While the iPAC family of 'Pocket PCs' was clearly marketed at the sort of young urban professional who might be in the market for a Filofax upgrade, my reasons for acquiring one were far more literary and refined. And I'd never owned a diary, let alone a Filofax.
In spring 2001 we were a few months away from launching a range of ebooks and an ebookstore at Penguin, the first such endeavour from a major UK publisher. The iPhone was half a decade from taking the world by storm and the Kindle was not yet a glimmer in Jeff Bezos' eye, but we knew that at some point in the future people would want to read books on screens smaller than a computer monitor and in 2001 the iPAQ was as good as it got.
Boasting 32mb on onboard memory, the iPAQ was a powerhorse of its day. I could store a good few ebooks on the device, though I wouldn't have had enough memory to store an album from Spotify had Spotify been around back then. To get a book on the device one had to connect it with actual wires to an actual computer and use Microsoft's proprietary software to move the title from computer to handheld. The small number of early ebook adopters who purchased ebooks from the Penguin site when we launched later that year were confronted by pages of instructions and FAQs to aid 'onboarding'. Publishers and their tech partners were seemingly more concerned with preventing ebook piracy than with providing a pleasant customer experience and this was reflected in the minuscule ebook sales we made in the pre-Kindle era.
I'm sure I read a few books on my iPAQ but mainly I used it for posing, carrying it ostentatiously round the office, scratching illegible notes on its screen with its stylus during meetings, acting like the sort of yuppie arse I professed to hate. 'Look at me, with my Compaq iPAQ and look at you, with your paper manuscripts! Which of us is the future, eh, eh?' Then, in November 2001 Apple released the '1000 songs in your pocket' iPod and suddenly my iPAQ stopped looking so much like the future. Early the following year it went into my desk drawer to be joined later by a Rocket eBook and a Sony eReader. I left Penguin in 2010. For all I know my tiny Museum of Dead eBook Readers is still in situ.
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