I hate that article. It entirely forgets PalmOS. This was PalmOS on the year 2000, a whopping 2 years before the Hiptop. The blackberry pager they quote is just that, a pager, and in no way representative of the state-of-the-art of nascent smartphones back then.

The VIIx had web browsing over cellular data, push-notification mail client, PIM, messaging, and fully programmable in C (& C++). Unlike the Hiptop Java crap which on a much more powerful device was slow as molasses.

The article even goes out of its way to mention that they were the first to do proportional fonts. PalmOS was doing that since '96.

And it is not possible they forgot PalmOS because of its "obscurity": it basically had a _monopoly_ from 1998-2004, the year MS finally overtook them. Despite the fact MS had been burning money ever since '96.

And to be honest, I still think the PalmOS' PIM and workflow was superior to everything we have today. They really did things like counting the number of taps required for the average action. The hiphop, on the other hand, had an almost unusable, "keyboard-first" interface. Think Android 1.0.

The only thing Danger did which PalmOS did not was multitasking. But PocketPC _did_ multitasking in a PDA as early as 1998, almost a full 4 years before the hiphop.

Almost nothing the article asserts "they did first" is true. Palm supported Bluetooth since _2001_ and Bluetooth headsets since _2003_ (not A2DP though) yet they claim they were the first to support headsets "in 2005".

The worst part is that it seems Danger's employees really have this "we were the first at _everything_" mentality deeply ingrained, since I know of another Danger employee who keeps repeating that they at Danger were the first to do a "software MIDI synthesizer". Go figure...