Palm Pre Sold 37,000 Units Before Vanishing Completely
Talisman Design is crowdfunding a device called the PocketMage. A clamshell PDA with an e-paper screen, a mechanical keyboard, and separate OLED display for quick access.
It's pitched as a response to creative professionals drowning in notification noise, people who want to write and take notes without the gravitational pull of apps. The device costs $799 because enough people felt nostalgic for 2004.
This exact resurrection attempt happened before, and it failed completely. In 2009, Palm released the Pre. A genuine attempt to resurrect the PDA form factor with a gesture-based interface, a focus on productivity, and hardware people actually liked holding in their hands.
The Pre launched with real affection from users who wanted an alternative to the iPhone's walled garden. Tech enthusiasts loved it. Regular people bought exactly 37,000 of them before the device vanished from store shelves within months. The Pre didn't fail because of nostalgia. It failed because of infrastructure that nobody sells as part of the product.
The mechanical brilliance of the device became irrelevant the moment users realized they couldn't reliably move their files out.
A smartphone is not a phone. It is an ecosystem. The Pre had Palm's WebOS operating system, which was genuinely innovative and fast, but it had no developer base. The iPhone had over 15,000 apps by 2009 while the Pre had maybe 400. More critically, the Pre depended on cloud synchronization and file sharing with services like Dropbox and Google Drive that had no incentive to build robust integrations for a device controlled by a company they were not. And the Pre couldn't talk smoothly to the systems where its users actually stored their work.
The PocketMage will face identical structural conditions. It relies on cloud sync with platforms it doesn't control. It has no app ecosystem. Developers have no reason to build for it when the same user owns an iPhone, an iPad. A Mac that all share the same incentive system. The device might be beautiful.
What's changed since 2009 is not the market structure. It's our amnesia about how that structure actually works.
List three apps or services you use daily and identify which company controls your data within each one—understanding these dependencies clarifies why switching devices feels harder than it should.
