 I have a new computer, this is not it! This is my old Palm Pilot. It's a Palm 3E. I know that the Palm 3Es were only ever sold in 1999 and as I bought this new that means that this must now be 21 years old. I used the hell out of it and eventually it failed. Well I say eventually, it didn't take very long, it wasn't very well made and since then it's been in there covered ever since. But I did a lot of stuff on this including writing. I used to have a unfoldable keyboard that it would plug into. This is a personal digital assistant or PDA which for people who don't know is essentially a smartphone without being smart or containing a phone. It's got two megabytes of RAM, an operating system on ROM, not Flash, ROM since you can't upgrade it and no storage. It's also got no connectivity. The only way of contacting the outside world is via this peripheral port and what you're supposed to do is to get out your docking station which is this which plugs into the serial port of your PC and you would plug the thing in like so and hit the button and it would try and perform a sync and in fact it has actually woken up since I pushed the button. This would then synchronize your email, your contacts, everything, documents, programs from the software running on the PC, typically Windows, over the very slow serial connection and onto the device and this was bi-directional so it actually worked pretty well. It wasn't fast. There is also this which is the Urda infrared port about which I will talk more later. Anyway, I want to get the camera set up because you can see that the screen is incredibly shiny and walk you through some of the features because they will become important later and it's quite interesting. Alright, turns out my PC is not plugged in. Who knew? So here it is. Hopefully in focus from looking at my camera display and hopefully it will remain in focus. This thing is operated via a touchscreen. It's a resistive touchscreen which means that while you can poke it with your fingers it works much better with the stylus which plugs in a slot behind there. I have removed it for use because it's currently propped up with a AA battery to get the camera at the right angle to the screen. It's an old-fashioned reflective calculator style screen which is why the viewing angle is so bad. So the interesting thing about Parmos, apart from its willingness to turn itself off after short periods of time, is that everything happens in RAM. This has no flash storage. All your document programs and everything are stored in RAM which does mean that if you take the batteries out all your data goes away. But the intention was that you would have everything synchronized to the PC. So if you change the batteries and the machine reset you just drop it into the cradle and hit the sync button again and everything would be fine. The OS is amazingly fast and efficient. Everything is stored in in-memory databases so there's no need to delay while loading and saving data. If I pull up a couple of applications like say the calculator, which is this fairly dismal for operation calculator, frankly Parm should have been embarrassed to put on this, I can for example go to back to the home screen, pull up the address book. Here are a couple of addresses. These are the default ones you get in ROM. And if I touch this button here we are back at the calculator. So this looks pretty normal, right? Multitasking, except it's not. When you switch from one application to another the application is storing its state in the database and shutting down. So the ability to save and restore state so quickly makes it seem like it's a multitasking system even if it's not. And this is how it manages to achieve so much on such a low-end machine. The applications are all pretty simple for fairly obvious reasons. It was designed as a well as a personal organiser. You weren't supposed to like write documents on it. You did stuff like keep your address book. And here are the address fields for the now defunct Parm US. This is the European version. I've hit the calculator button. You should be able to get back to the address book by pressing this button. But the buttons are there we go. Oh, no, that's actually the calendar under the address books this one. But the buttons have failed. They've all got these conductive rubber pads on them and they just don't work properly anymore. Yeah, here we are back again. The little icon here says there's a memo attached to each one. This allows fairly short documents to be written. You can enter text using the graffiti system here where you draw letters. Sorry, I'm trying to remember the graffiti mnemonics. The system actually works really well. What's R? They are letter like forms, but they're not actually letters. And in fact, there is a tutorial program. We are graffiti. Hit the try it button. This will walk you through how it all works. Here we go. Here are the letters. So each each letter is a single stroke leading to some slightly odd choices like K over here is a backwards gamma. But with a little practice, and I mean a