Asklemmy

43892 readers

941 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

If the order of events were different, what might we be calling smartphones? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 8 months ago by SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I had this shower thought earlier and I actually wanted to post it in that community. The name I came up with was SmartWalkman, but later I realized that Walkman is Sony specific, so I doubt other companies would’ve gone for that name, but I didn’t want to let this shower thought slip so here I am now asking you guys.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 31 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I feel like palmtop, as derived from desktop and laptop, has a shot here

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We had some computers called palmtops for a while! They were sort of like early tablets that ran Windows and had keyboards. Some were pretty cool, and they definitely played a similar role to smartphones for a bit. Although they were overly expensive. Here is one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO

These are making a (little) bit of a comeback. I find myself sometimes wanting a portable terminal for emergency maintenance, although it's more practical to just throw a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone in my backpack.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Office Depot's tiny-laptop aisle was like pornography, whenever I was dragged through there as a child in the late 90s. A computer of your own? The size of a Game Boy? Running actual* Windows?! And it's only $3000! Forget the colored binders, mom, lemme snag one of these!

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Haha yeah... I couldn't afford them either. Also the weird fancy Sony-VAIO things only in Japan.

I did eventually get a Panasonic CF-M34 though. It was a netbook before netbooks were a thing -- and you could use it to hammer in a nail, then boil it it in a pot of water to clean it. Without turning it off. Then set it gently on a table, and blow the table up with dynamite -- although this apparently caused a restart (someone tried it). That thing was awesome. You still spot it in movies sometimes.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ohhh, the Toughbooks. Yeah those things were ridiculous. I just bought a Libretto, years later, and have had the most aggravating time trying to get any data on or off of it, thanks to the gulf in interfaces.

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 1 points 8 months ago

The librettos were cute little machines though!

Also there were those TransMeta Crusoe processors that came after them. Those were way before their time and didn't take off. Went bankrupt. Now we do that with Intel Atom, or RISC.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

We did have palm pilot for a brief period in time.