Palm Pilot

In 1996, Palm Computing manufactured a range of PDAs, under the product name, 'Pilot'. However, with an objection from Pilot Pen Corporation, for infringement of trademark, Palm Computing had to discontinue using the name 'Pilot' for its PDAs. But, in the meantime, Palm Pilot had already established its product in the market, and the name 'Pilot' by then had already become a generic name for all PDAs. The idea of a PDA struck Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, while they were working on creating handwriting recognition software for devices like, 'Graffiti'. The first generation included Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, which respectively had a memory of 128K and 512K. They did not have infrared port or backlight. The next generation included, Palm Pilot Personal and Palm Pilot Professional. These had memories of 512K and 1024K plus backlight. The following range of PDAs, were called Palm. Following the Personal and Professional models, Palm III, had backlight, infrared port as well as flash memory. It functioned on standard AAA batteries and data was not lost, when the battery was replaced. Palm III had a memory of 2 MB. The versions that followed thereafter, include, Palm IIIx, Palm IIIe and Palm V, which had higher memories. Palm VII allowed wireless access to certain internet services; this happened, when the concept of internal rechargeable batteries was introduced and since then, has been continuing till date. Palm handhelds are getting more and more advanced by the day and can be called as a miniature version of Note-books. Treo 700w uses Windows as its operating system (OS) instead of Palm OS.