Almost
certainly the most significant PDA product was to be
the Palm Pilot, first released in 1996. The Palm Pilot’s
creator, Jeff Hawkins, took a second look at what PDAs
needed to do. Rather than attempt to compete with desktop
PCs, he decided that the competition was really paper
- diaries, note pads, filofaxes and so on. To make a
successful product, he decided that he had to make something
small (he even went to the lengths of measuring his
shirt pocket and then fashioned a wooden prototype that
would fit), fast (he timed how long it took him to look
up an event in his paper diary) and not too expensive.
The
other key selling point for Jeff’s Palm Pilot
was the handwriting recognition. Other products had
attempted this without great success, but again Hawkins
took a different approach. Rather than getting a computer
to learn handwriting, he would ask the user to learn
to write in a way that the computer could understand.
The simplified writing system made it much easier to
get his Palm Pilot to recognise each letter, yet only
asked a small investment of time by the user to learn
the system.
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