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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

Palm OS never got the respect it deserved IMO. I had a Palm device in 2003 which had a camera, app support, and audio/video playback. The Palm Treo line existed in 2002 too, and that added cellular connectivity to the mix. Apple gets a lot of credit for pulling the idea of a modern idea of a smartphone out of thin air, but if you look at the interface of even the earliest Palm devices almost a decade earlier, so much of it was right there.

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Granted, Apple’s Newton was there before Palm, too, and that work fed into the iPod and iPhone designs. I think it’s a great lesson in how some ideas need time to gel – in this case, you needed multiple generations of improvements on the hardware to get not only viable CPUs but also things like screens with accurate and responsive digitizers to make the UI feel right. PalmOS had some nice features but it was also an old design with unprotected memory so it crashed enough to be annoying and even when the mobile CPUs were ready the software was a huge undertaking.

On the social side, we also needed a big shift in usage. When the Palm or Newton designs were being made, wireless networking wasn’t common the way it is now and especially people weren’t used to using software the way we take for granted now. Email was a novelty for most people, business documents were exchanged physically, and mobile gaming was a kid’s pastime. The big thing which made the iPhone 1 so appealing was that everyone had spent the previous decade finding things they wanted to do on the web and then you could take that with you anywhere. People who were looking at the traditional PDA usage thought it’d fail since it didn’t have a Blackberry keyboard.

Apple doesn't deserve credit for inventing the smartphone the same way Palm doesn't deserve the credit for inventing the touch-based PDA, but both companies made products that hit the perfect spot - the Palm was much cheaper than the Newton and the Zoomer, aiming much lower, and proved to be just enough computer to carry around. The iPhone was far less capable than a Windows CE (or a Palm) phone back then, but was a joy to use (unlike its competition).

Agreed.

Apple does deserve credit for making the best device ever for beginners.

Apple is very good at making things for beginners who are not super technical.

Handspring documentary by the Verge had an interesting perspective on the matter: https://youtu.be/b9_Vh9h3Ohw?start=773

(I'm bad at cropping YouTube videos. The part in question is [12:53 - 14:30])

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