It's a sad fact of life that not every handheld is a success.
Some fail because their designers tried to do the impossible. Others fail because the designers didn't try hard enough.
I've compiled a list of the five most disappointing Palm OS handhelds ever.
Before I start, though, I want to make it clear that these aren't the worst handhelds ever made.
For one thing, I'm restricting the list to just Palm OS models, and these are rarely complete dogs. They often have just a single fatal flaw.
Also, this list is made up of models that were disappointing, not necessarily total failures. These handhelds had the potential to be great, but weren't.
 5. Sony Clie UX50
I know including the UX50 on this list is going to send some people up in flames, but I was very disappointed by this model.
With its clamshell design, dual wireless capabilities, and generous amount of memory, this could have been the best handheld ever, even at its high price.
But Sony blew it by putting in a tiny screen that that was locked into landscape mode.
I tried to like the UX50. I really did. But I got eyestrain reading tiny letters, and the large area of plastic around the screen mocked me. And whenever I flipped the screen around to put the device into tablet mode, I wanted to switch the screen to portrait orientation but couldn't.
 4. HandEra 330
If you're new to the handheld world, you might never have even heard of HandEra, as it stopped making handhelds years ago.
Its final model, the 330, was incredibly ambitious. It was one of the first Palm OS model with a CompactFlash slot or a voice recorder. It's also the only one I can think of with a QVGA screen.
Unfortunately, it was a monochrome device when the market was moving to color screens.
Sales of the 330 were so poor, HandEra never made another handheld, which is too bad. No Palm OS maker has ever supported CompactFlash peripherals like this one did.
 3. Handspring Visor Edge
In some ways, the Visor Edge was the antithesis of the HandEra 330. It was probably Handspring's least functional handheld.
Unlike all the other Visors, you had to attach a special widget in order to be able use Springboard modules.
Also, the HandEra 330 was ugly as a stump, while the Edge was beautiful. Slim and sleek, it's one of the few handhelds I remember seeing in advertisements for other products.
But, as different as the 330 and the Edge were, they both had the same fatal flaw. They were monochrome devices that came out at the same time Palm and Sony released color ones that cost about the same.
 2. Sony Clie NZ90
I don't mean to beat up on Sony by putting two Clies on this list, but Sony made so many different models it's inevitable that one or two of them didn't work out.
The NZ90 was another overly-ambition model. It had a 2 megapixel camera with flash when only a few other devices had built-in VGA ones.
You could even plug its cradle into a TV to display the pictures you'd taken.
Sadly, it was approximately the size and weight of a brick, it cost $800, and its battery life was measured in minutes.
I can see what Sony was trying to do with this model, but its reach simply exceeded its grasp.
 1. Palm Tungsten W
The Tungsten W was Palm's attempt to make a cellular-wireless handheld. Unfortunately, it got just about everything wrong, which is why it's at the top of my list of bad handhelds.
It was widely criticized because it lacked the most basic things every phone has to have: a speaker and microphone. The only way to make a phone call was to plug in a headset.
And it didn't have Bluetooth, so this had to be a wired headset.
It also ran Palm OS 4 at the time Palm OS 5 devices were everywhere. No one is paying top dollar for an out-of-date device.
The Tungsten W bombed. No one bought it. At least Palm learned its lesson and didn't try again. Instead, it bought Handspring to get the Treo 600, which had a much, much better design.
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