(upbeat music) - Welcome to In the News for August the 2nd, 2024.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com. - And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

Hey Brett. - Hey Jeff, special edition time. - Oh, I'm excited. - We usually love to go through your Friday In the News post on iPhoneJD, which I have been reading for many, many, many years.

And it's just always been a thrill for me to do this podcast with you.

But at least once a year or so, we like to do kind of a special edition.

And this one I'm very excited about. - Me too. - We came up with this idea.

Let's do a walkthrough mobile devices that you and I used leading up to the iPhone.

Now, the only kind of, I think the caveat we wanted to put on this is like, we didn't wanna go through all of the phones.

Like, I don't know, I'm sure you did the same, Jeff.

I had several like Motorola flip phones and different candy bar phones and stuff.

But really it was, well, you're going all the way back to '89, which we'll talk about in just a moment.

But it was like some of these like personal digital assistants, I guess, is more the best or better way to kind of put it.

PDAs, which I always say that, and my mom from her generation thinks of PDA as standing for something else other than personal digital assistant.

But PDAs is sort of this idea of like being able to have access to a lot of information more than just maybe your contacts, to make a phone call.

But I'm excited to kind of walk through this memory late a little bit, Jeff, and just to kind of see, because every time that we do something similar to this, it really just kind of highlights to me the evolution of the technology up to the iPhone.

And then of course, to see it today, so many years later. - Yeah, it really is fascinating.

We all love the iPhone.

It's such a powerful little computer in your pocket, but it wasn't the first.

I mean, the iPhone came, there were things before the iPhone.

You said not as emphasizing the phone side of it, but more of the little mini computer side of it.

And so if you look at the history of it, the phrase that you say that we'll often use is PDA.

PDA is actually a phrase that was, I don't know if you should say invented or popularized, I'm not sure, but one of the two, certainly popularized by Apple CEO, John Scully, in the 1990s.

He came out with the, he was in charge of Apple when they came out with the Newton and he came up with this idea, or at least popularized it, I love calling it a PDA, the personal digital assistant, but the Newton was not the first PDA.

The first PDA, depending upon how you want to describe it, really was in the 80s.

There was a company called Scion, P-S-I-O-N, and they had a number of devices over the years.

I remember that for a while, my brother used to use one that looked like a little mini computer, but they came up with something that you're showing on the screen right now, which was in the mid 80s.

And it was the very first idea of something that you would carry around and that you could store information in it.

So it almost looked like a calculator, but you could store other types of information, calendar entries and notes and things like that.

So that's where it sort of came.

But I mean, again, that first Scion thing that was not a big seller, it was a very small device, but it was in the late 80s that the idea of having something digital that you could store information with started to become popular.

I mean, I remember in the early 80s, there was some Casio watches that you could store some limited information in them and stuff.

But I was always looking for this 'cause I was always a technology geek.

I graduated from high school in 1987.

So I started college in '87.

And I wanted something to sort of keep track of my information, my little notes of information, my calendar, my contacts.

And I remember it was right around 1989.

So I was sort of a sophomore, junior in college when this category first started to become more popular.

In '89, there was a whole bunch of companies that came out with versions of these organizers.

And there were some of them that were a little bit more expensive.

For example, Sharp had one called the Sharp Wizard, which was around $300.

And I used to really, I was envious of the Sharp Wizard because it had lots of cool functions.

But for me on a college budget, given the value of a dollar at the time in the 1989, $300 was a little too rich for my blood.

So I never had that one.

Casio had a series called the Boss, which was the same idea.

Scion, of course, we just mentioned.

Scion had their organizers.

So those were sort of the higher end ones in the 1980s.

My very first organizer, I don't remember the name of it.

I know that it was sort of like a lower end Casio or Sharp or one of those sorts of things.

But it was a way that when I was in college, I could keep track of my upcoming appointments.

I could keep track of my phone numbers and stuff like that.

And I had a notes section that's, it's sort of akin to the notes app on the iPhone where I could just like jot down bits of information.

And I would carry this little device with me.

And it was really, I liked it.

I mean, it was incredibly primitive at the time.

But I got into the idea of having this digital device with me at all time that could have information.

The first one that I had that was really started to become what at the time I considered popular was a 1993 when I was in law school.

And Sharp came up with this product that was called the Y0310 that you're showing on the screen right now.

We should mention by the way that I know this is an audio podcast, but if you're ever gonna look at the YouTube video of this podcast, this is a good episode to do it because Brett is, as I'm talking and Brett's gonna do the same when he's talking, we're bringing up all of these images of these things from the past that, the picture's worth a thousand words.

You almost wanna look at these things to really see what we're talking about.

But the Sharp devices, there was a couple of models.

I remember using this Y0310 because it had 64K of memory, which to me just seemed like more memory than I would ever possibly need.

And it had all the basic functions.

It had, it was sort of a clamshell design.

So you would open it up and it was almost like a mini laptop.

So the top part would have just a couple screen, a couple lines of an LCD display and the bottom part would have a little chicklet keyboard.

And, but it was, it allowed me to type things in there.

And again, I used to use it for the calendar, contacts, notes, a calculator.

This one was cool because it was one of the first, it was the first one that I ever used that it had a way, it wasn't just self-contained.

So you weren't just putting stuff in there to never get it out.

But it actually had a link on the left side of it.

You could see it actually written on the side there, a computer link that you could connect a proprietary cord and connect it to your computer just as a backup.

And so the idea is that my information wasn't locked forever on the organizer.

It was on my computer.

And I knew at the time that that meant that in the future, when I upgraded to whatever, you know, the next late great, the next great model, I'd be able to transfer information from one device to another, which was really, really nice.

And so that was the first device that I used.

And it was also right around this time period in the 1990s when Apple came out with its Newton, which was very expensive and, you know, it had the stylus and all that sort of stuff.

And, you know, Newton tried to have an interface where you used a stylus to write things on it.

And for that interface to work well, it would have to understand each of your letters as you wrote them.

And of course they were lampooned in the beginning by the infamous Simpsons episode where somebody says something like, you know, I remember the joke was Nelson writes something that was supposed to be go to the store and it said it changed it to like eat up Martha or something that made no sense.

But the idea is that the character recognition was not very accurate in those early models.

