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Needed a phone jack to call
The Hardware
It was about the size of a hardback book, with a grayscale monochrome touch screen the size of a postcard. It ran on double A batteries and drained them mercilessly. There was no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth in that world, so to send a message you sat at your office desk and plugged the device into a telephone cable. You had to do the same to make a call.
The Sales Problem
The graphics were charming, the sound effects were pleasing, and the touch screen interface was ahead of its time. It still cost about $1,600 in today's money for not a lot of functionality. The only people who bought it were the friends and family of General Magicians. Sony sold 3,000 units in the first six months, and years later Apple would sell about 300,000 iPhones on the first day.
In 1995, alliance member Motorola released the Envoy, which did have wireless communication. It was almost twice the price of the Magic Link.
How does a modem send data over wires?
A modem converts digital bits into audio tones that travel across a voice phone line and converts them back at the other end. That conversion is why dial-up connections made their screeching handshake sounds. In the mid-1990s consumer modems sent data at 14.4 to 28.8 kilobits per second. Voice phone lines were designed to carry frequencies up to about 3,400 hertz, which limited how much data fit through.
Why did the Palm Pilot succeed where others stalled?
Palm launched the Pilot in 1996 at about $300, far below the roughly $700 price of Apple's Newton, which had launched in 1993. It fit in a shirt pocket, started instantly, and synced with a desktop computer through a cradle. It did a handful of jobs, such as a calendar, address book, and notes, and did them quickly. Its Graffiti system had users write letters in a simplified stroke alphabet that the device could read reliably.
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