I think one of the key ideas of the Palm was that it was supposed to cooperate with the desktop PC rather than compete with it (like the Newton and others tried - and failed - to do). Palm Desktop was a pretty good contact and calendar manager and the palm itself was supposed to be synchronized to what the desktop had. There was a brief period when I used it to answer work e-mails while flying between clients and synchronizing with my laptop from time to time (because the laptop hade the 14400 bps modem).
That simplicity enabled a very to-the-point environment. When Palms started to be able to connect themselves to the internet, a lot of the simplicity was lost. Palm could have gone the way of Danger and offer an online source of truth both PC and PDA would sync to/from, but they never went that way.
And the batteries lasted for weeks.