Monday, July 1, 2002

Explore the origin of the Palm OS species at PalmEvolution.com

PALMPOWER SITE OF THE MONTH

By Steve Niles

We're all familiar with that famous illustration depicting the evolution of Man from slouching Neanderthal to fully erect homo sapien. Well, Dan Royea has created a similar visual, depicting the extended family tree of the Palm OS handheld at his site called PalmEvolution.com. You can find it at http://www.palmevolution.com, and I've selected it as July's PalmPower Site of the Month. It's pictured in Figure A.

FIGURE A

From the dark ages of the late 90's to today, the Palm OS handheld has evolved. (click for larger image)

Royea has been hooked on Palm OS computing since owning his first PalmPilot Professional back in 1997. He now owns more than a two dozen Palm OS devices, not to mention his other PDAs (including a Newton, Zoomer, Magic Link, and assorted Windows CE devices).

He has also been active in the Palm OS community for many years, both on the Web and locally as president of the Vancouver Palm Users Group at http://www.vanpug.com. Along with Peter Strobel in Germany, Royea is a partner in deepTec (at http://www.deeptec.com), a company that specializes in vertical-market Palm OS development. He also acted as Technical Reviewer for O'Reilly's PalmPilot: the Ultimate Guide (Second Edition).

Royea wanted to create PalmEvolution.com because he felt it would provide an interesting visual perspective of the increasingly complex array of hardware, and he believed the Palm OS community would find it to be a valuable resource tool. His final inspiration came after reading Piloting Palm by Andrea Butter and David Pogue. This behind-the-scenes story of the birth of the handheld industry can be found at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471089656/.

Royea plans to continue updating PalmEvolution.com as new devices and licensees are announced. In fact, the new Dana device from AlphaSmart (at http://www.alphasmart.com) has already been added to the ever-growing family tree. Check out http://www.palmevolution.com for yourself and reflect on the amazing history of the Palm OS handheld.