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Palm Moving From Dragonball To ARM/StrongARM
mikefoley wrote to us with some interesting news from the
PalmPilot folks regarding chips. They'll be moving to Arm/SA as the title indicates, but the story also contains some cool information about their wireless plans. Looks like I'm going to need a new Palm soon.
So, the StrongARM processor chalks up yet another adoptee. Ever since Acorn Computers spun off Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) as a separate company, ARM has made progressively more and more inroads into the embedded processor market. Today there are ARM chips almost everywhere I look, from ATM routing systems to palm-helds to the odd desktop PC or Net box running either RiscOS or ARMLinux. And this has been a fairly quiet revolution happening out of sight of the general public, who neither know nor care what sits inside that little black organiser. When there is so much noise happening in the desktop PC CPU market, this is an almost refreshing change.
Now - the real question is since there is a port of Linux on the StrongARM processor, how long will it be before we can attach a microdrive to this baby and run a pocket Linux machine?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
They're going to put voice recognition in all palms. I can't think of a worse idea. Isn't it bad enough that we can't go anywhere without having to endure listening to people yell into their cel phones to affirm their perverted self importance, or walk through an office without passing at least one fool listening to voicemail over speakerphone? Now we're going to have a whole new breed of idiots speaking loudly and s-l-o-w-l-y into their handhelds, repeating everything because the first try didn't work.
"FIND MOM'S PHONE NUMBER
...
no
...
FIND MMMOMMM'S PHONE NUMBER"
over and over again.
please help me
One thing that doesn't seem to be addressed in the news item is binary compatibility. Palm has an enormous library of software that is compiled and matured on the Dragonball MCU. For the most part, this software is written in some form of C, so should be cross-compilable, but will require motivating anyone with closed source to recompile [in the very least].
Less obvious is how they are going to keep all of that straight. Hopefully they will[have] develop[ed] some kind of binary signing standard so that people who unwittingly download the Dragonball version don't install it on their ARM version [or vice versa]. I seriously doubt the two are that binary compatible... In some cases, the CPU may see that it has been handed an invalid opcode, and will branch out to a handler (if that has been implemented... that is a design subtlety that I know that I wouldn't normally worry about), but there are only so many opcodes, and there are bound to be overlap.
Anyway, the point being: trying to execute binary code for the wrong archetecture would probably have rather catastophic results. Does anyone know if there already exists a mechanism that could handle this in the Palm? I'm not aware of how application loading occurs on the platform.
Besides, I won't buy one until I can play FreeCell on it...
It's easy to write EPOC off, as its share of the PDA market is still pretty small (although it's quite high in the UK), but its inclusion in smartphones from later on this year could well see it being widely-adopted at that end of the market, with consequent "sudden" demand for compatible PDAs...
Here is a pocket ARM Linux machine. No HD, but Flash, and a CompactFlash slot.
Sorry for the formatting:
Display
240x320, Bright Back-light, True Color TFT Iiquid
crystal, 65,536 color
CPU
206MHz ARM RISC 32bit Microprocessor
OS
ARMLinux
Interface Serial
RS232C & USB Serial port
Memory
32MB RAM, 32MB(64MB) Flash Memory
Built-In
Internet Web Browser & E-mail S/W with Mobile phone
or Wireless Modem
MP3 Player Function
MPEG Moving Picture Function
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
"I think we all know that the screen sizes suck, and that the drop-down menus are the road to hell," Yankowski said.
Yes, