Tag: PDA

The story of digital organizers is a story about focus vs. abundance. From the PalmPilot's singular mission - organize your life - to today's always-on smartphones that do everything and demand everything, here's what we lost, what we gained, and what designers should remember.

The Newton MessagePad was a strange, brilliant, and messy ancestor of today's tablets. This piece traces how its handwriting recognition, apps, and design experiments prefigured features we now take for granted - and why it was canceled before the world was ready.