Hi, I'm Fred, and I'm a handheld computer addict. (Hi, Fred!)
In high school, my friend Joe taught me how to program a pocket calculator. I think it was Texas Instruments, like the TI-55, or the Radio Shack clone; I remember it used assembly-style programming – sto 1 rcl 2 gto 5 gsb 7 rnd. I believe the memory was lost whenever the power was turned off, and about the best you could do was a random number guessing program. Which we did over and over again when we were bored in math class. 55 enter? Lower!
In college, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Actually made by Sharp, it had a single-line display, programmed in Basic, even had an external portable printer/plotter which I used to solve and print results for matrix multiplication problems for a game theory class. A few years ago I found it in a box and donated it to a guy that was starting a museum. I still have another one that seems to eat up batteries instantly, but that may be because I only fire it up every few years.
The HP100LX/HP200LX was a favorite of mine. DOS (even though I hated DOS!), database, word processor, Lotus 123 (interface hell, but still, a spreadsheet in my palm around 1990 was pretty cool). I mainly used it as a serial port diagnosis tool, with a serial cable and Reflections. I even used the modem to do dial up maintenance on customer sites from hotel rooms. What killed the 100LX was not switching to Unix; they could still be selling the thing as a UNIX terminal, even without a GUI. I still have one of these, too, that I'm this close to selling; let me know if you want it before it goes to ebay.
Loved the Newton, of course, several of them (100, 120, 2000, even an eMate). What an awesome device, which I argue was killed by one missing element – a USB port. (The original Newtons had a serial port; the 2000 had a screwy proprietary interconnect port that only was able to connect to the required interconnect port->serial adapter!) USB would have given the Newton easy connectivity for sync'ing, third party external keyboards, memory sticks, and any number of external devices (By the way, I just bought a USB key WIFI adapter, for $12. Lets you create your own 'ad hoc' wifi network. Open, of course.) It did have PCMCIA cards, and I guess you could get a USB one of those; I know I had a network card that worked swell. In the garage there's a whole box of Newton – 2000, development kit, CDs, leather case, keyboard, etc. etc. I really really need to get rid of it, but I just can't!
There was at least one developer release of a Unix-based palmtop, but without a keyboard and with only a serial port, it was pretty useless.
My phone is a Treo 650 because despite how juvenile I find the PalmOS, I can connect and sync it with my Mac (using Missing Sync); run Pocket Quicken to enter my cash transactions; play music (I don't even own an iPod. Okay, that's not true, I have an original 5GB that sits in a drawer); keep notes, surf the web – mainly used for googling the closest (whatever) or finding the answers to questions that pop up. I've had a lot of phones, too, and this admittedly isn't the best phone (the range isn't that great, and it's a little uncomfortable to talk on for long periods. I have programming books for Palm but I've never gotten that far into them.
I've become attached to the hp12c calculator, partly because I adore the perversity of RPN, partly because I used it to calculate mortgage payments while shopping unsuccessfully for houses. I even got an HP12c emulator for my Palm.
Which brings us to the latest. Ever look at Woot? It's a site where every day (sometimes several times a day) they sell discount electronic closeout stuff. The site's shtick is to have a clever or amusing story about each item. Today they're advertising a media player with a list of disclaimers: “40GB hard drive holds so many songs, mentally unstable users may become frustrated and bellicose when trying to decide what to listen to.” Stuff sells quickly so unless you jump on it, it'll be gone – sort of like the Home Shopping Network of electronica. Of course it's in my daily Firefox bookmarks (Damn you, “Open All in Tabs”!) Anyhow, the other day up popped the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, for $129. Nearly the same size as the HP12c, it's a full Debian Linux PC, with an awesome color screen, built-in Wifi, Bluetooth, Opera web browser, email, RSS reader, and easy-to-install Linux software (yes, that's a contradiction in terms, but it works!) No keyboard, but the bluetooth keyboard I never use with my Palm works fine with it. Runs VNC so I can connect to my home PC from anywhere I have a Wifi connection. Still won't replace my Treo as a carry-around web device (tho there's apparently a hack to defeat Verizon's cripplage and let the 770 use the internet connection from the Treo).
Then there's the iPhone. I really really wanted one of these, and the store near me had them in stock and no lines on “iDay”. What kills it for me is having to use AT&T. Not that I love Verizon – they're all spinoffs of the death star, after all. But everyone I know is on Verizon, so calls to them aren't included in my minutes. Plus they don't have the damned “rollover minutes” which I of course think of as “roll over and …. minutes” – could they make it more obvious that they're screwing you? That, and the fact that it isn't programmable. I'm sure I could create some cool webapps for it, this is after all what I know how to do. But somehow, without being able to actually program it…it's just a phone with a web browser. Maybe that's just rationalizing; what's true is it doesn't currently do as much as my Treo (tho what it does, it does a lot more elegantly!)