What the hell is this thing?

Davnes007 said:

What the hell is this thing?

That's what she said.

It's obviously a cheap "generic" Palm Pilot knock-off (there were hundreds like all those 'Fauxlofaxes').

You might get a clue if you can open the thing up and have a look at the chips but I doubt it.

With a bit of luck it's a direct clone of a major name brand device in which case it would mimic all the PIM functions of it doubtlessly documented antecedent.

I think it's a leftie "smartphone."

Oh what a blast from the past! I used to have one of those...don't remember what happened to it. Like other people have been saying, it's a PDA: simple, quaint, and ultimately useless with the advent of smart phones.

I thought the OP was a joke at first, then I realized it was serious, and now I am crying.

One of the coolest pieces of technology I owned when I was a preteen was my electronic organizer. It was awesome, like having my very own computer that fit in my pocket. I could type up short paragraphs in it and save them. Or use it as a calculator. Years later I upgraded to one with an indiglo screen. I think my first one was a Royal DM75. All my friends were really jealous, and I felt extremely sophisticated with this thing in my back pocket everywhere I went. It was basically a glorified calculator with all the capabilities of a digital watch, and with the ability to store a limited number of text memos. I used to store dirty words in mine, and felt pretty cool about it. It featured a password lock too, so no worries of prying eyes reading my secret profanity laced memos to myself.

Later the things came with dictionaries built into them, and you could play simple word games (like hangman) on them.

The one pictured above was what they started to look like right before they went extinct, mimicking the look of the then popular, and much more technologically advanced, PDAs.

I still have my Merlin.

I also still have one of these:

I had a little professor.

Remembering archaic technology...

Back in high school a buddy (foreign exchange student) and I went to an electronics store. My friend asked the sales floor guy there about mini-disc players, and the guy, trying to be helpful, told him not to even bother with mini-disc and to go with an mp3 player instead. This was a few years before the ipod came along, mp3 players were a new thing and what would be considered a cheapo mp3 player today was quite expensive then. My friend argued with the electronics store guys that mini-discs are clearly going to be the successor to the CD and that mp3's will never take off beyond use by pirates (this was even before Napster sold out), and also that mini-discs were better because they never skip. The guy looked at him funny and said, "Mp3's are all digital, there are no moving parts, it would be impossible for them to skip."

They went back and forth for a while. Kind of a funny conversation to reflect back on now. Pfft, mini-disc players...

With the rampant anti-piracy awareness campaigns going on around this time, I once got grounded for having mp3's, apparently my computer was making a lot of noise so my mom went in to check it out, saw a weird program running on the screen, made out the word "mp3" along with artist and song names, noticed a stack of borrowed CD's on top of the CPU, and somehow figured out that I was ripping CD's into mp3's. There went a perfectly good week of my social life. Mp3 almost did used to be a dirty word associated with delinquent youths who stole music. It was almost like I got caught with drugs, I remember my mother in a hurt and disappointed voice saying something like, "I sure hope you wouldn't be okay with going into a store and stealing CD's."