The worst PDA of all time – OSnews
This title could be clearer and more informative.Try out Clickbait Shieldfor free (5 uses left this month).
A detailed retrospective on the Olivetti daVinci DV3, a late-1990s PDA widely regarded as one of the worst ever made. Olivetti outsourced its operating system development to Hong Kong firm Echolink Design, which ended up copying actual Palm OS source code, leading to a lawsuit from Palm/3Com and a court-ordered sales injunction. The DV3 itself is examined in depth: its cheap plastic build, dim low-resolution screen, unreliable Graffiti-clone handwriting input, mysterious Sharp SM6010 processor, and a fan-made reverse-engineered game built by hobbyists who disassembled its firmware. The piece contrasts the daVinci's failures with the design excellence of Palm OS and Windows Pocket PC, which shaped modern smartphone paradigms.
Questions this post answers
What lawsuit did Palm file against Olivetti over the daVinci PDA?
Palm, then a subsidiary of 3Com, sued Olivetti alleging that the daVinci's operating system, developed by Hong Kong contractor Echolink Design, contained stolen Palm OS source code, including grammatical mistakes copied verbatim. Palm also sued CompanionLink Software, maker of the daVinci's Outlook sync tool. A judge granted temporary restraining orders halting sales within a day of filing, and Olivetti claimed the copied code was under 2% of the OS. Anyone tracking software IP disputes can follow similar cases and analysis on daily.dev.
What processor does the Olivetti daVinci DV3 PDA use?
The daVinci DV3 runs on a Sharp SM6010, a basic 16-bit single-chip microcomputer with an unspecified proprietary architecture clocked at 30MHz, featuring an integrated LCD controller, watchdog timer, UART/SCI serial interfaces, SIR, PWM output, real-time clock, A/D converter, and bus controller. The chip is epoxy-blob packaged, making visual identification impossible, and documentation is scarce. Retro hardware tinkerers digging into obscure chips like this can find similar deep dives on daily.dev.
How did hobbyists develop custom software for the Olivetti daVinci DV3 without an official SDK?
Developer Alex Zwiesele discovered that the daVinci DV3's installation CD-ROM contained the full operating system image and a loader program, since Olivetti never released the promised SDK. Zwiesele and collaborators wrote their own disassembler and assembler based on Sharp SM6010 documentation, then disassembled the OS binary, injected custom code, reassembled it, and loaded it back via the loader, eventually producing a working Breakout clone by 2003. Developers reverse-engineering obscure embedded firmware can find similar hardware hacking writeups on daily.dev.