really little amount of practice, it only takes like 10 minutes. It becomes really intuitive. Sadly, graffiti got loyal to death because it apparently violated somebody's patent and they had to replace it with graffiti to which had different letter forms, some of which use two strokes and it wasn't nearly as good. There are no documents because there is no file system. This is the memo pad. And here are four memos. The only thing that knows about memos is the memo pad itself. They're actually stored internally as four different databases, which the sync tool knows about. So when you sync it to your PC, these will actually show up on your PC as individual text files integrated into whatever memo thing you're using if the hot sync software understood it. And likewise, you edit the text files and sync that come back onto the device as databases. Applications are also a kind of database and can be synced in exactly the same way. There's not a lot on here in ROM. We've got a dress book, the calculator I showed you earlier, the calendar, which is a called date book, which is really basic. I don't have any data in any of this. An expense tool that I never figured out how to use because back in 1999, I was a student. I didn't have expenses. The graffiti tutorial, the hot sync tool, you can sync it over a modem so that you get a serial adapter that plugs in here, attach it to your modem and a phone line, and it would dial and sync remotely, which was nice. This sync adapter is just a serial adapter with a button on it. The button triggers the hot sync program on the palm. It doesn't actually do anything over the serial link. We've got an email program. I have one pending email. Welcome to transfer mail from your desktop to your handheld computer. You must configure hot sync and there's some instructions. Is there a date on it? Applications typically have this drop down menu where stuff appears. There's not a lot actually. You can change the font. So I'm looking at a oblique angle on the screen and the screen is actually rather below the plastic so there's quite a lot of parallax. So I'm having trouble hitting the buttons. Nothing in our box. Now I've just got the one. It's a pretty basic program. Yes, that's interesting. I don't see any way to get the date, which would now be considered 21 years later critical. Oh, there it is. Here we go. 4199. Let me go into the preferences. That wants me to set the date formats. Month, day, year. Yeah, let's set that to the much more sensible year month day. Although there doesn't seem to be a way to tell it to do four digit years. It's been a while since I've seen a 99 in a date. And if we go back to the email program, interesting. That did not save the state of what email I was looking at. Yes, that's a bit naughty. It's supposed to be better than that. Right. This is the fact the first of April 1999. So I can enter a reply to the sender. They were clever enough not to put a valid return address. Yeah. I mean, it's not like I have hot sink anyway. The member powder showed you earlier preferences. There's not a lot of configuration options. Network doesn't do what you might think. This just tells it tells it how to dial or modem. Remember those? And you've got a choice of AT&T, WorldNet, CompuServe, Earthlink, UUNet, Windows, RAS. Never heard of them. Cynet, wasn't that a Cylon thing? And Unix, whatever that is. Modem configuration, decent serial port rate, 57.6 kbps is, I think, half of what the sinker would do, which ran at 115, I believe. And documents on this are so tiny that it was sinking absolutely no time. General options, sounds, beeps, Simon date, formats you've seen. Digitizer, the resistive touchscreen is notoriously unreliable. So you have to calibrate it, which happens on startup by touching the targets. In fact, I believe I have just calibrated it based on my parallax. So I should now be able to press the button easily. Yep. But from your perspective, it'll look like I'm touching it internally the wrong place. Anyway, that's your problem, not mine. Buttons. It means these hard buttons here, which are configurable. You get four hard coded applications. You can see what they are. These two are page up and down to allow you to do things like read long documents, holding the thing one-handed. They've all died. Pen. Oh, I completely forgotten about this. You can do that to get a thing. And very sensibly, the default option is the list of graffiti symbols. And not the letters, which are easy to remember. It's the other ones. We should be able to cycle through or I'll just use the pen. That's easier. What other things are available? Turn off beam. That's infrared. Keyboard. What's this do? This will be the soft keyboard. Let's find the memo pad again. Power tips. Yep. If you don't want to use graffiti at all, the touch screen is surprisingly precise once you calibrated it. And if you're used to a capacitive touch screen, which you work by stabbing it with big, fleshy fingers, it's a bit hard to realize just how precisely you can use a stylus. So in fact, that tiny little