What's the deal with humidity meters or hygrometers as they're officially called
I have three of them here and although they're displaying
Pretty close in terms of their temperatures within a few degrees of each other
This one's stuck in Celsius for some reason, but 21.8 Celsius is about
71 degrees Fahrenheit, so they're pretty close in terms of temperature readings, but their humidity readings are all over the place
35%
57%
46% and they've all been sitting right next to each other for at least an hour
So you think they'd be reading the same thing?
So what are they just guessing but that's not what this video is going to be about. It's about this thing a
Palm
IIIe
handheld personal digital assistant from 1999
this was a thrift store find as most of my
Things I show on my videos usually are the first PDA was the Apple Newton introduced in 1993
He was this huge brick light thing, which didn't really work that well
It was expensive and it was pretty much a commercial failure the Palm Pilot
Introduced in 1997 was the first really successful PDA the palm 3 series replaced it in 1998
But a lot of people still called it the Palm Pilot
Even though it was not officially called that anymore and this
Model the Palm IIIe was introduced in 1999. The original list price was
229 dollars has two megabytes of RAM
16 megahertz Motorola Dragonball EZ processor
Which is actually based on the Motorola
68000 series has a 160 by 160
resolution two-bit grayscale monochrome LCD
Which is a touchscreen has a stylus it can store six thousand addresses five years worth of appointments
1500 to do items
1500 memos and 200 emails so you already saw the cover?
which for some reason doesn't flip all the way around like most of them did
Which is kind of stupid, but of course
you can remove it pretty easily. on the back is the stylus which we will need for operating it
There's the information sticker it's made in Mexico
Runs on two AAA batteries and
The battery life of this thing is - 2 months and I've been using this thing for an entire week on these crappy Harbor Freight
Carbon zinc batteries and the batteries are still almost totally full
So I do not doubt that this thing could last two months on a set of batteries
Here's the connector for syncing it with your computer
also on the back is an infrared port for wireless data transfer to other palm devices that side is nothing that
side is a contrast wheel for the LCD and
We get some buttons on the bottom here. This is the power button
Turns on instantly
Don't you wish your smartphone or tablet turn on that quickly?
There you can see how much battery life is remaining. So as the aforementioned address book
Which already has some numbers in it for ordering accessories or
Technical support which I'm sure is no longer valid because palm got bought out by Hewlett Packard
So I don't think they really provide any support for these things anymore
But those are examples some of the things you can store in the address book
As a calculator basic four function calculator
Does not have a square root which is kind of surprising
But you can do your standard
Four function calculator operations on it. You can actually use it if your finger because the buttons are large enough
But most of the things on the screen are a little bit too small to use your finger
So that's why they give you the stylus. It has a date book
Which you can store appointments like for example at 10 o'clock. I'll add a new entry
Start at 10 o'clock and at 11:00
And this is where the handwriting recognition comes into play
Oops V, no the V is like that
I'm not an expert at this. I just practiced it a little bit so there I just entered record YouTube video
through the handwriting recognition
Which is known as graffiti you can see it right there and
You use this part of the screen for entering letters in this part for entering numbers
It has a memo pad
I'll show you one of the entries they added here this part I entered using the on-screen keyboard and I switch back to the graffiti
Handwriting recognition to get to the on-screen keyboard to use this button. Which brings you the
Pulldown menus go to edit keyboard. And now you have an on-screen keyboard
So it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether you be faster using on-screen keyboard or the handwriting recognition
I guess it depends on how good you are at that graffiti
Handwriting recognition. Here's the to-do list
Which already has something here fill up and return your registration card or registered by phone or fax?
