By David Pogue
The hilarious thing about the PalmPilot's crazy, out-of-control success is that it's happening despite every plan laid by Palm Computing. The motto in their corporate hallways in Mountain View, California must be: "Less turns out to be more. Way, way more."
Let me explain
In the beginning, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins couldn't find a manufacturer for his little gadget. Nobody would touch it because it did too little. It didn't record your voice, it didn't accept PC cards, it didn't run Excel.
But Hawkins persisted. He'd seen the Newton flop, the Zoomer bomb, and the Wizards and Bosses tank. He knew the reason, too: those machines did too much. The designers overloaded their puny pocket-size arteries with too much software cholesterol. Hawkins wanted something simple, streamlined, focused.
Those qualities got the PalmPilot halfway into the halls of greatness. What shot it onto the pedestal, though, was exactly the opposite of Hawkin's original conception: the add-ons. These gadgets, extensions, and thousands upon thousands of programs take the PalmPilot beyond its designers' original plans. The PalmPilot's ability to be harnessed to almost any mobile task is a tribute not to its design simplicity, but its design openness (and 3Com/Palm's willingness to support almost any add-on effort).
For example, consider music. Yes, music. You might find it peculiar to hear music mentioned in conjunction with a device that can't record sound, can't play chords, and has a screen 160 dots square. But believe it or not, musicians around the world are tuning the PalmPilot to their will. Let us count the ways.
A little light MIDI music
You might think that the PalmPilot's chirpy little speaker would nip this palmtop's musical future in the bud. Actually, though, the music software for the PalmPilot excels at many musical tasks. And quit making fun of the PalmPilot's little piezo speaker. As of the Palm III, the PalmPilot has a much stronger and more flexible music architecture, including a louder speaker and the ability to play standard MIDI files.
For the computer musicians who just splurted their Sprites: you read that right. The PalmPilot can play back standard (one-track, format 0) MIDI files, which are like text files for music. Such files, distributed by the thousands on the Internet, are tiny, but contain the complete computer instructions for playing prepared melodies.