But the Newton was a pretty revolutionary device.

It was bigger than what I wanted 'cause it couldn't fit in your pocket.

But it was this early idea of a really powerful little personal assistant that you could carry around and do stuff with you.

I stayed on the small side though.

So I liked that sharp device that I was using was something really, really small.

And then the big change for me was in 1990, the late 1990s when Palm came up with its devices.

And let me just talk about this for a second.

So Palm was just such a revolutionary company at the time.

One of the founders was, what is his name?

Jeff, I'm blanking on his last name. - Yeah, me too, I'll find it.

But Jeff is right. - It'll come up in a second.

But he had this idea of, he wanted to have a device that he could carry with him.

And he's like, "I know that I often have shirts "as I'm wearing right now that have a pocket."

And so he said, Jeff Hawkins, I think it is.

He says, "I want to," he went into his little workshop and he carved a piece of wood that was just a piece of wood.

And he carved all sorts of different sizes.

And he would just carry around these pieces of wood in his pocket until he found the size that was big enough without being too big.

And so then he said, "Okay, so this is the aim.

"We need something that's the size of this piece of wood."

And then they went to start developing.

And they ultimately came up with something that was called the Palm Pilot, which was this personal organizer.

It much like the Newton, it had a stylus, but unlike the Newton, it used a special vocabulary that was called graffiti.

So that for example, in order to make certain letters, like to make the letter A, you would just go up and come down and then that would make an A.

The keystrokes were very similar to what you, not the keystrokes, the brushstrokes were similar to an actual letter in the English alphabet, but were just unique enough that it made it much easier for the device to understand what you were doing.

So you're showing on your screen right now some of the prototypes that he did.

They came out with the Palm Pilot.

The company sort of ran out of money and had to be purchased by US Robotics to even be able to come to production with this stuff.

But eventually it came to market.

And when the first Palm Pilot came to market in the late '90s, it was revolutionary because it was so easy to carry, but it could do so much.

It had a nice screen.

It was easy to put input in, relatively easy, because of the stylus and the graffiti system.

And it synced to a computer.

And it's like, wow, this is really cool.

I did not get the very first generation.

The first one that I got was the Palm III, which you're showing right now.

I said US Robotics, it was, well, this says 3Com, but US Robotics was involved at some point too.

I forget how that all worked, but regardless.

Anyway, but the Palm III was the first one I had, which was just sort of a subsequent generation of it.

And it was nice.

It had all these, it was the, nobody used the word app at the time.

That was a term that would become popularized much later by Steve Jobs.

But it had what today we would call apps.

There would be an app for the calendar and an app for the notes.

Plus the Palm was the first device that I used.

Now the Newton did this earlier, but it was the first device that I used that you could have third-party apps installed.

And so I would go to a computer store and you would buy a box off the shelf of some app and you would install it on your phone.

And it was really, really useful.

And I used it, I mean, it was a perfect, it was just a really perfect ancillary to my law practice that I put all this information in it.

And it got to the point where I was using this enough.

I mean, I got it in 1998, but by the year 2000, I was actually using the Palm enough that I started to talk with other lawyers and there were articles written about, is this gonna affect the law practice and stuff?

And in fact, I had sent you, Brad, if you can find it.

I had done a presentation for lawyers in the year 2000 about using a Palm in your law practice.

At this point, I had moved on to the Palm 3C, which was just a color version of the Palm 3 that I have.

And I did this whole presentation on how lawyers and really any professional would use a Palm, not to replace your computer, but just as sort of a portable version that you could carry around with you.

And one of the nice things about the Palm is that it's synced to the computer.

So much like that old Sharp advisor, but that was important because at the time there was no wifi, there was no built-in internet, there was no phone connection.

And so the only way for you to get new information on there is you would sync it to the computer, everything that you had typed into it would be backed up, but then any new information that the computer would download would be synced back over to it.

And so you could also like update like a contact entry in your computer.

I mean, it had like this little cradle that you would connect to your computer so you could stick it in the cradle. - Hot sync. - You could press a button to sync it.

We'd also charge it at the same time.

They also had like external keyboards that you could use for it as well.

There was one that Palm made, which sort of folded up.

And I remember times when I would travel for work that I had my Palm device and I had my little fold-up keyboard, which was both so tiny I could stick them in a pocket.

And then I really had everything I needed.

So like I would go take a plane ride as a lawyer to go do like a deposition or something.

And on the way back, just right there on my tray, on the plane, I would open up my keyboard, I would stick my Palm device in there, and I would type up my summary of the deposition.

And then by the time the plane ride was over, I had already drafted my client report.

And you know, these are the days before, yes, we had some portable computers at the time for sure, 'cause those came out in the nineties, but they were so much bigger and this was so tiny and light and I could fit it in my pocket.

I just thought it was the bee's knees to have all of this cool technology with the Palm and third-party apps.

I'm actually, one other thing about the Palm that I used to love is that I could take documents on my computer, like a Microsoft Word document, and I could actually move them over to the Palm using software from a company called DataVis, where you would be able to, it would, it's like, it wasn't Microsoft Word for the Palm, but it was a program that would basically understand how to read Word documents and put them into a text-only format so that you could actually read documents.

So I could take documents with me along the way.

It was really revolutionary and it was a big part of my practice.

I loved using the Palm and I felt like for me, and this is the same way I think of my iPhone today, I often call my iPhone like my external brain.

My brain does not remember everything in life, but the things that I don't remember, they're in my phone.

And so if I need to find a phone number for somebody, if I need to find a note from a couple of years ago, whatever it is I need, I may not know it in my brain, but it's on my iPhone, but it all goes back to the Palm.

I mean, it all goes back even earlier to my Sharp device, but really with the Palm, that's when I was putting all of my important information in there, whether it related to my personal life or my business life.

Oh, loved it so much.

So that brings me up to the year 2000.

And so where were you in the year 2000? - I remember, so from my standpoint, it's weird how it kind of goes with like your educational aspect.

I was in law school, '97 to 2000.

So I remember in law school, like I wasn't having, I mean, I couldn't afford anything on this aspect, but for me at least, I carried my laptop everywhere that I went.

And that was just, we were only studying and not really doing a whole lot else on some of that.

And I didn't need anything else.