But you wouldn't believe how many people still use fax machines these days
special offers on accessories and add-ons sneak previews of new product enhancements and software releases
Because you can install software on these things
Including games
This is running palm OS 3.1. I know it's just 3.0, but it's actually palm OS 3.1 and
The Palm IIIe is a little bit different in that it does not have a flash ROM so you cannot upgrade
The OS version unlike most other Palm PDAs and you can set a password on this
You can turn off and lock device. So if you think locking your phone is something new this thing had it in
1999 when you were first set up one of these you have to go through the welcome screen
Which shows you had to remove the stylus and tap anywhere to continue
Then you have to tap it or in the middle of where they're telling you
Which calibrates it then you enter your time and date setup complete
They show you a tutorial on how to use the graffiti handwriting recognition
Try it
See there they give you some examples of how the letters are drawn and in case you're in a dark environment in which the screen
Doesn't show up that well, it doesn't have a backlight. You just hold down the power button for a few seconds and
There it lights up it
Shows up in inverse video unlike the earlier palm models
Which some people didn't like this some people actually preferred it compared to the old version
So I noticed in some environments it actually makes it worse when you turn on the backlight
Like right there you can kind of see it's more visible without it, but of course when it gets really dark
Then it certainly does make a major improvement
And your ability to use it and this was going to be pretty much the end of the video until I found this
At the thrift store today, it's the hot sync cable
For the Palm III series. Paid $1.99 for it.
plugs into your serial port on your computer that
cable plugs into the connector on the bottom here
So let's try it out while booting up my think pad. Here's a size comparison with a modern smartphone
This is actually one of the smaller ones you can buy today
And it's stupid the screen keeps dimming because it has to conserve its battery life
While all you can leave this thing on all day and doesn't even matter
so in terms of
Height they're about the same. This is a little bit wider a little bit thicker, but it still fits just fine in your shirt pocket
So here's my trusty think pad t20 which I was thankfully able to recover
From the Sony rootkit that I installed in one of my previous videos. I just ran the
official xcp uninstaller program it seems to have taken care of it and
I was able to download and install
Palm desktop 4.1.4, which is the last version that can run in Windows 98
The last ever version of palm desktop is 6.2 I believe
Which some people have even gotten to work in Windows 10
so that's running on the computer and now I'm gonna plug in the hot sync cable into the
Palm
Turn it on and now I should be able to just hit hot sync on this
And do local sync
Connecting with the desktop
Don't know if I have it set up right. Okay. I think I found the problem. It's set to USB
I have to change it to local and make sure it's set to the serial port
Local COM1 so let's try that again
There we go, I already created account so let's choose that
And there it goes it's doing the update
To-do lists, everything, synchronizing and
There it's done. You need to reset your handheld computer by tapping the button below
Huh, that's how fast it takes to boot up and remember that thing I typed in using the handwriting recognition
it's right there on the computer now, so I'll add a new one here test of
Synchronizing data
From computer to Palm. So now if I do another hot sync
Okay
let's go to the date book and there it is the
Entry I created on the computer is now on the palm and I found a Tetris game for Palm OS
Don't know if it's gonna work on this model, but I'll give it a shot
So I will sync it to the palm
So now I guess if I do a hot sync it's going to install that
There, synchronizing Tetris
And let's see, uh-huh there are it is Tetris it installed so let's try playing Tetris
Even has music
Press up to start. Okay, it's a limited demo.
Try the demo
So, how do we work this thing paused okay
Press up to resume
Okay that
Okay, so use the buttons rather than the touchscreen
That's fair enough
That drops it
Alright, I think that moves it around
It's gonna take awhile to get used to these buttons, let's try to at least get one line completed
Yeah, I don't know about that one
Gonna need some of those long ones to finish this row
Which are always the hardest to get
But the next one is gonna be one of those I
Like the different patterns they put on them
There we go
So that's Tetris for the palm III I think it said copyright 2003
So
Tetris classic by HANDMARK
Version 1.22
Officially copyrighted by the tetris company. So it's an official Tetris is not
one of those unofficial clones, so that's about it for the Palm IIIe
Personal digital assistant from 1999 and look at that been using it for pretty much an hour now
To make this video and the battery life is exactly
where it was when we started so probably not too many people use these things anymore, but
Certainly for quite a while
These were very handy things to have
before everybody started replacing them with
Blackberries and the later iPhones, but you're certainly not going to get two months of battery life out of an iPhone