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> There were even apps, but everything was lot more locked down and a lot more expensive.

And just plain... bad. The entire experience didn't have that "feel" that Apple turned into reality. It's comparable to today's AI landscape—the technology is pretty neat, but using it is a complete slog.

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I actually have pretty fond memories of PalmOS PDAs. The hardware was very nice, but they were held back by the resistive touchscreen and dependence on a stylus for input. I never used a Treo but it felt like this was Palm trying to copy BlackBerry by adding a physical keyboard.

Edit: There were also the limitations of that era that held devices back in general. WAP internet[1] was awful, but most mobile services were too slow for much else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

Nokias were very open. You had a terminal with apt-get.

The entire device was a regular Linux machine.

In general, they were not. You're probably thinking of the very niche and unsuccessful Maemo/MeeGo project - eg Nokia N900 - that were indeed Linux-based. But everything else smartphone-ish from Nokia before Lumia (Windows Phone) were Symbian, which predates Linux and has nothing to do with it.

I am of course referring to Maemo, as per my previous post.

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