But I remember my first job, I get out at a law firm and I specifically remember this 'cause I'm like, okay, now I want to do something.

And I've been watching this whole Palm trajectory.

Like I knew that they were the beast.

I knew that this was the big deal, but all of these screenshots, which by the way, this presentation is fantastic to kind of walk through.

And I guess we could even provide the link for folks too, Jeff, to see if they wanted to go through and see it on here.

But I mean, just to see it, the main thing that maybe would jump out at you is that this was only a black and white screen or not even black and white.

It was just that greenish screen so that there wasn't any color, even though you've got a couple of slides in here. - Yeah, so I did, eventually the Palm 3C was in color, but yet the early models were just black and white, yeah. - But the reason I'm bringing that up is at the time I knew like, okay, I want to get something that is a little more what I would like to see from a color standpoint.

And maybe it was just as simple as the color standpoint.

Well, at the same time that this was going on, Windows, Microsoft was also building up a little bit on the mobile side.

Like they knew that this was coming around.

They'd watched Apple, they'd watched Palm.

And then there was a couple of other, you know, Blackberry and some of the other companies that were up and coming in this area.

And so they started working with other companies, right?

Because at the time, Microsoft didn't release a Microsoft product.

There was a few kind of in there, but just like they have Windows that can run on a compact or HP or whatever else, they were providing what at the time they called Pocket PC or used to be called Windows CE.

I can't remember exactly what CE, but Pocket PC was I thought this cute phrase that they were using was the idea like, can we basically put Windows, a Windows operating system into a mobile device?

And one of the, no, there was a few that came out, but the one that I landed on was Casio.

I called it my Casio Pia, but the actual model number was EM500, the Casio EM500 Pocket PC.

This is a review from October, 2000 from Julie at the gadgeteer.com website, which is great.

But it was running a Windows CE version 3.0.

It had 16 megabytes of RAM.

Now we're talking about 16 gigs of RAM, right?

In the phones today, Jeff.

But I just remember it had a multimedia slot.

It had a stereo headphone jack.

It was a little bigger and thicker than some of the Palm devices, but here I'll get down to some of the screenshots that Julie put into this review here.

It was just fascinating.

Like I look like I was looking at a calendar like on my computer.

I mean, just to be, see it now by today's standards, this looks absolutely horrendous.

But at the time it was like, what?

Like I have a full contact card right there on my phone.

And I remember even at the time, like you can even see sort of the idea of the apps.

I had an internet explorer.

Like there was a web browser built into that.

And now again, today we take that for granted.

We were just, we've been talking about that.

But at the time, this was amazing.

And look, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel.

Like I wanted that same idea that you were just talking about, Jeff, was the idea like I wanted to be able to work on Word documents on a mobile device, but I didn't wanna have to like use a separate program and kind of, you know, go back and forth.

I wanted something that would actually let me work on a Pocket Word version of this.

Pocket Outlook, it had a voice recorder on it.

This wasn't the best, but I was, I gotta say from all intents and purposes, it was something that, I mean, at that point, I knew this was the future, right?

Just like you, Jeff.

I started carrying this everywhere.

It's a little too thick to put in your shirt pocket unless you wanted it to kind of fall off, but it was absolutely fantastic.

Now, again, it did have the capability.

I think it may have had, I don't even know if it had wifi.

Like I remember at the times, even if it did have wifi, which I don't think that it did, by the way.

Let me see if I had it up here. - I don't think it did either at the time, yeah. - Yeah, I don't think it did, but what I would do is I would take, I remember specifically, I would take like archives of websites, Jeff, like I would download an archive on a computer, transfer it over to my Cassiopeia so I could surf the web like on the Cassiopeia as I was walking around.

Like that's how desperate I was that I wanted to look around on some of that.

But anyway, in 2000, that's where I was.

Like it took me a while to catch up to this.

I wasn't into like the sharps or, I knew that the Palm was just kicking off the ground, but in my mind, at least I was like, well, the Windows side, that's gonna be a little bit more successful.

First of all, it's Microsoft.

Second of all, I'm already using a Windows computer, right?

And I wanted to continue on that trajectory.

So that's where I was in the early 2000. - The two things you mentioned there I wanna follow up on, one is platforms and then one is connectivity.

On platforms, nowadays we talk about iPhone versus Android.

You know, way back in the day in the 80s, it was, you know, Mac versus PC.

But at this point in time in mobile, it was really, there was a ton of players, but one of the big ones was Palm and then another big one was Microsoft.

You called it the Windows CE.

I think the CE stood for compact edition.

Sometimes people that were Palm, people that were very in the Palm platform, would in a derogatory fashion referred to Windows CE as Wince, W-A-N-C-E, because it would make you wince to have that Windows interface on something as beautiful as a screen.

But regardless, you know, of the silly little things at the time, there was definitely some things Windows had well, because it owned things like Word and could use it in there.

But in terms of connectivity, see at the time these devices, they just, they didn't have an ability to have like a cell phone inside of them.

That technology just wasn't there.

And wifi was at that point only available on some computers.

It wasn't available here.

And so for my Palm device, if I wanted it to update information from the internet, I would have to go to my computer, sync it.

And I actually had a program on my Palm, which was like a news program.

And that every time I put it in the cradle and press the button to sync, it would download headlines.

And so then throughout the day, I could actually look at my Palm and I could see the headlines, but they were only the news headlines as of the last time that I actually synced to my computer.

As an alternative, there were some ways, and they were a little hacky at the time, that you could connect a Palm to a cell phone.

Like I remember I had like a Sony Ericsson cell phone at the time that there was a way that I could connect it to the phone and I could get it to sync data.

And it was very, very, some incredibly slow, horribly slow at the time.

And you would never download anything like a, I mean, there was no internet browsers that you would download web pages.

It would just be the text on a website that you would download.

But those early days of connectivity were there.

So at the time, because PDAs weren't really great with connectivity, it opened up the idea to another kind of device, a device that did have connectivity that was on 24/7.

And this was the beginning of really, the first big player in this category was of course, BlackBerry.

BlackBerry came out originally in the late 1990s.

In fact, there's a movie that came out a year or two ago called BlackBerry, which is not 100% factual, but it is a fun movie.

I do recommend watching it.

