, I found a passionate, interesting crowd. I bought my own PalmPilot and started to play with it.

I was hooked.

This is an amazing little machine. A really useful computer small enough to fit into your pocket or purse! Too bad American Express pre-empted the slogan "Don't leave home without it."

As David Pogue had noted in his proposal:

I was skeptical when Pilot arrived. I'd never seen a PDA worth the trouble of learning to use it. But the folks at U.S. Robotics took a minimalist approach and succeeded in producing a gadget that does a few things very well.
The key insight of the PalmPilot developers, which seems to have been lost on other hand-held developers, is that a PDA is not a replacement for a PC, but a supplement to it--a peripheral, if you will. The PalmPilot doesn't compete with a PC, it completes it. It competes with your day timer!

Because of its minimalist objectives, the PalmPilot is one of the most intuitive machines you will ever pick up. The handwriting recognition is really quite good; it takes only a few minutes to learn the abbreviated writing style (called Graffiti) that makes data entry so quick and error free. But more than that, almost everything you want to do besides data entry takes only one or two taps of the stylus, or a press of one of the four buttons below the screen.

PalmPilot
The PalmPilot pictured here is equipped with a portable light.

The integration with the PC or Mac is amazingly easy. Simply slip the PalmPilot into a cradle connected to the PC serial port (or with the Palm III, use the infrared port and skip the cradle entirely), press one button, and "hotsync" your data in seconds. Anything entered onto the PalmPilot is transferred to the PC; anything entered into the PalmPilot desktop is transferred to the PalmPilot--names, addresses and phone numbers, appointments, memos, new applications to be installed or removed--you name it. Conflicting information is reported in a hotsync log that is available when the process is done.

The PalmPilot's built-in applications (calendar, address book, memo pad, expense report and to do list) are only the beginning. There's an active developer community. The Everything PalmPilot CD that comes with David's book contains over 900 add-on programs--freeware, shareware and commercial demos. The pilotgear mailing list, which reports the latest offerings for download, reports fifteen or twenty new downloads a day.

Apart from its ease of use, one of the most amazing things about the PalmPilot is the compactness of its applications. When bloatware is the norm on PCs, it's truly amazing to see useful, functioning applications running in less than 10K of memory.

So what do I have stored on my PalmPilot?

All that fills up only 384K of the PalmPilot's 1M of memory! Without the books, I'd be under 150K.

Fishermen store tide tables; baseball fanatics store the schedules for their favorite teams; travelers store subway maps and other information resources for cities they are visiting. The amount and variety of information you can pack into this thing is truly amazing.

What's even more compelling is this: if you lose your daytimer, you may never be able to recover your contact list or reconstruct your calendar. But if you lose your PalmPilot, no big worry. Just buy a new one and restore all the data from the hotsynced PC or Mac!

Still, if all this is so easy, what's there to write about?

David's book does an amazing job of uncovering information that makes the PalmPilot even more powerful and easy to use--things as simple as that a "V" drawn backwards from the way Palm tells you to do it is recognized more reliably or as complex as how to reduce memory fragmentation caused by some third-party applications.

The book is packed with useful information on the standard applications, but it goes way beyond that in detailing (not just listing) the most useful add-ons. How to reprogram the PalmPilot buttons or change the volume or sound of the alarm. How to use your PalmPilot to read and send email. How to use it as a web browser. How to use it to store online books. How to make it an extension not just of your PC but of the vast resources of the Internet.

The PalmPilot is an incredible device, but buying one without buying David's book as well is like getting only half of what you paid for.

As I get more and more familiar with my PalmPilot, and use the book to extend its capabilities, I become convinced that it represents not just a neat little toy, but a major step forward. We'll all look back on the introduction of the PalmPilot as the real beginning of the next stage of computing, in which special purpose handhelds interface cleanly and easily with desktops and other fixed "ports" onto the global computing network.

Previous handhelds are equivalent to the CP/M machines that started off the PC revolution; despite David's analogy to the Mac market, the PalmPilot is probably more analogous to the IBM PC in creating a new platform that we'll be living on and extending for years to come.




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