I’ve owned a lot of PDAs in my life.  Ever since the first Palm Pilots came out I’ve been fascinated by them.  I’ve always been a contrarian, though, so while I’ve owned a few Palms, I’ve never had them long.  My history is a long and strange one.  Click on through for pictures and summaries.

Sony Magic Link:

My PDA adventures began here.  This was a rather clunky machine, with a bad OS and poor features.  It had Solitaire, could MAYBE email, and it could send a fax.  I returned it in the first week and went on a hiatus from PDAs for about 8 months.  I haven’t seen one of these in the flesh since that time, and the one I got was an open box special at a Best Buy in New Jersey.  They didn’t last.

Psion Series 5:

Perhaps one of my all-time favorite PDAs.  They were much more popular in their native UK, but they had a cult following here in the US as well.  It synced up with Windows beautifully and had the best implemented handheld keyboard I’ve seen yet.  It was actually possible to touch type with it, although the process was a little slower.  It was one of the first handhelds to actually handle email well, and you could surf the web as well.  I also had a build of SimCity on mine.  I have nothing but fond memories for the Psion, and it stayed with me perhaps longer than any other PDA I owned.

iPaq 3150

This one was more of a rarity.  When the iPaq first came out, it was extremely expensive.  Compaq responded by making one with a monochrome LCD and cutting the price down.  The battery life was much improved as well, and it ran every Pocket PC application I tried.  It was a little more cheaply constructed than the other models, but it was more powerful than the Palms or Visors of the day, and it could use all the sleds Compaq made for the carious iPaqs.  It help me for a while until I moved on to color.

Casio Cassiopeia E-125

Being contrary, I moved away from the iPaq pretty quickly.  They were starting to pop up everywhere.  I studied up on the competition, and found this little gem.  The E-125 got ragged on a little for being built like a brick, but it was durable and functional.  It also had a gorgeous QVGA screen.  It wasn’t transflective, like the iPaq’s, but it was decent enough in most light, and the colors were better.  Also, the button layout made it nearly perfect for running NES and Sega emulators.  This handheld put me firmly into the PocketPC camp, with ebooks, emulation, and media.  It’s one of the classics of its time.

Hitachi ePlate

In the late part of 2001 and early 2002, I went on a Windows CE tablet kick.  Probably the best of these was the Hitachi ePlate.  The text recognition was decent with Calligrapher, and the mobile applications were great.  It included a 56k modem, but it also had a PCMCIA slot which allowed me to surf wirelessly on it.  The USB port let me add a keyboard when needed.  Hitachi used an SH4 processor (for the record, the Sega Dreamcast used an SH4 processor as well), right around the time when the StrongArm processors were starting to take over the market.  This meant available software was a little hit and miss, but most guys were compiling for all three major processor types.  The ePlate is the only handheld I lost to catastrophe; it slipped off my desk and the LCD cracked.  Heartbreak.

Fujitsu PenCentra

The PenCentra was another example of a Windows CE tablet.  It had some nice features setting it apart: it was rugged, with a nice thick case, it had a PS/2 port for a keyboard, and it had two PCMCIA slots.  The dual slots allowed for extra memory and web surfing simultaneously.  I had three of these, two with the outdoors-oriented transflective screen, which was pretty bad, and one with the standard indoor screen, which was decent.  The touch screen wasn’t as responsive as the ePlate’s, and it wasn’t as bright either.  But it was a decent little portable with excellent battery life.

Toshiba e570

I got back into PocketPCs, and haven’t really strayed from there since.  The e570 had one of the best forms, with nice rubbery grips on the sides and a very responsive directional pad.  It had fair battery life, a decent screen, and a fast processor.  It also had a unique feature, for the time; both a CompactFlash slot and a SecureDigital slot.  Audiovox used this design to make one of the first PocketPC phones, and they also made a cheaper version with less memory.

Toshiba e740

Toshiba followed up with one of the first PDAs to have built-in 802.11b, the e740.  It was a little longer than the e570, but a bit thinner.  They also added a jog dial on the side, a feature I loved for ebooks and web surfing.  The e740 got a little flak for its design, but I thought it was decent.  Battery life with WiFi on was terrible, something that hasn’t changed much in the four years or so since I had this PDA. I had an e310 for a while as well, which was the same basic design, but quite a bit thinner, no WiFi, and much better battery life. 

Well, this concludes part one.  I’ll delve into some more unusual PDAs in the next installment.

Continued in Part 2