I watched it a couple of months ago.

It's a fun movie that talks about the early days of the BlackBerry all the way through the introduction to the iPhone, definitely worth watching.

But they were the first person, Research in Motion was the company up in Canada, and they came up with this device that would be able to sync your email using the cell phone carriers so that if you carried around the BlackBerry device, if somebody sent you an email, you would be able to read it and respond to it in real time no matter where you were.

This concept is so, I mean, today, we don't even think twice about it, but at the time it was revolutionary, especially for business people, the idea that you could get your business done 24/7.

I mean, as a lawyer, gosh, I remember being in seminars in the early 2000s, Brett, where people would say like, "Is this good or bad?"

Because if your clients can reach you 24 hours a day, they're gonna demand you to be on call 24 hours a day, and to a certain degree, that ship is long sailed by now.

But it was so nice to be able to have your messages with you.

So BlackBerry was definitely one of the leaders, and they had their BlackBerry, and I had one of the first BlackBerrys I had was the one that you're showing right there, the BlackBerry 857, where it had the nice little chiclet keyboard at the bottom.

You could read your messages, stuff like that.

At the same time, there were also some competitors to BlackBerry that came out, and one of them that we used to use at our firm in addition to the BlackBerry was a company called Good Technology, and they had something called the Good G100, which was a little bitty, and again, it was just their version of something very similar to a BlackBerry, and I used the G100 for a while 'cause I thought it was sort of a cool little device.

So I would basically have these two devices with me.

My Palm was what I would be using for calendar, and contacts, and notes, and information that was a little bit more static.

I could change it if I wanted to, but then for the real-time communications of email, and they also had some very limited version of text messaging at the time on the BlackBerry.

That's what I would use the BlackBerry and the Good for and use those devices.

So at the same time that this is happening, these small devices are slowly, slowly starting to gain the idea of connectivity and devices, and we talked about the different platforms.

One of the things that Palm decided to do was to open up the platform and to allow third parties to be sort of using the Palm platform, which is one of the things that led to a company called Handspring, which was very noteworthy, and I think I remember you, so did you actually have a Handspring, or did you use a Handspring device back in the day? - I did, so I wanna talk just quickly on the G100, because I actually had it too, and I remember at the time I was at a law firm where I was working on the mobile technology side for the lawyers, and we were even looking at the BlackBerry side, and I just wanted to point out, I remember specifically that this G100, it was a little faster, they were experimenting.

If you remember this little click wheel that was-- - Oh, I love that wheel, yeah. - I know, people love the wheel.

People like that a little bit.

It seemed like that Good worked just a little bit better, synchronizing with even Microsoft Outlook.

In other words, I remember specifically the fact that you could delete an email on one device, and then it would be deleted on your computer when you got back.

Just a lot of that kind of stuff was, again, just kind of foreign to the things that we were doing at the time, but Good technology was just, I think it was now it's owned by Motorola, but at the time it was just something that was so amazing, like I said, bi-directional synchronization with Microsoft Outlook.

We were already using that, right?

Yeah, and you didn't have to have the desktop software or the cradle, and the fact that it could work, Good technology would not just support the G100, but some of those other devices that we're gonna talk about here in a little bit too, but I just wanted to underscore that G100, that Good technology.

I mean, they're still around today in some form or fashion, but that was a big milestone for sure. - So let me mention that real quick.

A Good company started with their hardware devices.

They did not last very long, even though the G100 was a great device.

They eventually became a software only company, and they would, one of the things that made my Palm so powerful is that as I moved to, and we're gonna get to the Palm 650 in a second, but as Palms gained the ability to be interactive, you would be able to install a Good app, the Good software app on your Palm to actually get basically the same type of BlackBerry features of email on a device.

Fast forward in time, you said that Good was purchased by Motorola.

I actually think if I remember correctly, Brett, check me on this, I think Good was eventually purchased by BlackBerry, which was sort of the ultimate irony of, and this is long after the days that BlackBerry had sort of become far less relevant than it did, because I remember that headline years and years ago when I thought to myself, if you had told me that BlackBerry and Good would be in the same company back in the early 2000s when they were such fierce competitors, I would have been so surprised.

But anyway, I've jumped ahead a little bit, but that's sort of jumping to the end of Good.

So that was the G100.

I love that you're bringing up an old presentation that you did when you were at Thompson Hein way back when, that's just so funny. - I was, I know.

And this was a presentation in 2004, but actually I remember we were implementing G100 even in 2002, 2003.

That's at least for my firm and several other firms, 'cause people, I remember going to this conference and people were just so interested to hear a little bit more about what is it that you're doing.

Now, at this point in time in 2002, I'm gonna, it's not really cheap, but I was also doing some writing columns for an old magazine called Law Office Computing Magazine, Jeff. - Oh yeah, I remember that. - And I was also doing some reviews for the local newspaper here in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer.

And because of that, because I knew this was such a hot topic even in those early 2000s, I was able to get access to a lot of these different devices.

So some of these I would use for, two or three months at a time while I was reviewing it.

And then others, sometimes I would keep them or sometimes I would just go out and buy it because it was so good.

One of the first in 2002 that I was using is this Handspring.

This was the Visor Pro is what this one is.

So, Handspring, as you were talking about, sort of like, I mean, I guess a competitor to Palm at the time.

I mean, they were trying to come up with, they were running Palm operating systems, I believe, but they were designing it a little bit differently.

Like you said, you were referencing some of that.

And I just remembered that this Visor Pro was interesting to me.

Still a monochrome screen.

Here, I think I actually have, let me see what I said on this.

I can't remember what company that this was for.

I said, in 2000, this was 2002, reviewing PDAs or handhelds always gets a little dicey because almost everyone has picked a side to what you were talking about earlier, Jeff.

You either go with a Palm OS or Microsoft's Pocket PC.

And so I said, if you wanna go simple, go with a Palm.

But if you're looking for a mini computer to play games and play music files and a little bit more, then spend a little bit more for the Pocket PC.

That's what I said way back in the day.

But we were just really seeing a plethora of kind of these different, not just from Handspring, but just at this point, it was really starting to take off.

Like everybody wanted to have some kind of a handheld, computing device that they were gonna be able to take around with them.

And this Handspring Visor Pro was one of the first that was coming up.

