Palm celebrates Pilot's 10th birthday

Handheld pioneer Palm today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its ground-breaking Palm Pilot handheld, the first commercially successful device to depend entirely on pen interface.

Apple brought out the pen-driven handheld Newton two years earlier in 1993, but this failed because of poor handwriting recognition.

Palm, co-founded by former Apple employee Donna Dubinsky, produced a smaller, thinner and cheaper product with Graffiti handwriting recognition that was accurate enough to be useful.

It was an immediate success among private and business users. Famously it built a huge corporate market by entering companies 'by the back door': Palm users began to use the devices at work, where they were found to be too useful to ignore.

Pilots were not sold in the UK until mid-1996, though our then US correspondent Tim Bajarin had been raving about them for months. PCW was the first UK title to get a look at one.

Palm has since sold more than 34 million handhelds worldwide but it has been through some tricky patches. The original Pilot was designed to do a very few things very well, which was especially important at a time when even desktop processors were underpowered for the software they were running.

But this philosophy of simplicity did not serve the company well in the longer term as processors became more powerful and the competition became stronger.

Palm was slow to realise the importance of mobile telephony, and found itself competing with the likes of Symbian and Nokia on one front, while trying to fight off Microsoft's mobile assault on the corporate market. Now its flagship product, the Treo, is a smartphone.

'The first Pilot organizer was such a runaway success, even we were a bit surprised,' Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer, recalled today.

'The Pilot and its many Palm successors have become an extension of millions of people’s lives - keeping them connected to their work and home, letting them do email and browse the web on the go, allowing them to keep all their favourite files, music, photos and videos with them.

'I’m enormously proud of what we’ve accomplished, and I’m even more excited about what’s yet to come.'