Introduction to the design of palmtops

Introduction to the design of palmtops

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Palmtops are small computers that are of the shape of our palm. They are similar in design to a desktop computer but without any disk drive to store data. However, to overcome this drawback, they have slots to insert disk drives, modems, etc. to store our data. No, palmtops are not better than computers because though they are smaller in size and portable, data storage becomes a problem in the case of palmtops. Thus, apart from being small in size, palmtops don’t have many advantages over a computer, unlike laptops.

Introduction to the design of palmtops

A Palmtop PC is a computer small enough to hold in one hand and then operate with the other hand. It is also called a handtop. It has a small keyboard or specialized keypad customized to particular industry. General-purpose palmtops never became popular but were brought back to life in the form of today’s Smartphones and tablets which are basically handheld computers.

The image above shows an example of a Palmtop. The above is an IBM palmtop that dates back to the days of Intel 486 CPUs in the 1990s. Another good example of Palmtop PC is the PalmPilot. Because of their small size, early versions of Palmtop computers didn’t have a keyboard or a mouse.

Palmtop PCs differentiate from other palmtop computers by using typically IBM-compatible PC architecture and BIOS including an Intel-compatible x86 processor. Majority of these devices were DOS-based where DOS is stored in ROM.