Switching on a PalmPilot today is like opening a time capsule. Its beeps, gray, stylus-driven screen, and simple app grid are pure nostalgia. Yet this little organizer captured the essence of mobile computing long before iPhones and Androids existed.
Revisiting the PalmPilot
My PalmPilot is the Palm m105, which launched around 2001. It was only a budget, entry-level model, but it has held up incredibly well. Ironically, a more expensive device might not have survived more than two decades in a desk drawer, as it would have had a rechargeable battery. Mine takes two AAA cells and powers on instantly.
Turning it on, it's a real blast from the past, yet also strangely familiar because the software was so influential.
Andy Betts / How-To Geek
The device is very much of its time. There's a stylus in the housing on the back, and you have to use it to calibrate the display when you first switch it on. There's no Wi-Fi, so you also have to manually enter the time and date to complete the setup. Constant beeps greet every tap.
Yet when it's finally ready to use, what are you faced with? A home screen containing a grid of 12 app icons. It can seem hard to believe that this platform is where iOS and Android have their roots, but it's right there.
What Still Works (And What Doesn't)
PDAs started out as a digital replacement for the Filofax, so the default apps are all built around personal information management: address book, calendar, notes, memos, and to-do list, along with a calculator.
It was possible to install third-party apps onto a Palm, although you had to do it via a desktop computer, and I no longer have the HotSync cable to connect it up. If I had, I'd be relying on community projects like the Palm-Sync software to get it working.
A quick check on the archive site PalmDB reveals the kinds of apps I would have been using . There are titles in all sorts of categories, just as you'd expect from a modern app store: games ( including a port of Doom, of course ), productivity tools, media apps, and so on.
Andy Betts / How-To Geek
Text input happens using the Graffiti system, where you use the stylus to write on the dedicated panel below the screen. Graffiti uses shapes that are similar to but not exactly the same as the letters you're writing, so it takes some learning. There's a tiny onscreen QWERTY keyboard for those who couldn't master it.
In use, so much is familiar. You tap the Home button when you want to close an app; there's a global search option; an equivalent to the three-dot menu to access features; plus a dedicated settings section.
Andy Betts / How-To Geek
But without apps or the internet, a Palm is unsurprisingly limited in 2025. Technically, you could get internet access on this, not over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but through infrared, of all things. You could use it in conjunction with an IR receiver on a laptop to get what would have been an incredibly slow connection. More likely, the IR port would be useful for those times when you needed to beam your business card to a fellow Palm user.
An even bigger limitation was that these early Palms had no permanent storage but used volatile memory instead. When your batteries run out, you lose any data you haven't backed up.
How Palm Invented the Smartphone
Innovation and influence were visible right throughout Palm's history. It didn't just begin and end with the core Palm OS interface.
Around the same time as the m105 came out, a small company called Handspring was making the Palm-powered Treo series. These were some of the earliest smartphones . Palm bought the company in 2003 and continued developing the range, but the phones remained reliant on stylus input, and also acquired a BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard. If Palm had hit on the capacitive touchscreen tech that Apple would use only a few years later, the whole history of smartphones might have turned out differently.
And then in 2009, Palm OS was replaced by webOS on the Palm Pre smartphone. It was fantastic, and failed miserably. But it still left its mark. Its buttonless, card-based UI, where you would swipe left and right through your open apps and swipe up to close them, was lifted almost wholesale by both Android and iOS for their multitasking interfaces. Today, webOS is reduced to powering LG smart TVs .
I'd Totally Buy a New Palm Device
Palm is a great example of how a brand can totally dominate a market yet be gone just a few years later—in this case, squeezed by BlackBerry, then killed off by Apple. It's also one of my all-time favorite tech companies.
Palm was perhaps the closest thing to Steve Jobs' Apple, with a markedly different vision from what modern tech gives us. The devices delivered power and innovation without overcomplicating things. If a modern Palm device appeared tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate to buy one.