keypad is quite comfortable to use. It's marginally faster than using graffiti, but a little bit more awkward. You've got to rest your hand on it to actually be able to hit the tabs, tabs, buttons even. But I prefer graffiti, to be honest. Let's see if I can actually type something. It's been a while since I've used this. Sorry about that. Anyway, did I get that cue? I think I got that cue. That was an H. Oh, then we'll be that. F. I forgot to put this back to the graffiti setting. What's an F? Oh, that is an F. Yeah, it's a little bit hard for me to see the screen from where I am. J, U. V needs a little tail on it to distinguish it from U. A, just A upside down V. So an F is this sort of curve. It might even be one of these. No, that's a... Up angle is the control key. It allows you to get at these menu options. So F is that, but... Oh, yes, I'm getting that mixed up with T, which is the same symbol the other way around. So F, O, X. And you get numbers over here and the number sigils are obvious. Interesting that they actually use two different areas for that. Yes, you're not going to want to use this much, but it's fine for like simple text fields. It's quite a useful way of using the little screen. What else? And my preference is security. You can put passwords and things on it to do list. Yes, I really don't think the registration code is going to work anymore. I can't remember if I did register. And welcome is the application that starts up when you power it on from cold and the RAM has been reset. And it will walk you through calibrating the screen. It also won't take no for an answer. You can't get out of it. So let me just do this. Get back to the main screen. Done. Yeah. You can categorize your applications because there's no external storage. The only place to put applications is in RAM. Let me go to info here. And this will show you the size of the applications. Most of them are very small because they're just pointing at ROM. But graffiti here at 14K is, I believe, the actual size of the application. I've managed to beam that to another device and it does actually work. So out of the box, I'm using practically none of my two megabytes of RAM. I mean, compare that with an Android device. So yes, that is the Palm 3e. So now I've shown you this. It's time to show you my other Palm pilot. And this is going to require a bit more camera work. And this is my new Palm pilot. This is a Dana wireless produced by AlphaSmart who are now sadly defunct. AlphaSmart started out producing what essentially battery-backed keyboards. You would get a portable device that was a laptop keyboard with a little screen and a big battery. And the idea was that you could take this out and type on it and it would record what you typed. You got up to eight files directly accessed by function keys and you did basic editing on the little screen. And then once you were finished, you would take it home, plug it into your PC via the keyboard port, which was interesting, and the device would retype your document onto your computer, which was a stroke of genius because it meant that it completely bypassed any compatibility issues. If you want to import your documents into Microsoft Word, you load Microsoft Word and the keyboard will type your document into Word. If you want an email program, you load your email program. And these were very highly thought of among certain demographics. AlphaSmart aimed them at students a lot, but journalists loved them as being an easy way to write up stories when out and about. And I know novelists who swear by them because the portability and the little screen means they're great for first draft. You can type without getting bogged down in editing details, formatting, that sort of thing. So if you just want to sit and churn out text, they're brilliant. This, however, is I think the last device they came out with before going under. And it's a rather different sort of thing. You can see that it's got a massive screen, which is much bigger than the, I think, four line screens the earlier things have. And it is a Palm Pilot. It runs PalmOS. And that is showing up on the camera. Let me just compare with my 3e. Does that look familiar? It should. It is a upgraded machine running the same OS as this. A tablet operating system is an interesting choice for something that's basically a laptop, but it actually works really well. Let me just show you the device itself. It's not obvious from the camera, but it's actually a massive chunky thing. It feels heavy and really solid to use. It operates via three AA nickel metal hydride cells, which go in here. It originally came with this battery module, but you could replace the battery module with ordinary AA alkalines. But I have performed a small modification to let me insert nickel metal hydride AA's and it will charge them itself. I am just going to take the back off to show you. So what we've got here inside is a single fairly small PCB containing all the works. This is the Dragon Ball MC68000 processor that runs it, which is I believe the same chip as in