EEVblog #334 - History of PDA's in Teardowns

Teardown Tuesday
A teardown chronological history of PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) Organisers spanning 17 years.
The 1986 Psion II Organiser
The 1996 Palm Pilot 5000
The 2003 HP iPAQ 5550

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[ASilentS]

It was sort of amazing how Palm required people to learn a specific way of writing for the character recognition and was pretty much successful in that regard.

[Browningate]

HP did buy out Palm, but not until a number of years after that iPAQ was released. The brands were still competing at that point if I'm not mistaken. Cool teardown though. I owned a Palm m500 (similar to the Pilot5000, but a bit newer, circa 2001) and still have my iPAQ 4150.

[MrIvorfan]

One of thw 2 large blue capacitors, along with the inductor, was used in the charge pump for generating 21v to program the EPROM memory packs. The 3.6864 is NOT the clock speed of the CPU - it's divided by 4 to 0.9216. The extra ROM is this was a a multilingual version. The unknown square chip next to the ribbon is a semi-custom controller chip. There was no realtime clock, but it used a counter to turn it on after about 34 mins to update itself, driven by the 32k xtal.

[seveno]

He has a great voice no problem for me ...very distinct not mumbling like some ...great for ex fault finders like me... I started with valves early 60s ..packed up in the late 80 s could not earn a living any more ...very inspiring ...got the urge to get back into it...thanks mate ...

[TheCrazyInventor]

I love all the expressions you Aussies use. "Used to run on the sniff of an oily rag". Fantastic! :)

[gusmueller]

that "spider" you saw is a shed skin from a spider that could still be alive somewhere. see the little holes at the tops of each leg? thats where that skin fits on the spider like an eight-legged pair of trousers

[KBUIF]

There was a cell phone version of the ipaq so that warranty sticker looks like it covered the position for the sim card for that service.

I used all of these devices over the years so you took me down memory lane,
Many thanks.

[Mr.Laidukas]

I guess that HP iPAQ 5550 antenna is built like that to get circular polarization and some gain. Helical antennas are directional. Circular polarization prevents you from going out of signal polarization when moving the device.

[colormaker]

I have a new visor prism in box and the seal has not been broken. One day I will give it to my kids. Love your channel.

[Burningwithecstasy]

your enthusiasm for technology is infectious. keep the videos coming!

[mikeselectricstuff]

44780 can direct drive small displays like 8x1 - the second chip expands the number of segments.

[tmd]

Dave, The Wifi antenna touches the pad next to the circular connection. Check the hole alignment with the screw hole. The screw is directly above the connector and the wire spring is to one side. 46:50 Top Right, you can see the square contact pad ANT1.

[IndustrialGoblin]

That super cap in palm device might be just hacked in by previous owner, because as far as I remember Palm originally used lithium batteries, and super caps was the popular way to fix dead battery issue.
P.S. I presume the next version of DragonBall processor would be DragonBall Z?

[MrKldenton]

I actually miss my Palm nowadays, though my phone does all the stuff it did and more, the Palm unit just did it so well and when you had it in your hand you were using it an an organiser as intended, not browsing facebook or some other time wasting rubbish.

[Zero-dgdz]

The psion 2 has OPL Organiser programming language so its more akin to a pocket computer than PDA nice video showing how technology changes over the years

[ArduinoTronic]

I would like to point out that the black marks on the board where the components are not fitted are in fact the components. These are pull up/down resistors screen printed in a thick film ink made by Acheson.

[pikuorguk]

The book "Piloting palm" has a good insight into how the original Palm Pilot was designed and created.

[xKatjaxPurrsx]

I think those "black marks" are actually carbon paint jumpers!

[EEVblog]

Thanks, made for an interesting video. I have a Psion 5 as well I thoguth about tearing down too, but this one was long enough already!

[xpepos]

Those axial caps on the Psion Organiser II are in fact part of a charge pump designed to generate high voltage (21V) to program Datapaks. Datapaks were actually EPROMS + some circuitry. Later version of EPROMS use just 12.5V so there was some sort of voltage divider on the pack.