在我们的iPhone饱和世界中，可以相信，在21世纪之交的某一时刻，一家完全不同的公司和移动设备占据了市场的主导地位。它也因其简单性，设计和功能而获得了消费者的奉献精神，并获得了值得称赞的赞美。但是那时，移动计算的世界属于苹果，而是棕榈。
In a2001年5月功能in财富magazine about the cultural impact of Palm, the company behind the genre-defining PalmPilot handheld computer, writer John Simons reported that he’d “seen the best minds of my generation in thrall to their Palm Pilots.” He noted its one-time 83% market share, and predicted that a high-end version of the device was “destined for a place in the Smithsonian.” A million PalmPilots were sold in its first year and a half on the market, the article reported, outpacing the IBM PC, the Walkman, color TV, and cellphones in the rate of consumer acceptance. When Palm went public in March 2000, it was valued at $53.3 billion (a market cap比大GM or McDonald’s). “No hourglasses while programs loaded. No crashes. The Palm just made life easier,” Simons wrote.
Palm’s era as a tech titan, like many other early leaders in mobile, would be short lived, thanks toa seriesof mergers, spin-offs, executive shakeups, and the arrival of the iPhone and Android. But during its brief years of glory, the fact that it “just made life easier”—unlike our devices today, which do make life easier, but also make us feel bad in seemingly a thousand different ways—underpinned its success.
德赢提款最近，与一位前棕榈首席执行官，从事各种棕榈项目的设计师以及棕榈用户的设计遗产进行了交谈。这是一个时刻，许多人除了对他们的移动设备的热情不只是温暖的感觉。棕榈对当今设计更好的技术的设计可以教给我们什么？
“Nobody had really nailed the design”
In the late ’90s, cellphones were (sort of) good for one thing: phone calls. T9 messaging was a slog, and internet connectivity on phones was not yet pervasive. Laptops were in their infancy. So increasingly, in addition to their phones, many people carried a second device. Quaintly known as “personal digital assistants,” or PDAs, these devices performed tasks like list-making, note-taking, and keeping calendars and contact information up-to-date. R&D money was being spent at a furious pace on developing these devices, but until Palm came along, none of these efforts had really taken off.
Ed ColliganOur competition wasn’t other devices—it was pen and paper.”
“We were in a strong position in early days, mostly because nobody had really nailed the design,” says Ed Colligan, the first VP of marketing at Palm, who helped develop the original Palm Pilot, the Palm brand, and would later become CEO. “There had been a lot of tries—a billion dollars had been spent on developing handheld computers.”
Colligan和他的团队认为问题是其他设备制造商试图将太多功能填充到尚未具有支持它的内存或处理能力的设备中。（“这不一定是糟糕的想法，这只是超越了时代，” Colligan说。
Palm, in contrast, narrowed its scope to what was achievable at the time; its key design differentiation would be a more focused, and easy to use, suite of basic apps: contacts, calendar, notes, and email/web.
科利根说，他的团队同意了他们用来指导决策的五个关键概念。首先，大小。该设备必须小巧且轻巧以适合衬衫口袋，而不是外套口袋或袋子。其次，它必须超级快，并且可以立即开始。Colligan说：“我们的竞争不是其他设备，它是笔和纸，所以它必须以这种无缝的方式工作。”
“We were going to create these really simplified devices, and those four key buttons are still on every device,” Colligan says of its contacts, calendar, notes, and email/web approach. “If you look at every device today, it’s basically the same design as the PalmPilot. What has changed? The display tech, wireless networks, memory, processing power.”
This relative simplicity resulted in a device that users loved.
Even now, a Twitter account calledArchivePalmosshares Palm-related photos and nostalgia, and an active Discord group (PalmDB) trades tips about buying, maintaining, and using old devices. Others see the creative possibilities of antiquated software;animator Pinot Ichwandardiuses old Palm devices to create art experimentslike this one, and says it’s a “simple yet powerful device to tell stories.”
Today, people have more fraught relationships with their always-pinging cellphones. But thanks to its ultra-simple interface and relative lack of features compared with smartphones, Palm fans seemed to view their devices as tools rather than extensions of themselves.
Anne Haley, an attorney for the City of Los Angeles, was an early Palm user, and remembers feeling like the device did everything she wanted it to do—and no more. “If you leave your phone at home, you have to go back; I cannot function without it,” Haley says. “I did not have the same addiction to the Palm device. It only helped my life, but I didn’t obsess over it. It was an aid, and a plaything. The phones now feel like an appendage, a necessity. There was an innocence about the [Palm devices].”