this, although upgraded rather to make it faster. We've got some RAM. We've got a flash chip containing the ROM, not the ROM, the operating system software. Although I have upgraded mine so it's no longer version 1.2.1, you've got a staggering two SD card slots for massive amounts of storage. The later version of the OS that this runs actually supports storage devices unlike this. The modification I made is over here. There are two sets of terminals, one for the nickel metal hydride battery which normally plugs in via this connector and the other is for the alkaline batteries. So all I've done for this modification, and if you've got one of these it's recommended because the original battery packs are now completely short, is to just desolder one of the wires from the alkaline terminals and connect it up to the nickel metal hydride terminals. That's this one and that means that it now expects nickel metal hydride AA's in here and the built-in charging circuit will operate on them. But don't put alkaline batteries in. And over here there's a rather interesting feature which is the Wi-Fi module because this device does have Wi-Fi. But unfortunately you shouldn't get too excited because it only supports WEP, not WPA or WPA2 or anything like that. This is storage for a stylus just like on the palm and it is very much the same stylus except slightly longer. And oh yes, there's one other thing which I shall point out here. Here on the silkscreen it says, cool dudes, Brad, Joe, Hellerman, David, John, Phil, Mayank, Ron, Brian, Don, Tracy, Rick, Scott, Dave and RunB, which will be the names of the designers. And that's always really nice to see on a piece of hardware because it means they cared. Anyway, now I get to put it back together again. Okay, so let's have a quick tour through the software. You turn it on with the Ein Auske, this is the Swiss German keyboard, but I've installed the UK firmware. And as you see you get exactly the same launcher that you get on the 3E. This program knows about the bigger screen size, so it fills the entire screen, which is nice. Not all programs do. The standard software like the date book works perfectly well. You can see it's the same thing. Of course on this you get to use the keyboard rather than graffiti to enter a text. And the keyboard is actually pretty good. It's a decent full size keyboard. It's got a reasonable amount of travel. It's, let's be honest, it is a rubber dome keyboard and isn't the greatest. But when it comes to generic laptop sheet keyboards, this is a really good one. You can very comfortably do a lot of typing on this. It works just the same way as the 3E. The hard buttons down here are mapped to the keys here. So we've got the date book, the address book, the task list, the memo pad, a generic search button. I haven't found a keyboard way to do cancel yet, which is a bit annoying. This is the menu button. It's the same one as this. Home is this one, which takes you back to the home screen. Send and sync is beam and sync. This corresponds to the sync button on the dock here. Although this machine uses USB rather than serial, this is wanting to do infrared beaming. And oh yes, here you can see the set of applications and how big they are. So what have we got? Here's the memo pad, which is a whole 33k. So yeah, applications and these machines are absolutely minuscule. The actual set of applications you get on it, I mean, it's the same ones you have on this with a few additions. The biggest addition is alpha word, which is the bespoke word processor. And if you have one of these machines, this is where you'll be spending most of your time. It's a decent word processor. It's a licensed branded version of wordsmith. I actually had a copy of wordsmith by Blue Nomad for this 3e. I actually paid money for it. I used to write with it plugged into a docked folding keyboard. So this came as a very pleasant surprise. It's a generic word processor with a simple styling. I think this will work. This will work. Yep. Parmas only supports bitmap fonts, and not very many of them. So you have a fairly small set of fonts. This is plain. You get Times New Roman to Homer, Garamond, Courier New and Actual Aerial. So let's just try selecting some text and put it into Aerial. That does not look like Aerial, to be honest. It's not the Aerial I know, but let's crank the font size up to make it a bit easier to see. That looks like a Suri font. So I'm not sure that's normal Aerial. Courier New again does not look like Courier. Garamond? That looks like a the same generic Suri font that Aerial was showing up as. It's possible that the fonts are not actually working, or not installed, which is very strange. Yeah. I think we are using the System Sans font and the System Metallic font and nothing else. Well, Times New Roman works. You get basic paragraph styles, justification, indentation, bullet lists. You don't really need much else. You don't really want much else. This is not intended for doing full word processing. It's intended for doing text entry. The actual set of features you