I used an original PalmPilot for 4 years, 1996-2000, until I got the very first smartphone (which was the size of a brick, and ran the Palm OS) called the Qualcomm PDQ. After I had that for 2 years, I switched to the Qualcomm 6035, then to a tiny Samsung flip-smartphone Palm device, and then to the Treo. Now I use an iPhone
I had a 6035 after it died I got a Samsung i500 Samsung SPH-i500 Palm OS Smartphone from Sprint PCS Review I remember on the 6035 using the Palm PPP dialer over the cell network and it only using my minutes. I had unlimited nights and weekends, and usually never came close to my daytime limits, so I practically had free data service.
This is my complete device history (Very High Res) I've used handhelds in some capacity since 1996. You can probably guess why I now do this for a living. The two devices on top are a Sharp ZQ-5000 and Pocket Electrodex. These were very simple memorization devices, no apps or anything, they let you save some memos and phone numbers and that was it. I got these as hand-me-downs from my parents who used them until they moved onto whatever the big thing was back then. Those devices held 32 kilobytes and 64 kilobytes each. That's "kilobytes", as in, the size of one of thousands of Internet packets used to deliver this message to you. It would take 26 Sharp organizers just to store that image you opened. The devices below were once I got a bit more modern. Around 2003 I picked up the Palm Zire, the entry-level Palm handheld. Believe me when I say Palm OS was the iPhone of its day; popular, pervasive, maybe lacking a bit in features when it came to the competition but still managed to stay king. Largely, this was born of its simplicity: the Zire handheld ran on a simple 68K processor and had but 2MB of RAM. This was also the era where if you didn't get home in time to charge the batteries, you lost everything on it. Backing up using the Hotsync feature was very important. In December of that same year, I outgrew the Zire very quickly and regretted not going a bit better, since I was more than impressed with Palm OS. So I outdid myself and got the Tungsten T3, what was then the top of the line. That was probably one of the best PDAs I've ever used. It would slide open to reveal more screen space, the big thing about that was that it would save space when you weren't using that part of the screen. I watched movies, played music, did everything all you teens do with phones now...before it was cool. Unfortunately, it also had deplorable battery life and really started falling apart in its later years. That's when Palm OS started dying off and I picked up the iPAQ. Windows Mobile did a lot, but I never quite found it as elegant as the Palm platform. Nevertheless, I also loved this device. Did everything I need and then some. Had slots for both SD and CF cards, I could just pop the card from my camera right in it and view the pictures. Used that one for a bit before I bought my first "modern era" device, the iPod Touch 1G (and later the iPod Touch 3G i got as a gift). I jailbroke that for every major version of iOS, from 1.1.4 (before the app store) to 3.1.2. It made a solid PDA once you removed Apple's bullshit restrictions on it. After growing beyond frustrated with the totalitarianism of the iOS platform, I decided I would move to Android, and got the Droid Incredible. Still a solid performer, I learned everything I know about Android on it, and still have Jelly Bean installed on it, for no reason at all other than I like to tinker with phones. The one I'm using now is the Galaxy S3, which would be the best phone I ever had, if the radio it came with wasn't constantly dropping its signal.
