Psion A3 for me, then a Psion Series5, and then a Palm IIIc. Wow, lots of memories there. I miss that Series5. It was the first device that really felt like a palm top computer.

~Briggs~

PDAs = Palm IIX (upgraded memory) --> Handera 330 --> Ipaq 3955 (upgraded memory) --> HP HX4705 (upgraded memory) --> HTC Advantage

Laptops: PcClub Enpower ENP-314 pIII --> NEC Versa Litepad --> IBM/Lenovo X41t --> (who knows!)

Still have them all! Only regularly use the HX4705, HTC Advantage and the X41t.

It's been a great journey!

BSmithers

First mobile device (apart from taking my Atari 2600 to friends:-) ) was a Thinkpad 300 with a B/W DSTN screen in 1993. I remember how cool I thought it was I could play 'Civ' on the move! http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:300

The screen was awful, smeary and hard to read.

Next major mobile device was a Psion 3a (battery life in measured in weeks!) then a Cassiopeia E105 which had a great Galaga clone on it and was also my first ebook reader!

I must be old. My first portable was an Epson Geneva PX8 CPM machine, complete with tape drive and the CPM OS!

http://www.vintage-computer.com/epsonpx8.shtml

This was 1985 or so, and I was geeked to get it. I took it on a business trip in 87 and it performed great. I think my wife has it at her preschool as a toy now.

My first mobile computer was a TRS80 Model 100. It only had a 4 line text display and a 300 baud modem, but it allowed me to stay in contact with family and friends online via a long-gone company named Compuserve.

I couldn't do any word processing worth discussing with it, but it was the first real online portable that I had.

My first portable "computer" that did office work was a Toshiba laptop with a black and white display. I had to modify it to even add a hard drive (a whopping 10MB) and get a Carnet in order to carry it overseas in the late '80's. Still, it was wonderful to have a travelling copy of Word Perfect!

I guess my first portable was the Commodore SX64

And it was heavy ;)

Sharp Zaurus

Engineer here ... for what engineers did then and what we do now, a programmable calculator would certainly qualify as a computer. Thus, my 1976 HP-25C was my first mobile computer. Ah, I see that some of you are thinking a calculator is not really a computer. OK, how about my circa 1978 Rockwell AIM65? It had a one-line LED display built-in printer and an external cassette player for storage ( check it out here: http://oldcomputers.net/AIM-65.html, the gray plastic case version, second photo.) After that, a year or two later I got an HP-85 (http://oldcomputers.net/hp85.html) with BASIC in ROM. They sure don't make them like that anymore (TM) ...

First portable? Packard-Bell laptop in about 1990...black and white, but it served me well. Favorite portable? HP Jornada 820. WinCE, but with 640x480 display, keyboard, clamshell design, much like a current ASUS EEPC or any of the other ultraportables. It was a great machine, I still have it...also, about ten hours of battery life. If I could have loaded normal Windows programs on it, I'd be using it still.

Atari portfolio:
http://oldcomputers.net/portfolio.html
t

I'd had some devices before but the one that really made me feel mobile was my Jornada 720 (looks lovingly at it sitting on my desk gathering dust). I don't actually use it anymore but I do charge the battery every so often.

My first mobile device was a Netwon MP100 Appel. But I think it could be the Amstrad Notepad. I had a lot of mobile devices.

They have me excited from the outset. I think the oldest Mobile device what I had was a notebook with legendary 286er processor and 10 MB hard disk.

The battery was then pointed times. Good two hours for the times was already incredibly good.

At that time there were already really good equipment and now I use full satisfaction of a Nokia E90, a Everun and rounding off an IBM X41.

To screen question:

Green screen was always good. The first notebook I had was with blue and white display.

Could you still remember the Commodore SX64?

That was a C64 in a long housing what you wear. However, without a battery.

1989. Tandy 1400
1994. Apple Powerbook 150
1995. Apple PowerBook 190
1996. Palm Pilot 1000
1997. Newton Messagepad 2000
1997. Newton Messagepad 2001 upgrade
2006. Motion LE 1600
2008. Toshiba M700


There was also a Mac laptop every year between '96 and now, plus a lot of desktop Macs and a few desktop PCs - but the list above hits the significant points of my mobile history.

The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium is the only umpc/mobile device that I lust after these days - though the upcoming MID-devices may spark an interest. Its too bad Samsung hates Canada (won't sell umpc line here - thankfully www.expansys.ca exists). Unless something better presents itself, I'll soon have another entry for 2008!

Peter

My first mobile device was Pocketmail, a blue thing double the size of my PDA which had a keyboard for writing emails and then you held it up to the telephone receiver and it made goofy dial-up noises and sent your email. It actually came in useful overseas on many occasions. The bad thing is when I started getting spam through that thing I would be holding it up to the phone like an idiot for 5 minutes+ and people would stare at me wondering what kind of strange James Bond things I was doing to the payphone.

