I had a palm pilot that I eagerly replaced with a smartphone as soon as I could. I jumped from a Tungesten e2 to an HTC g1. Technically, the G1 was a better device but honestly, aside from the addition of wifi and cellular connectivity, I don't think it was an improvement in terms of ease of use (and, any many cases, it was a step backwards.)

At the time, I could not accurately evaluate this, because I spent a lot of money on the new thing, and I needed to justify that purchase to myself.

Now, there is no question in my mind that a modern smartphone outperforms a vintage palmpilot for most of the tasks that I would use either device for.

I would also argue that the use cases of each device are different enough that, even though there is some overlap, the nature of each device dictated the way that I used it.

After my G1, I went through several other cheap smartphones in quick succession. Each one was only a marginal improvement (if that) over the last, and only the g1 had an actual keyboard. Moving to these later devices served to highlight the limitations of the smartphones of that era, and led me to purchase an hp 200LX.

I supplemented my smartphone with my LX until the LX stopped working. It, again, was a different beast. It had a different use case. It enabled me to interact with the world differently.

I miss my LX sometimes, but I haven't purchased another one, because they are expensive, and because my current (several year old) iPhone can more than handle all of the major tasks that I used the LX for.

For the minor tasks, or the areas where the LX outperforms the iPhone, I've moved on.

I've removed those activities from my workflow.

And I'm again letting the device I have dictate the way I interact with the world.

So, I'm using a Mac Plus, and I'll use this palm lifedrive.

I want to see what using them feels like, and how it impacts my workflow. I want to see if I change the way I work in response to using these devices.

I also want to see, specifically, in what ways modern software and hardware are better than the older equivalents, and in what ways they are worse.

I imagine that I will find some in each bucket.

And it's a real mixed bag in terms of software and hardware as you jump from device to device.

For example, my Tandy 100 circa 1983 is still useful today (as a wireless serial terminal, if nothing else) when other computers from the same year just ... aren't, without significant effort.

My HP 200LX was very useful, well into the 2010s, when very similar products from Atari and Compaq are almost impossible to use today.

(part of this owes to those devices making use of standard ports and accessories. Part of this owes to the community that sprung up around these things, developing software for them and helping extend them.)

From a "standardization" standpoint, the Lifedrive should be a great fit for remaining useful.

It uses wifi and bluetooth, it uses SD cards for removable storage and I can swap in a CF card for the internal storage.

Drivers exist for Windows and Linux to sync files to it.

I'm concerned about the "Community" part though.

From the looks of things, very little new software is being developed for this hardware. I know I'm not getting security updates. I doubt I'm even going to be able to use SSH or HTTPS.

We'll see how it goes when it arrives, though.

@ajroach42 Frankly, even HTTP on Palm OS was a disaster in the mid 2000s.

Your options were typically Blazer, which was atrocious, and Opera Mini, which was fantastic if you had a good JVM. The Palm OS version of J9 was not a good JVM, it was horrifically unstable (I had to pull my battery to reboot multiple times per day), and it didn't save the state of a running program when you switched away (so Opera Mini would completely exit every time you switched programs).

@ajroach42 For the livedrive there's an OpenBSD port that's dicontinued, but at least that includes ssh and friends: https://www.openbsd.org/palm.html

@ajroach42 I think this is what keeps me from going older than my 2009 iPod. There are some sites that just won't open, and it just gets worse the older your device is. WEP-only wifi, for example.

If I end up going the ESP route as a wifi-serial interface, I'll probably write some CLI apps to run on the ESP instead of trying to figure out something modern-ish to run on the Palm. It seems like there isn't much of a personal organizer development scene these days for some reason.

@ajroach42 somebody should make a Palm OS client for Mastodon. It would be challenging and interesting task for retro dev.

@ajroach42 I loved my Tungsten

@ajroach42 also, it's something to play with and test performance boundaries of old hardware

@drewzero1 as long as you can keep getting software updates, it’s great.

My biggest concern against using some older machines as daily drivers is security.

I’m working on that blog post right now.

@ajroach42 Fair point. That was the issue with Flash on my iBook, there were old versions available but I wouldn't run an outdated version.

The best scenario is when, as in my ThinkPad's case, an alternative modern OS is available. There's no way I would use XP or Vista today, but the latest version of Debian runs just fine and I can get updates almost every day.

I'm especially intrigued about @ckeen 's suggestion of OpenBSD. It may be possible to compile new versions of some things on that.

@saper @ajroach42 The T7700 C2D is usually adequate, but sometimes certain content on certain websites seems to slow it down. Also playing/encoding medial is smoother on a newer machine.

Switching from Chromium to Firefox seemed to help it feel snappier. I'm running Debian with either MATE or WindowMaker, depending on the day. I haven't really tried gaming on it, mostly because I haven't bothered to upgrade the 80GB HDD.