We seethis desire如今，在今天的产品中进行更多剥离的移动体验Light Phone, apps likeFreedom, and settings like Screen Time—as well as Palm’s latest attempt at a reboot, the pared-back Palm phone与Steph Curry结合开发.
But really, there’s no putting the apps back in the store. Phones that do it all, and their relentless alerts and chirps and haptic pings, are here to stay.
Maaike Evers, cofounder of the industrial design studioMike＆Maaikein San Francisco, helped design the Palm m100, released in 2000, and m125, released in 2001. She says that artificial intelligence could help tackle some of the “busy-ness” we feel because of all the tasks our phones constantly prompt us to do.
“My phone is not making me that happy; it’s a lot of mundane tasks these days,” she says. “That’s where the next revolution will come with AI—there’s a lot of repetition in the work you do. To have that replaced with some sort of AI entity that would help you more on a personal level would be almost like having a virtual assistant represented in your device.”
为每个人设计
The look of Palm products evolved significantly during the time they dominated the market. This was in no small part because Palm recognized that its early devices were not as appealing as they could be to a full half of the market: women.
Colligan说：“突破性的设计使我们进入了很多人的口袋，还有更多女性是Palm V，它于1999年推出。“每个人都在推动我们在其中提出更多功能。我们认为正确的做法是制作最光滑，最美丽的设计，可以滑入您的口袋里，这将是更大的收养驱动力。事实证明这是绝对正确的，Palm V是大片卖家。”
Gadi Amit这是我每天仍然使用的公式 - 用户最终感觉到他们得到的超出了他们所支付的费用。”
Evers, who worked on devices subsequent to the Palm V, said her team at the product design firmLunarwas tasked with creating devices that would be even more attractive to a younger and more female audience, pushing Palm further away from the boxy, gray PalmPilots of the ’90s.
埃弗斯说，她游说很难将更多的颜色纳入设备，但由于难以制造多个SKU（她使用的第二种设备是双重调配的，带有蓝色灰色的前部），因此取得了有限的成功。Lunar还重新设计了Palm的形式，Palm的形式变得越来越小，更弯曲（更加嬉戏，友好”），并舒适地掌握在您的手中，无论大小如何。设计师今天仍然努力奋斗，这个问题给了我们如此临时solutionslike the PopSocket. The designers of the m100 also considered how women would cart the device around. “There’s a very big difference between briefcases for working-class males and the purses women carry; we didn’t even have computer bags yet at the time,” notes Evers. “We wanted something that slipped in and out of purses easier, and had rounded edges.”
加迪·阿米特（Gadi Amit）于2002年发行了受欢迎的棕榈齐尔设备的设计，他帮助了他有影响力的硅谷设计公司newdealsignon the map, said targeting women influenced both the design and the sales strategy for the Zire.
“我认为第一个手掌是sold in the blister packin the aisles of consumer electronics stores,” Amit says. “You didn’t have to go to the counter and ask; it was grab and go.”
Stripping the Palm of almost all of its bells and whistles was a risky gambit—but it paid off handsomely. When the Zire was introduced, it was thefastest-selling product在公司的历史上。阿米特说，尽管该产品是低成本的，但设计“尊重最终用户”。“有高光，好的塑料零件，颜色良好；当时，大多数消费电子产品都是黑色，灰色和笨拙的，”他说。“ Zire的手中有一种感觉，在美学上提出了质量。这是我每天仍然使用的公式 - 用户最终感觉到他们得到的超出了他们所支付的费用。”
Learning from Palm
阿米特（Amit）认为，Zire的成功证明，即使在今天，低端设备仍有一个有利可图的市场，即使不是全部，也很大程度上被忽略了。
阿米特说：“您可以在100美元以下所需的东西获得相当好的功能的想法是多年来或多或少被忽略的。”“我们倾向于获得多功能，今天的设备更昂贵。如今，像Palm这样的设备可能是10美元的设备。这个市场不喜欢看。”
Amit, who worked on Google’s现已停产的ARA项目, which was developing modular phones, says there’s a huge untapped market in the demographic that wants a phone, but maybe doesn’t care about having a world-class camera or unlimited music streaming capabilities.
“The whole notion [of Project Ara] was to drop the price of a smartphone below $100 by increasing the competition on components, and really going down this lane of providing a phone for the next 4 billion people,” Amit says. “This is still a very important goal, in my mind.”
本星期，德赢提款is looking at the most influential design of the year 2000. Read more这里:
- The secret history of the Motorola Razr, the first great phone of the millennium
- AIM是1997年的杀手级应用程序。今天仍在构成互联网
- 统治美国的目录Delia的兴衰