Another one just quickly, I'll say, and around 2002 was, I was also reviewing a Palm device.

This is the i7-05.

And again, these were just sort of incremental improvements.

I think a lot of this also had a cradle.

Obviously all of these had stylists.

At the time, they all still had hardware buttons that they were doing, that they were incorporating.

Here, I think is another review that I did on the i7-05.

Let me see what I said here.

I said, "We already have some PDA cell phone combos, but they weren't very good.

Some BlackBerry type devices."

And I said, "Somewhere in the middle comes the Palms i7-05 handheld."

And I said, I was pretty fond of it at the time, but the wireless network, they were starting to use wireless networks for this, but they called them for email and for quote, "Web clippings."

So I said, right there, I said, "It's too slow to do any serious work."

But that was when the writing was just starting to be on the wall.

Like you said, Jeff, we'd already had the BlackBerry idea.

We had the idea of G100 getting access to your mail.

Like, it would be great.

Could we just surf the web then at that point?

And boy, it took a while for that to come on board.

But as we started to see in these early 2000s, that's when it started.

Sounds like you also did some Palm devices during that time as well. - So there was lots of variety during this period of time.

You know, on the one hand, Palm itself was coming up with lots of different types of devices.

There was sort of a slimmer version of the Palm called the Palm 5, which was incredibly popular because it was so sleek.

My wife had one of those.

There was, you know, bigger ones.

Eventually there was something called the Palm Tungsten, which was a little bit more high-end.

It had some high-end features.

And then, although most of the Palms did not have the interactivity features, there was some of them, like you just mentioned, the Palm 7 line, including the 705, which did actually work with a very simplistic cellular network to transmit very slowly information.

And I never got one of those at the time because, first of all, you have to pay for the cell phone service every month.

And second of all, it was so slow that I just didn't think it was worth it because I could just sync to my phone at the time.

But it was a neat thing.

It was neat to see the variety.

And Spring, by the way, you mentioned the Handspring company.

If I remember correctly, it was actually founded by some of the original Palm designers, Palm founders that went over there.

And they were coming up with their own versions of a Palm using the same Palm operating system, but doing some interesting hardware features.

One of the things that some of those initial Handspring visors would do is they had an expansion pack on the side that you could plug in different things, like, for example, a cellular connectivity thing or some other little hardware devices, a camera and other things like that.

But there was a lot of variety.

People were very much trying to figure out what do people want, both on the Pocket PC side and the Windows CE side, and also on the Palm side, there was just all this variety coming out of different devices.

For me, the next real watershed moment was when Palm came out with the Palm Treo line.

And so let me mention, Handspring itself came up with something called the Handspring Treo, and then Palm purchased Handspring, which was the reunification of some of those companies.

And so then Palm and Handspring were together.

And the Treo 650, which came out in 2004, was to me a truly revolutionary device.

And in fact, I have one here in my desk.

Sometimes I've showed it in this podcast many times in the past, that it was the first time that Palm integrated a cell phone in a way that really worked well.

So it was a good cell phone that you could use for all of your telephone.

You can use it as a true blue cell phone, worked great.

But in addition, it took advantage of that cell phone connectivity to have true data in the phone.

So it was no longer necessary for me to carry a Palm device and a BlackBerry, or a Palm device and a good G100, but I could just have that Palm Treo 650 and everything was in one device.

And at this point, we've long since passed the point of color screens.

Now there were even better color screens with even better backlighting.

There were so many apps that were available for it.

You could use it now that you have the connectivity, you could download them over the internet.

They were more expensive than iPhone apps tend to be at the time, 'cause they're more limited.

But I mean, this is, if I, you know, give what the iPhone is now, and certainly was when it came out, the Palm Treo was certainly, you know, one step behind it, not quite as advanced as the iPhone, but, you know, it was truly getting almost there.

And you can absolutely see a lot of the innovations that were shown off in the Treo 650 that directly led to the iPhone.

I got a Palm Treo in 2004, and I used it for many, many years.

And it was the last thing that I used before the iPhone, before I got the iPhone.

So while I was using the Palm Treo 650, what were you using? - Yeah, you know, no doubt about the 650 to me, that was the biggest.

I think when that started getting into the hands of people, Jeff, there you go, you got yours still.

I think I still have mine somewhere as well, because it was such an amazing device. - Yeah, the hands are nice. - Yeah, I mean, it was a little chunky, certainly by today's standards. - By today's standards, yeah. - Yeah, you had access to the, still a hardware keyboard, which a lot of people still bemoan the fact that that's, you know, gone.

You had some of those fast track, you know, shortcut buttons, if you will, there at the top.

You had the ability, it had the antenna, and of course the stylus, you had the antenna.

I mean, this to me was the vision of where this was going to go.

Now, just quickly, this is in 2004, like you said.

I remember I received a Treo 600.

Now that was really quite right at the end of 2003.

And I think quickly that Handspring, or Palm at the time, or Palm One, that they realized, hey, we need to make some improvements.

Like this is a huge leap on there.

And in fact, here, I think I even, this is an article I wrote for the Plain Dealer at the time.

And I said on the 600, this was in December, 2003, "My quest for the perfect PDA phone combo is over.

In one tightly integrated package, the new Handspring at the time, Treo 600, has effectively replaced three of my old devices, my cell phone, my text pager, and my old Palm personal digital assistant." - There you go, that's it, yeah. - That's what I said in 2003, December, 2003, Jeff, because it was such a watershed moment.

And then I think it was just a few months later that the 650 came out.

The screen was so much improved.

Just the fact that they, I think it was so much more streamlined in the sense of like being able to have cell access.

The calls sounded great.

I just remember like that was even such a big deal.

Like that was the fact, I could make a phone call wherever I am.

Obviously we had some of these phones, but then I can also look down at it and I can get access to information.

And I remember the web browser was so molasses slow.

It was so terrible. - It was so slow, oh my goodness. - I loved it.

Like I embraced it because I had the fact that I could just get access to it at any time.

I remember I always used to use it with a headset.

Like there was a wired headset 'cause I would always want to be able to look at something when I was talking with somebody on the screen.

And I just, I remember so fondly sitting there always with the Treo 650 in my hand and just surfing around.

