I had this shower thought earlier and I actually wanted to post it in that community. The name I came up with was SmartWalkman, but later I realized that Walkman is Sony specific, so I doubt other companies would’ve gone for that name, but I didn’t want to let this shower thought slip so here I am now asking you guys.
I feel like palmtop, as derived from desktop and laptop, has a shot here
We had some computers called palmtops for a while! They were sort of like early tablets that ran Windows and had keyboards. Some were pretty cool, and they definitely played a similar role to smartphones for a bit. Although they were overly expensive. Here is one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO
These are making a (little) bit of a comeback. I find myself sometimes wanting a portable terminal for emergency maintenance, although it’s more practical to just throw a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone in my backpack.
Office Depot’s tiny-laptop aisle was like pornography, whenever I was dragged through there as a child in the late 90s. A computer of your own? The size of a Game Boy? Running actual* Windows?! And it’s only $3000! Forget the colored binders, mom, lemme snag one of these!
Haha yeah… I couldn’t afford them either. Also the weird fancy Sony-VAIO things only in Japan.
I did eventually get a Panasonic CF-M34 though. It was a netbook before netbooks were a thing – and you could use it to hammer in a nail, then boil it it in a pot of water to clean it. Without turning it off. Then set it gently on a table, and blow the table up with dynamite – although this apparently caused a restart (someone tried it). That thing was awesome. You still spot it in movies sometimes.
Ohhh, the Toughbooks. Yeah those things were ridiculous. I just bought a Libretto, years later, and have had the most aggravating time trying to get any data on or off of it, thanks to the gulf in interfaces.
The librettos were cute little machines though!
Also there were those TransMeta Crusoe processors that came after them. Those were way before their time and didn’t take off. Went bankrupt. Now we do that with Intel Atom, or RISC.
We did have palm pilot for a brief period in time.