Approximately 33 years ago a colleague at work started using a Casio organiser. I described it in My Digital Generation–

‘I sat opposite a lady called Marylyn who smoked about five hundred cigarettes a day and had a voice to prove the point, sort of like Barry White with a sore throat. One day, she brought in a Casio Organiser and showed it to me. I was dumbstruck at how clever this device was and that night dragged my girlfriend to Bournemouth town centre to buy one. £35 later I had my first PDA.

It was remarkable- I spent all night adding telephone numbers, diary entries and cities that I would never visit to the built in world map application. It was my constant companion and I immediately felt more organised and cleverer than those I worked with. I’m fairly convinced I already was, but you would have needed to work there to understand…’

From that point I went through countless Psions, Palms and Sony Clie devices with a smattering of BlackBerry’s until the iPhone 3GS which slowly worked its way into becoming your main device.

It has been iPhones ever since and during that latter period the excitement has waned while the stability and usefulness of the products has increased (apart from iOS 26 which is a bit if a dog’s dinner).

What has struck me, however, is that the glory days of mobile devices and the organisation that came with them will forever be with the Psion and Palm products. The lack of connectivity, the simplistic nature of the apps and the more human approach to mobile working just seemed to work. In some ways it is a bit like going back to ‘how the internet used to be’ which many talk about today, but in this case it is not just sentiment that makes me feel this way.

It genuinely was the case that simplicity makes for a better solution for many and that it somehow fits the human mind. Unlike so many apps today and AI solutions, the older apps did not try to do everything. They helped you do things, they provided useful triggers or reminders and they always ensured that you had to do something to make them work for you.

As I was getting used to the Viwoods AiPaper Reader (reviewed here) I started to get the same feeling. Maybe it’s the e-ink or maybe it is the lack of complexity, but I get a sense of a device that can do tasks very well with the added bonus of connectivity and just enough modern-ness to make it feel valuable.

I then tried a Palm OS emulator and boy oh boy it all came back to me in an instant. 30 years went away and I was back using Graffiti on an e-ink device just as I did all those years ago. And then the Psion emulator was tried and I was hooked! It’s just so sweet to use and surprisingly useful- it feels just like it did when I still had hair, but of course there is no permanent offline solution currently.

An emulator is never ideal and it would be good to see simpler apps available, but the AiPaper offers a lot of human-based functionality in hardware that is close to perfect. Add a few simple apps and you too can experience the feeling that older mobile enthusiasts, like myself, enjoyed so long ago.

The future should be simpler, less connected and more human.

Categories: Articles, Retro