And it worked on that good technology service as well, by the way.

And so we were able to use that backend for the good technology to be able to access everything on the Treo 600 or the 650 as it were.

And of course it was still so slow.

This even had a Bluetooth capacity in it, but it was working on like the edge networks, which was just a little crazy, but it was still around.

It says it lasted until 2008.

So the Treo 650, there's a lot, whenever I show this on a presentation, Jeff, everybody is always like, oh yeah.

Like so many people had the Treo 650.

It was really a watershed moment in what we're talking about here.

And that's exactly the same for me.

I use this as my primary device until I got my iPhone. - One of the things that made me sad is, I remember I was living in New York City.

I was there for about eight months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

So in late 2005 and 2006.

And I, at the time there were very, very heavy rumors that Apple was working on a phone.

And nothing had been announced yet because I guess the iPhone itself came out in 2007, was announced in what I think January of 2007, I forget.

But- - That's right. - So nothing official had been announced yet, but everybody knew that Apple was working on something.

And so I was in New York City and I was in a cab and I jumped out of my cab and somehow my Treo was in my coat pocket and it slipped out and I left it in the cab and I never, never got it again.

And I'm like, okay, first of all, this was devastating 'cause I love my Treo 650.

But second of all, even though I had loved it and used it for so many years, I knew that Apple was so close.

Now, it turned out it was a couple of years away from me, but at the time I thought it might be months away, months away that I'd be getting some sort of an Apple phone.

And, but they didn't have anything available.

And so I had to go buy another Treo 650.

And at the time that I bought it, I remember thinking, 'cause this was in like early 2006, I remember thinking, am I gonna buy this new Treo and use it for like a month?

And then Apple's gonna come out with whatever their device is.

And of course it turned out it was another two years before I bought something.

But fortunately, once I got the new device, I was able to use that syncing technology to get all of my information back on it again and stuff.

And I laugh because information that is on my, there are some things on my iPhone today, which came from my Treo, which came from my early Palm, which some of it even dates all the way back to that original Sharp organizer that I was using in the early 1990s, because I've just synced it over time.

And it's sort of come across over time and stuff like that.

You know, before we end up, you go ahead next. - Well, I was just gonna say a couple of other things I just wanted to point out leading up into the iPhone. - This is what I wanted to ask you about.

Yeah. - Yeah, seeing some of the writing on the wall on this.

First of all, you know, I had that Cassiopeia, the pocket PC that was still going on.

Now it wasn't quite as amazing, I think it's what the 650, but another one of these pocket PCs that I had was from Dell of all places.

So this was in 2004, they had the Dell AXIM, A-X-I-M, X30.

And this was a big deal for me because again, it wasn't something that I used as my daily driver because at this point, the 650 was the only thing pretty much that I was going with.

And this had wifi on it, but again, it was very, very slow.

And I already see the writing on the wall with the 650 on there.

But I just, I said like, this was amazing to me that Dell was even delving into this aspect of going into the pocket PC.

It's a mighty impressive follow-up.

Now it was just a handheld on that, but that was interesting because again, Windows was still offering that Windows CE for a long time.

And the last thing quickly I wanted to talk about before we get into even the iPhone is like the year before 2006, we talk about the Palm Trio 650, of course running the Palm operating system.

But this is how crazy it was.

There was a Trio 700. - This is crazy. - There was a Trio 700W, which was basically a 650 if nothing else.

I guess I think there's probably a picture of it down here. - Very similar, yeah, yeah. - But it was very similar, but instead of running the Palm operating system, it was running a version of Windows CE.

At the time it was called Windows Mobile 5.0.

So I just want people to get into that headspace.

This is 2006, right before, it's actually was released at the end of 2005, right before Apple was getting, but this was the world that Steve Jobs was observing.

And we know from some of the history now, Jeff, that even over these years, there were several people in very secret dark corners of Apple that were studying this, and watching exactly what was going on.

But I just wanted to mention that little brief blip that people so often miss, that there was a Palm Trio 700 running a Windows Mobile operating system.

I never had it, 'cause at that time, similar to what you were talking about, Jeff, we knew that Apple was working on something, and we were kind of all waiting on the edge there for what that was coming up.

But it's just interesting to me that something like that was even happening.

Like that was almost unbelievable.

That there was, here's a, this is the 700. - Yeah, it looks exactly like a 650, yeah. - Exactly, exactly.

But this was running on the Sprint network.

I remember the time I was using Sprint myself, by Palm.

Anyway, just wanted to make that, to me, all of those things coming together was what was setting the stage, literally, for January 2007, when Steve Jobs was gonna take it and introduce the original iPhone. - When there was a version of Palm that ran Windows CE, or whatever it was called at the time, I just thought that that was crazy pants.

And frankly, I think, I almost think it was a mistake.

I mean, I think it's sort of evidence is that Palm, although it had some amazing technology, and the stuff that they came out with in the late 1990s, was just unbelievable.

And it was such a strong company for so long.

Palm had such problems at the executive level.

The company kept getting purchased by other companies.

People were leaving.

And all of these smart engineers had great ideas.

It needed a leader like a Steve Jobs to really pull it all together.

And they sort of lost their way.

They could have been, I mean, I can imagine an alternate world in which, Brett, you and I are in the year 2024, staunch advocates of Palm devices.

That could have happened. - True, you're right. - But it didn't. - You're right. - Because of all the problems with the technology and the corporate side and everything else, Palm sort of lost its way.

Other companies did too.

And so, I mean, let's just talk a tiny bit about the beginning of the iPhone.

The original iPhone is announced in January of 2007.

Steve has what is, of all the Steve Jobs keynote announcements that he did over the years, this, I think, was perhaps his best.

If I will still go back every once in a while and rewatch the five minutes where he introduced the iPhone, he was a master showman.

He was, he's just, nobody was better than Steve when it came to introducing a new product.

No product was more interesting than the iPhone.

And of course, that first generation iPhone was so limited in so many ways.

I mean, it used, as you mentioned before, that edge network.

This was before the early version of cellular data, that was so ridiculously slow.

It was like turtles were moving your data back and forth.

It had lots of other problems too.

It did not have third-party apps.

It was missing a million different things.