get are fairly straightforward. The all important word count that any word processor needs. Things I find and replace. The Sorus for some reason. Basic formatting. Basic options. The network support is if you're using Wi-Fi, you can send and receive files to another device on the network, but that's not set up. Full screen is interesting. Oh yeah, that just turns off the menu and status bars, giving you an unobstructed full screen view of your document, which is always very nice. The one key feature which this has inherited from the earlier Alpha Smart devices is you can have up to eight documents open at once, which are mapped to function keys. So this is document one. It says F1 down there. Just press the key and it switches me to a different document, which is a surprisingly nice feature. Documents do however get saved in the normal way. Just like the 3E, this has no internal file system storage. So this is actually just storing databases in RAM and you can find them from only from within Alpha Writer. I think it's Alpha Writer. You can see that this one is mapped to the F1 key. Yeah, nothing particularly exciting there. For the application that you're going to be spending most of your time in, it is surprisingly simple, which is exactly what you want for a machine like this. Back to the home screen and we see that we've got a palm reader, which is a ebook reader. This book only has two pages. I don't know what kind of ebooks it accesses, but you have that. Usual preferences, print and print setup are for printing, which you can do directly from this device either over the network or by USB. I don't have a printer at support, so I'm just going to ignore it. Screen is interesting because it will let you change the screen orientation. Now I'm not sure, it's too much glare. I'm not sure why you would want to do this, but now you have a very long thin screen. Everything still works. You get graffiti now, except this is graffiti 2, which works differently to graffiti 1. I wonder if that will do anything useful. Yes, here are the strokes. A lot of things are different. K, for example, instead of the backwards gamma, it is now two strokes. I have no idea why you would want to use graffiti when you have an entire keyboard, but there you have it. Let's just put that back to where it was. You'll notice that the Dana logo showed up for a moment there. If I pull up the calculator, you'll see why. Now, Parmos had a hardwired restriction to 160 by 160 pixels for a very long time, and a lot of applications assumed this particular screen size. So unless the application declares that it knows how to handle non-standard screen sizes, the operating system software on this boxes your application into this center segment here, so that it gets the screen size it's used to. The sections to each side were unused, so they decided to put graffiti in there, and this is just wasted with the Dana logo. I'm sure they could have put something in there. Yes, it's it's exactly the same calculator app that this had, although this one has square buttons rather than round buttons, it's kind of terrible. They have done a bit of rearrangement. Honestly, I'm not sure why you would bother, but most of the applications on this version of the firmware do understand the full screen size. When I got it, the earlier version, a lot of applications didn't, including for some reason the launcher here. So you ended up with the launcher boxed in the middle of the screen, which is very peculiar. You would have thought that this would be like the one application they would make sure was updated. Welcome is exactly the same welcome app that's on this. And of course, now I have to go through the call calibration process, because you can't get out of welcome. And then we get to the Wi-Fi ones. Now, this is the application that allows you to connect to a Wi-Fi network. And as I said earlier, it's web only, thus rendering it completely useless. It's trying to contact something. It does actually work well enough that it will spot the access points in my apartment block. So there is mine. It says web yes, but no, it doesn't. My access point only does WPA2, which this doesn't support. That is a real shame, because having Wi-Fi on this would make it so much more useful. But they have it. Unfortunately, this renders most of the networking features kind of useless. Wi-Fi here allows you to connect to a, I think an SMB server over Wi-Fi. The file transfer thing I showed you in Alpha Word works over Wi-Fi. So yeah. And that's it. That is all the software. But this machine does have one big advantage over this, which is it's got two SD card slots for external storage. So let me just plug this in into slot one. So the machine beeps as it recognizes the card, and it does actually have some applications installed onto the SD card. Now I'm pretty sure the Palmast does not support running applications off a card. So I think what it actually does when you try to run one of these things is that it copies the application from the card into RAM and runs it there. Some things