Wayback Wednesday #3: Palm IIIe Special Edition
In a time when digital cameras produced grainy pictures, when Palm dominated the PDA market, and when transparency was novel, came the Palm IIIe Special Edition. Sam Evans writes a review on Geek.com, dated February 10, 2000.
What made this handheld "special" were cosmetic changes, and a low-end price. The $149 device featured translucent casing, and was aimed at entry level users; the original, grey-colored IIIe originally sold back in 1998 for $369! Palm apparently thought external transformations would do; nothing inside was changed, not even the limited 2MB memory.
The IIIe SE was actually cheaper than the IIIe. This was reasonable, given that the former carried obsolete hardware. Compare that with today's special editions, like the Treo 650 Black-Tie Edition and the Nokia 8800 Aston Martin Edition, that normally sell for more than their "normal" variants.
