Hacker News Reader

> Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize,

Graffiti was so easy to use that you would see people write with it on whiteboards.

This has always baffled me. Graffiti was generally less than 20 characters per minute for me and I was an early palmpilot adopter. Eventually better options came out resembling the smartphone keyboards we have today.

I never used a Newton but the Microsoft handwriting recognition was pretty good on the iPAQ. Maybe the Palm graffiti approach is ok for people who don't care about feedback and can edit tiny characters on a tiny device.

Graffiti was great to use, but felt like a step down because it required memorizing the input method whereas the Newton's promise was to have full handwriting recognition. Granted I was on as MP 1200 but I don't think the 2000 series improvements were enough.

The motivation for Graffiti was it could be recognized by a small microprocessor meaning the palm devices could be quite inexpensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com