behave a bit oddly. For example, I have here Ice Blocks. Ice Blocks is an ancient Java game, which uses the KVM Java interpreter. And it will not run off the card. However, if I copy both of these things, let me try to remember how to do this, copy. So copy from card, so copy to Dana from card. Ice Blocks, copy. KVM, you notice that the entire Java VM is 200k and KVM util, which I think we also need. Now we switch here, we go back to all, and we see that Ice Blocks and KVM have shown up. So I can now run Ice Blocks. This is a very ancient mid-P game that we actually used as a demo app at my first job where we did JVMs. Why is that asking me how big the Java heap wants to be? I think I ran the wrong one. There we go, it's working. This is a fairly classic game where you are a penguin and you push sliding blocks of ice over things. Now it was designed to run on one of these and it used these four hard buttons to control your character. And it still uses the same hard buttons on this machine. So I think I want telephone for left. That will be the address book. Task list for right. Is it Alf Garben? No. Address is right. Calendar is left. So that's sensible enough. Problem is, up and down use these. And to get at those, you use function up and down. So, I mean, you can't go left and right here. You still have to use calendar and address. Thus rendering it a little bit difficult to play. You really need three hands. One to press the function key. One to work up and down here and one to do left and right here. But it works. And this is an actual Java interpreter running on a 68K with this machine has 16 megabytes of RAM. It's impressive that it works at all, to be honest. So let's get out of this back to the home screen. It said home screen. Interesting. Well, I never said it didn't have bugs. And let's go back to the card. What else do we have? This is the ROM update program that I used to update the firmware. This is SimCity. Yes, that's SimCity. And it's pretty big, so it takes a while to run off the card. And again, it only supports letterbox mode. You create a city. And here we have it. Palm pilot version of SimCity, which, to be honest, runs very badly. It doesn't get on well with this device. Let's try and build some roads. Lovely, lovely roads. And now some residential districts. And this now goes a bit wrong. I'm not sure why it's unhappy. I haven't been able to get SimCity onto the 3E, so I haven't been able to verify if it works there. But something about the way the touchscreen works isn't right. That's unfortunately rendering it kind of useless. But the application does work. And let me just see how big that is. To do that, we go to menu, info. We want to look at the card. SimCity is a bit under a megabyte, which is actually very big for a palm application. Here you can see the size of the ice blocks and the associated KBM. This was supposed to be a logo interpreter, but it turns out not to work. Yeah, I would not honestly recommend running stuff off the card. It's just kind of plunky and slow. But as a place to store document, it's great. Alpha Word knows all about it, so I can save as put it on the card. You'll notice that's pretty slow. I believe that it's serializing the document into memory and then copying that onto the card. So if we switch application, switch documents in memory, it's pretty quick. If I press F1, if I press F1, it loads the one that's actually in memory. So let me just open the one that's on the card. Dana to card. Here we go. This is a card document. Huh, that's interesting. Okay, I was doing it to disservice. This is actually working off the card, in which case this is a lot faster than it was the last time I tried this. Just save. I know what's going on. It's because when I'm switching documents, I've saved all the data already. Therefore, it doesn't need to save the document to the card again. If I add some text and then press one of the keys, yeah, it has to go through the whole save process. Because remember that this is a single tasking operating system. So every time you switch anything, it's saving state and then reloading the new application or document. Yes. You'll also notice that going to the home screen from an application takes a little bit of time. That is because it has to go look at the card to see whether there are any applications there to show in the card thing. If I remove it, where is it? Then it becomes much faster. Let's go back to AlphaWords. The document in F1 is no longer available because that's on the card. Having two cards at once is actually very unusual for anything with SD cards. There we go. It's now seen the card. My document should have shown up. Open card, card document. There it is. The file format it uses on the card is something that nothing else understands in the world. So you do have to use an importer and exporter to get your documents on and off. But this machine does also support sending things via a keyboard. So let me go and find another computer and give that a try. Okay. So here I have my trusty old hacked Chromebook. And