iPhone: son of Palm

As a platform, the iPhone feels like a direct descendant of Palm.

• Effectively instant-on. (Unless you really do a hard shutdown.)
• No quitting applications.
• No exposing of a file system to the user. Any concept of “saving” has to do with the user-interface rather than implementation details that should be hidden from the user.
• Echewing the overlapping windows user-interface of desktop systems for more of a screen-oriented style. In fact, the iPhone may go farther in this area than Palm did. (The Palm OS had a Mac-ish menubar.)

These are all good things in my book.

Even my old Palm V, however, had better To Do List and Memo Pad applications. Which were virtually unchanged from my first Pilot, if I recall correctly. (Was it a 1000 or a 5000?) Both of which I used heavily. You can get by with web apps on the iPhone, but I notice a real difference between a local iPhone app & the extra latency of a web app. With the SDK coming out soon, though, that should be remedied.

Oh, and the Palm V also worked well syncing with multiple computers. I used to use it to keep my contacts on my home and work computers synced. I’ve heard that doesn’t work with the iPhone.