palm iii

january 18, 2025

for about three years now, i have had some sort of interest in pdas/pocket pcs of the 90s and early 2000s. in 2021, i got a palm zire 21, but in that time period i knew pretty much nothing about how to do anything with it, and the battery was dead so it stayed plugged in a wall at all times, so i spent most of my time on it practicing graffiti. and then i broke the charger port by trying to use my laptop charger on it

fast forward a month ago, and i got some money from a relative for good grades, because for some reason my family does that. i wanted something to play old games on, mostly to get back at a friend who has a jailbroken iphone 4s, and i wanted it to have removable batteries, so that i didn't have to worry about it being doa and having to spend more money on a replacement battery.

i went for the iii mostly because i put no research into what i should have gotten. had i done that, i probably would have gotten an m105, but i already had my eyes set on the iii. so, with a budget of around 25 dollars, i bought both the palm iii and the dock.

for the handspring visor.

i made the mistake of not educating myself on palm os devices prior to this, so now i had a cool piece of plastic and a hopefully working piece of plastic. i put some batteries into the working piece of plastic, and the screen powered on. i took out the stylus, only to find that the screen wasn't registering my inputs at all. then i found out i had to press really, really hard on it. so i unscrewed the back, in an attempt to get whatever was under the screen out.

this is what the inside looks like by the way

due to the few supplies i have being not great, i was unable to get the screen out. i turned it back on to make sure i didn't ruin anything, and somehow the screen just worked like normal. so i just put it back together and made it play little bleeps and boops.

a month later, i get money from my uncle for christmas. 50 dollars, precisely. the first thing i thought to myself when i received that money, was to buy the correct dock and a serial to usb adapter, because the one working computer i had with a serial port, my dell latitude from 2001, gave up on its cd drive while i was installing a dell oem copy of windows xp, and then the hard drive died a few days prior to the palm iii's arrival.

i ordered the dock and the serial adapter. the adapter arrived in 2 days, and the dock was set to come on the 13th. and it never came. so i waited. no updates. the next day, no updates. the day after, no updates. and then, on the 17th, i went on my phone, checked on ebay, and it finally updated. and it was set to come at 7 that night. it actually came at 4

now that you know how long i waited to be able to write this, i can write about it.

upgrade

one neat thing about the palm iii (and many other later models), is that it has a flash rom, meaning you can upgrade it to later versions of palm os. palm supported the iii line until around late 2001, and in that time they released a flash tool to upgrade your iii to palm os 4.1, the last version to be released before palm's switch to arm cpus. so i upgraded it

after around ten minutes of that, it was now on palm os 4.1. i bought this for games, so i was going to get games on this thing. fortunately for me, palm desktop, the stuff you need for doing anything at all on your palm, came with 5 of them. unfortunately, most of them were boring.

giraffe is just the included graffiti app, except you have to write the letters before they reach the bottom, there's a points system and there are levels. i didn't like this one too much mostly because after a month of relying solely on the included graffiti app for entertainment, a rebadged version of it was not what i needed. minehunt is just minesweeper, which i'm terrible at, and hardball is a simple breakout clone.

the only games i found any enjoyment in is puzzle, which is a sliding puzzle, and subhunt, where you have to destroy ships below for points while also avoiding mines. disappointed, i made the journey to palmdb, and i went into the 'toys' section because that sounded slightly more fun than the games section. i shall now present to you what i found in there.

toys

the first app i downloaded was the beeper. put in some numbers, and it'll make a sound. there's also a beep button that just plays a predetermined sound.

this is what it looks like, but imagine it in two-color grayscale. image from palmdb

i also thought it would be a fun idea to compare the speakers between two models in the iii line. i emulated the iiixe because i was not getting another pda just for this

this is what the palm iii speaker sounds like

and this is what the palm iiixe speaker sounds like

the next thing i got was 'digi-guppie'. it's a single fish swimming around. just one. and you can choose between three types of fish. also if you hold the stylus up to the screen it behaves like the dvd logo screensaver

the next next thing i got was a face painter. you get three faces, and you can draw or erase. that is all.

the last thing i got that i will show you is mcrazor. it makes sounds that mimic a razor but this is also somewhat useful because it tells you how much battery you have left

what will i do with it now

games. you probably noticed that what i installed and showed you were toys, not games. so now, what i will install and not show you are games.

anyways, without making this page unnecessarily long, that is all until i feel like writing the next blog. ok bye