Computer Chronicles 1993 PDA Review Part 4 of 5

[POKEMONMASTER260]

Wow, it's sad they were calling tablets PDAs back then...

[FreudRulz]

It's strange, the Eo was extremely expensive for what it was, but was very widely purchased by massive corporations. I assume they destroyed them, as I have never seen one. Ever. Not on eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, anywhere.

[Genghis7777]

@FreudRulz I think it had a Y2K bug which made them unusable. See hembrow.eu / personal / eo. html

you'll have to remove the spaces for the link to work but YouTube wouldn't let me post it otherwise

[Genghis7777]

@TheEsotericDesi Yeah, the latest crop of tablets with Cellular and Wifi Connectivity is getting much closer to the Eo's vision.

However when compared to a Newton, they all fall short in the Newton's ability to provide seamless integration between apps, cross-app storage, modeless handwriting and stylus text input.

[TheEsotericDesi]

One day this is how world will look back on iPhone... :-P

[Genghis7777]

@DriverforHire: IBM's Simon was probably the first, it was released in 1992. The EO was launched in 1993. Nokia launched its Communicator range in 1996.

The size of the EO lent itself more toward the tablet rather than the phone application.

[Driverforhire]

The first smart phone???

[thomasbtmn]

I vote on Apple Newton

[Genghis7777]

@thomasbtmn

Yeah, I agree that the Newton is the best of the bunch. The Newton celebrated its 17th birthday on August 3. Today you still see them occasionally in the wild and it's still my everyday PDA. I have never seen any of the others still in use, though I have seen one or two HP 200LX's the successor model to the HP 100LX shown in the videos.

[JasonHD1985]

Thanks for providing this series.

[Genghis7777]

@JasonHD1985

You're welcome. Quite a dive into the past. Newton's original market research showed that the market desired a converged device with both cellular communications and a pda all integrated onto the same device. But back in the early to mid-90s there was no way to miniaturize it down to a size that could fit into a pocket. Today's smartphone fulfils that desire and see how they're taking off! For some socio-economic groups, their cellphone is their desktop computer.