Easy-to-use one purpose machine

I envisioned back in the late 90’s this highly stable and reliable easy-to-use one purpose machine that would handle mobile email; reading and replying; just text. There weren’t any. And I’m quite sure there isn’t even now any such machine. Blackberry might be very close to something like that, but there is also so much annoyance into the whole experience. I mean when you have a possibility of taking a picture and you want to send that picture via Bluetooth to your friend’s phone right on the spot, and your friend doesn't have a Blackberry-phone... Then there would be this annoying hassle and nothing would really work when the technology in the first place is not really intuitive enough for users.

Apple has been quite intuitive with the iPhone for sure, but then again to get the iPhone for a business-use, forget about it. You can’t copy/paste text or phone-numbers or you cannot copy even other files for that matter? There is no proper contacts directory, no multi-receiver sms-messages, etc. Sure it’s a nice weekend phone and a portable wlan-gadget, but nothing more. Maybe soon things will be different.

People have been really into mobile emailing with a qwerty-keyboard lately. First there were these Palm Pilot PDAs and such variants. Palm went mobile, Treo came out on the market. (Treo 750, image left) Palm didn’t really change anything on their operating system. Then came Blackberry and now they are all over the place. Even though Palm OS is a system you can really rely on, people go for “in/hip/cool” things. I admit, the Palm is quite outdated in looks when you compare it to the BB 8800 or Pearl for example, but then again it’s hard to compare them since the other system has a touch-screen and the other doesn’t. BB is more for emailing, but nothing else really. Maybe it's just that I love the Palm operating system in it's reability and, oh, well...the OS looks like an old Mac!