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by rkagerer 638 days ago
I would love a modern Palm OS phone, that's true to the original UI philosophies and could run (even if just through emulation) all my old titles.
2 comments

Take all of this with a big grain of salt due to rosy retrospection, but I feel like a big appeal of Palm OS was that going online was an intentional activity (if possible at all; most of my handhelds had neither mobile data nor Wi-Fi).

As a result, it was completely distraction-free: I'd queue up news/articles (via Plucker), mail, and books for the day, HotSync in the morning/evening, and then that was it – no chance of any notification (other than pre-programmed local reminders/appointments) popping up and disrupting whatever I was doing.

Other than that, there was still more than enough to do ~forever: More Ebooks on a 64 MB MMC than I could reasonably read all summer, the top 100? 1000? Wikipedia articles, the CIA World Factbook as a PalmDoc, Space Trader... Ok, enough with the nostalgia :)

(If this brought back a fond memory or two, head on over to https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ right now!)

I really like the idea of getting my day's worth of emails in the morning and responding to them throughout the day while offline (using one of the great folding keyboards!). Hard to emulate that these days though. It feels artificial to put my phone in airplane mode or whatever.
There is a guy who has gotten Palm OS running on modern ARM hardware http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
You mean "a cluster of highly trained elite software ninjas masking as one guy in public".

Eh. No, just kidding, of course, it's just that project^W site has a huge Fabrice Bellard-factor to it. Very, very impressive.