It was relatively slow, so much so that they even came up with a new thing that if you were scrolling a webpage faster than the webpage could be rendered on the screen, they would show this checkered grid so that you could just at least see a checkered grid moving and have an indication that you were scrolling.

But at the same time, it was revolutionary.

I mean, one of the big things at the time was that they had the idea that, why do you need to have half of the face of your phone taken up by this keyboard?

Let's have the entire face of the phone be a writing area.

We'll bring up a software keyboard when you need it, but we'll put it away when you don't need it and you have so much more space on the screen.

And at the time, people that use BlackBerry were like, oh, I would never wanna give up my keyboard, never.

But of course, over time, everybody realized that that was ridiculous and the writing was on the wall for BlackBerry and that company.

You know, that's the end of the BlackBerry movie if you watch it, is when the iPhone comes out and they're like, oh my goodness, what are we gonna do?

And so at that time, the iPhone was, it had so many great ideas, it was so revolutionary that companies like BlackBerry and Palm started justifiably to worry about what is our future gonna be.

So that was the first version, was an '07.

I did not have the very first iPhone version.

You did though, right?

You got the first generation iPhone. - I did.

So, we talked about this 2007.

It was January 9th, 2007, when Steve Jobs took the stage.

And one of the pictures that just burned in my mind from that presentation, Jeff, to your point, was I remember how he introduced this.

He's like, what if you could have an iPod, a phone, and internet in your hand?

And he did it like three times.

He's like, iPod, phone, internet.

And if you watch the video, it's like he just gets everybody hyped up so much and then he drops the bomb, the iPhone.

And it's all three of those things, which is weird because the iPod was like a device.

We all had iPods.

The phone was like a service.

And the internet was like, that's something that you do on a computer.

And it was weird.

I felt like how he did that, but it was like you said, masterful in the way he did that.

But that was in January, 2007.

The phone was not actually available until June of that year.

June 29th, 2007.

So I remember at the time, and I know you had to be watching as well.

It's like, okay, is this something I'm gonna do?

'Cause it was like, I think the original price was 499.

It was $500, which at the time was like, wow, like that's incredible that you would charge something that much for the phone.

But like you said, it was different.

We were wondering, was it going to work?

I mean, now we've seen, like I said, from the history, like it was just kind of held together by duct tape at the time, right?

When Steve Jobs was even announcing it.

And it's amazing that it did.

I remember the other thing specifically too, Jeff, if you, as well, most, I didn't use AT&T for any of those other devices.

I was either, most of the time I was Sprint and Verizon.

But I remember there was a big announcement.

I don't know if it was in January, maybe it was, that it was only gonna be available on AT&T, right?

And so that was a big deal, like 'cause I'd never done AT&T.

I was always gonna be Sprint, I was gonna be Verizon.

And at the time it was like, well, wait a minute, I don't wanna switch my carrier.

So that was another kind of a hurdle for me, at least, after June, 2007, I knew eventually I was gonna get one, but it was February, 2008.

So I lasted a little over about seven months or so, it's eight months, it's like, I knew I was gonna get it.

But in February, 2008, I remember, okay, now I'm finally at the point, I went down to the local Apple store here in Cleveland and I got it.

So I do have, and I still have, it's not this pretty 'cause it was handed down to the kids over all these years 'cause it could fetch a lovely price today if it was perfect in the box, but it's been well-loved and well-used.

And frankly, I can still go power it up right now, which is unbelievable that I could still do something like that.

I gotta find the right cable connector on there.

But it was in February, and I just remember that was my switch from the Palm Treo 650, Jeff, and it was insane how much better that it was from the 650.

Just to be able to scroll, I'm looking at a website, just like I look at on, it's on a mobile version, all of my email is syncing.

By that time, I was into the Mac side already anyway.

It already had a Mac, so everything was working.

And I remember looking, I found the same day, it was February 2nd, 2008, 'cause I remember in my email, I still have when I signed up for the iTunes account on that same day, I came back from the store and I signed up for that account.

And I'm like, I can sync music to the iPhone.

Like this is quick, wait, I can download, I can go access and download the song.

And of course at the time, still, we didn't have the third-party apps, right?

And that was another big thing that I was a little nervous about 'cause I wanted to be able to do that on there.

But anyway, that was my little story.

So February, 2008 was my first iPhone, the original iPhone, which by the way, was 2G, right?

It wasn't even 3G at the time.

I mean, but I was still so thrilled with the speeds that we had, even at that time. - So I wanted to get that first-generation iPhone and I thought that I would, in fact, that's why I was so upset that I had to buy the replacement Trio 650.

But then when Apple actually announced the iPhone, it was missing something critical for me.

And I'm not talking about third-party apps, but what I'm talking about was the ability to work with Microsoft Exchange for corporate email.

And this is the thing that as we talked about before, both BlackBerry and Good, they were so smart.

BlackBerry actually had a server that would be a part of your network for your company.

And so you could securely get email back and forth to your company in a way that it wasn't just being exposed on the internet.

I mean, for every business, privacy was important, but especially for those of us in the business of law, communications are supposed to be private between attorneys and clients.

And so we have a legal responsibility to keep that stuff confidential.

And so I needed something that was gonna work with Exchange and my corporate email.

And that original iPhone did not, it did have mail on it, but it would just be with regular mail or with Yahoo mail or something like that, private mail service.

It was not working with Microsoft Exchange.

So as much as I wanted to get the first generation iPhone, like you did, I just couldn't do it because I needed to have email, it was too important.

And so the second generation iPhone, which was called the iPhone 3G, they put 3G in the name to let you know that it was using the, what at the time was a much faster network.

Nowadays, we think of 3G as being ridiculously slow that does not even support it by networks anymore.

But at the time it was much faster than that edge network, the 2G network.

And so one of the big advantages of that new iPhone was that it had the faster internet with 3G.

Another advantage is it worked with the App Store, which Apple also announced that you could get third-party apps.

But for people like me, the key thing was that it worked with Microsoft Exchange.

So for the first time I could actually do it.

And so I remember that there was, where I work in downtown New Orleans, just a few blocks away from me on St.

Charles Avenue, there is an AT&T store.

By the way, when that first iPhone was announced, it was actually announced for singular.

And then it was between the time of the announcement and between January and June, singular changed its name to AT&T because of the purple purchase.