hopefully the screen is at least more or less in focus. And the way this works is really simple. You simply plug the machine into the USB port. If I can find the USB port, there we go. The machine here detects that it's a plugged into a computer and allows you to configure it like this. I'm going to just press the send key. And here is my document in all its rather feeble glory showing up on the computer. Let me see if I can get some more text. Let's go for the default. So I should be able to select this menu copy. I can't see the keyboard paste. Okay. So now I've heard it send. Send again. You can see the speed is not brilliant. But for normal size documents, it will take maybe, you know, 20, 30 seconds, maybe as much as a minute. If your word processor can't keep up, you can change the text speed, the typing speed. So let's do that again. And you can see here the speed at which the text is coming out. That would take an absolute age. That's about 300 board. So yeah, it is very, very simple using this and surprisingly effective. But this is not the only way to get stuff on and off the device because there is one last thing I need to show you, which is beaming. And if anyone has ever used Erda infrared beaming, you will be rolling your eyes now because you know what's coming. So Erda IRDA, which stands for something like infrared data access, is the art of sending data via an infrared port. And that is what this little black thing here is. That plastic is transparent infrared. And there's an infrared LED and light sensor on the inside. And as far as the computer is concerned, it's a serial port. You get to transmit and receive data via that thing. Now the Palm 3e has it. The Dana has it. Let me focus. It's behind this little window here. You can see that the entire back panel is made out of reddish plastic to let the infrared through. And while we're here, I'll also point out these four screw holes. These two are so that you can screw down shutters over the SD card slots to prevent your child from losing or replacing the card at school. While these are so that you can lock the entire device onto a bench to stop your child from stealing it from school. So a nice little feature, actually. So the way Erda is supposed to work is you put your two devices next to each other so that the two windows can see each other. And you go to the relevant option, which is beam and say that I want to transmit. Well, the only thing I can transmit here is the graffiti application because all the others are copy protected. So we say you want to transmit graffiti and we hit beam. And this is now trying to find this machine. And there's a long pause. And this machine turns itself off because the it's got bored. Yeah, let's try that again. Shall we graffiti beam? And now this is the stage which everyone who's ever used infrared will recognize because this is the point where it doesn't work. Erda is terrible. It always has been terrible. It's always only barely worked at all. And in practice, if you actually try to use Erda to send data, it just fails miserably. Yeah, could not find receiving handheld computer. So typically what you do is you adjust the position a bit and you try it again. And it still doesn't work. And you try it again and you try it again and eventually you give up and do something else. So yes, this is all part of the palm experience, possibly the less good bit. It is the same type of infrared that TV remote controls use. You can actually use this as a TV remote control with the right piece of software. It doesn't work very well. I don't think the ports were much good. But yeah, that was a palm thing. And frankly, I would ignore that completely. This the only real way to get data on and off is via the sync port. This you're much better off using the SD card or keyboard entry or, you know, Wi-Fi if you still have a wireless network. Yeah, well, that seems to be a pretty thorough tour of these two devices. I got this quite recently. I'm actually genuinely really impressed. And even though this is like 15 years old and incredibly behind the times, I can actually see myself using it. It's robust. The battery lasts for ages. It's got a nice keyboard. The word processor is basic, but usable. I mean, it's not the quickest. But it's perfectly fast enough for doing text entry, which is what I want to do with it. There are lots of them floating around. They sold pretty well. I'm not sure why you would want a Dana rather than one of the earlier Alpha Smart devices, unless you were into Palmos. If you are into Palmos, this makes a really nice Palmos device. It's possibly one of the most recent Palmos devices that still have a 68k processor in them. Later versions had an ARM processor, and they started to tinker with the operating system to try and make it do things. It wasn't really supposed to do essentially run normal applications, rather than applications specifically written for this thing. But yeah, here you have Palmos and the Dana by Alpha Smart. I hope you liked this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.