Turns out folks at Qualcomm in addition to Paul Jacobs have fond memories of the pdQ. Engineers who worked on the project point out that there was some significant integration between the phone and the Palm including the ability to place a call from the Palm Address Book, a “find and dial” search for phone numbers across apps, Address Book search from the phone dialpad, and APIs to give third-party Palm developers access to pdQ phone features. These features don’t sound terribly exciting today, but they were breakthroughs in 1999.
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Infrastructure got their unvested options put back in Irwin's pocket, phone got a couple years vested, but it was still the end for the Q smartphone.
It was an ugly time where Irwin's greed and lack of a broad vision screwed over a lot of good people, and put Qualcomm where it is today.
And all those people worked hard on this project get screwed and dumped to kyocera with all their options forfeited?
Man I wanted one, I was drive testing in Qualcomm back then in a big full size stretch van with Qualcomm in huge letters on the side and had every flavor of phone but that one. Then Jacobs decided to sell the tetra project, one of the first micro base stations, to Ericsson, then the thumper phone to Kyocera. I threw out teams of parsed and analyzed data on small cell omni configurations tested for low height high density.
Ooh they still play around with small cell in coconut, and still make near production phones, but really Q will never get either back. The time is wrong, the people are wrong, and the spirit of innovation we had back then is dead.
Now I'm sad thinking about it.
Anybody here who can share memories about this age and initiative
https://techpinions.com/qualcomm-and-the-birth-of-the-smartphone/13479