But anyway, so there's an 18th street door down the street.

And so I went to go line up.

So I got there early in the morning and 'cause that was what people did with the original iPhone is you lined up in front of stores to get the first model.

And so I got there super early and I got in line and I was probably only like number 15 in line or something like that.

But by that time I got to the front of the line, they had already sold, like they didn't have in stock any of them anymore that I wanted.

And so, although I had gotten in line on July 11th, I then had to order it and have wait for it to come.

So I paid for it on July 11th, which was the day it debuted, but I didn't actually get it for another 11 days until July 2022 of 2008.

And I knew that date only because, back at that time when I was using my Palm 650, I used to use Twitter and I used it on the computer as well.

And I remember that I went back in time and I found on my Twitter history, like the very first tweet that I did for my phone, it was on July 22nd, 2008, I said, this is a tweet from my new Palm 3G, which is the only reason I remember that date.

But so that was not this date.

This was later.

But so anyway, so that was when I finally jumped on to the iPhone bandwagon.

And at that point I was on iPhone ever since, and I don't see myself changing anytime soon.

You know, it's funny because at the same period of time, you had the original iPhone and then the iPhone 3G.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry, people are starting to move in droves from the BlackBerry to the iPhone.

Microsoft, it's pocket PC, Windows CE system was no longer very popular.

It was sort of going away.

Palm was still around.

And I remember in 2009, so a year after I bought this iPhone 3G, Palm came out with something called the Palm Pre, P-R-E, which was supposed to be the next generation of Palm.

At this point, Palm was run by a guy named Rubenstein, if I remember his first name.

He used to work for Apple, and he was one of the people that came up who was responsible for the introduction of the iPhone and Apple.

And I'm forgetting Rubenstein's first name, but then he went over to Palm and he took over the company and he was gonna introduce it.

And it came out and the Palm Pre did have some pretty revolutionary interface ideas that they had. - I remember this.

Yeah, flip up the keyboard.

Yeah, that's cool. - One of the very early posts that I did on iPhone JD, 'cause I started writing iPhone JD soon after I got my iPhone.

So that was in late 2008 and around November of 2008.

I remember writing a post on iPhone JD in 2009 where I talked about the Palm Pre and, you know, what were the advantages and disadvantages versus an iPhone.

But it was really sort of the beginning of the end.

I mean, Palm came up with that Pre, it did not sell very well.

And, you know, I called it at the time the first true competitor to the iPhone, but the reality is that, although it has some very cool ideas in it, don't get me wrong, from a technology standpoint, it was actually very neat.

But from a consumer at this point, if, you know, the iPhone was gaining in popularity so much, I mean, Apple's growth was just, if you looked at it on a chart, which is exponential, BlackBerry's growth was falling, Palm was already low and they never came back.

And then, you know, but for Google coming up with its version of Android, you know, Google was coming out with Android phones at the time.

And then right around the time that Apple introduced the iPhone, suddenly Google just changed all of their efforts.

And every Android after that looked very much like an iPhone.

They said, okay, Apple's figured out what these things should look like.

You don't want to have keyboards.

And even to this day, Android continues to look like, and you can talk about, you know, intellectual property stuff, you know, whether that's appropriate or not.

But, you know, Apple was so revolutionary with the early iPhone that, you know, except for Google having its Android alternative, you know, we no longer really had viable alternatives from BlackBerry, Palm, Casio, Sharp, you know, all these other technology companies that we talked about for the decades before the iPhone came out, all of which in their time were revolutionary and were so important in coming up with new ideas and everybody rested on the shoulders of each other's.

And so, you know, we don't want to laugh at those early, you know, Scion, even RadioShack, you know, the technology that they came out with at the time was so important at the time and the future stuff did build upon it.

But when the iPhone came out in '07 and especially with that first generation change in '08 with the App Store, that was really the, you know, at that point, it was going to be all iPhone from then on, except for the Android. - Just amazing to see where we are today again, right?

I mean, because I see a lot of these companies that have come and gone or they've modified.

I mean, even Windows, I remember, you know, they still were a player for a while.

You always do a good post from a couple of surveys that we follow in the legal sphere, at least a little bit, of like what lawyers are using.

And I remember your little pie chart, Jeff, there would be some that would still be holding on to the Windows side.

And then of course, Windows or Microsoft just said, you know, we're done, we're done with that market.

And it's just to see how Apple has continued to evolve, to me, I mean, after all these years, the original iPhone is now 16 years, 17 years old.

I mean, it's just amazing that, you know, 'cause we see some of these palms in devices and, you know, maybe if it goes five years, 10 years, that's pretty incredible.

But to see where Apple is today, it still continues just to be, blow me away on that.

But okay, anyway, I know that we thanks everybody for listening to us.

It's just been fun for us to geek out on some of this. - Yeah. - And as we mentioned, please make it a point, even if you just go through and you heard us talking about some things, you can go to the YouTube video, just because so you can see some of the, I'll include some of the links, but you can see some of the devices that we're talking about.

And it's just good sometimes to look back a little bit to see where we are today.

I mean, it helps us to, I think, even better appreciate a lot of what we have these days, Jeff, and that's important as well.

But also to see, like you said, to stand on the shoulders of the other things.

I mean, even just look at this Palm Pre, I'd completely forgotten about that.

But even just that idea of having that compactness is still important, you know?

I mean, that goes to the iPhone mini is what I keep thinking.

Jason Snell, such a big fan of the iPhone mini and then kind of that form factor there.

So, oh, good stuff.

I really enjoyed that.

Thanks Jeff for doing this.

That was a lot of fun. - It was.

So we should make sure we're gonna be off next week, right, Brett?

We have a vacation break. - Yes. - And then we'll be back in two weeks with the news of the day.

And at that point, we'll be getting closer to the end of the summer with probably last new Apple announcements, but especially as we get into the fall with the new iPhone being announced and everything else. - Gearing up. - New iPhone. - Gearing up for it to all come out in just a few weeks.

So that's very exciting stuff.

But it was great. - Good stuff. - Yes, we look forward to the future.

It was great walking down memory lane with you.

This was awesome. - It was a lot of fun.

Thanks Jeff.

Okay, thanks everybody.

We'll see you later. - Thanks Brett.