A desktop-beige colored Toshiba, can't remember the model name, around 1989 or so... I was doing financial analysis work on factory projects and even took it to Moscow (the days of Gorby). The hard disk had a problem there. When I told our counterparts (Ministry of Radio Industry) that we had a problem, but I had Lotus 1-2-3 and the spreadsheets all set up on a floppy, they wisked me off to a KGB office where they had a room full of the Soviet version of PCs with keyboards the size of skateboards with cables that looked like old telephone trunk line.

The local Russian "PC experts", besides sitting in another room most of the time watching pirated videos of Hollywood movies, were anxious to get the Toshiba and see if they could fix it (!), but I figured that might violate some sort of technology export laws if they actually got a look inside one. When I had finished and was ready to leave the "PC room", I spent about 30 minutes deleting the Lotus software and storing copies of junk on the hard disk until it got full to remove any trace of the software on their hard drives.

Those were the days... I guess Putin and Medvedev have better equipment now ;-)

That said, my Dad also had one of those first Compaqs.

Several notebooks, but my first real mobile / tablet was the ePod which was a great WinCE device and super form factor. Soon after I also got the Panasonic CF-01 which ran Win 95 and I thought it was just amazing at the time. My first tablet pcs....followed by TC1000, X41 and now X61.

1982: Osborne 1, 28 pounds, pre-green/amber, a lovely dull gray.

I took a Radio Shack Model 101 and a tape recorder to Mexico in around '84.

A Radio Shack laptop that had built-in TRS-DOS and a suite of programs, but no backlight (and I'm not remembering a battery, either), around 1990-91.

A Compaq laptop around '92 or '93. It had no graphic capability, worked for word processing and email.

Some kind of Compaq laptop around '98, my first windows machine.

Tablets:

Acer Travelmate 112T (2004) Very light weight.
Toshiba M400 (2006)
Samsung Q1P (2006)

Palms:

III, IIIe, M505, Tungsten C (wifi!), Tungsten E, Tungsten E2.

The revolutions:

Word processing--not having to retype whole papers because I changed something on page 1. Let the electrons do the work for you. WordStar on the O1 was the first word processor that showed you where your lines and pages ended without having to view in a print mode. Amazing. I was the lone guy with my own computer at the library, but it wasn't something I grabbed as I ran out the door.

True portability in the Model 101, even if it lacked real word processing. Fantastic, perhaps the best keyboard ever. That one I could take anywhere AND it ran wonderfully on four double A batteries.

True portability/full word processing with Radio Shack notebook whatever it was.

Pen note taking with my Palm, and I with an external keyboard (a clamshell; one that folded in half; Stowaways), meant I could take notes and write anywhere. I went back to school in '99 with a Palm III, and all my notes are digital (unlike the first time around), and I wrote most of my papers on that thing.

True portable connectivity with the Tungsten C.

Windows XP Tablet 2005 was the first anything that could read my handwriting.

Being able to ink on Word and PPT--gesture or capture handwriting--is revolutionary.

OneNote is revolutionary.

My Samsung Q1P is not just a full, inking computer that I CAN take with me anywhere, it is one that I DO take with me everywhere.

1998 - Texas Instrument Travelmate, monocrome screen don`t remember the model, i guess Travelmate 3000

2000 - 2001 - Handspring Visor

2003 - Handsprint Treo 180 (GSM phone and PDA)

2004 - Averatec Tablet PC C3500

2005 - Acer Aspire notebook

2007 - ASUS R2H UMPC
2007 - HTC TyTN / T-Mobile MDA II / Hermes
2007 - HTC 7500 Advantage

2008 - HTC TyTN II / Kaiser
2008 - HP Tx2120us Tablet PC

wow, i-m sure that I missing some gadget, but I think these are the representative in my mobile life :)

Have a great weekend!!

Carlos
Bolivia

Epson HX20. For many the first true laptop computer. I still have it in its case.

SHARP 1500A: http://www.pygmy.com/pc1500.htm

Which seems to be eual to the TRS80 PC-2?
http://www.pc1500.com/pc2manual.html

(You learn something new everyday...)

Wow, I just remembered I had a bunch of pocket PIM devices that folded clamshell style, but opened lying flat, with a screen on top and membrane keyboard and function keys on the bottom. I got good with those, but notes were necessarily brief, and I don't remember any of them syncing with a computer. I say a bunch, maybe three. There was one company that made the keyboard in alphabetical order instead of qwerty (not a keyboard for me).

@Anon, I well remember my friends and science teachers with their true programmable calculators, HP, and some higher level Texas Instruments. One I remember could store programs on magnetic cards the size of a business card snipped lengthwise in half. Amazing technology.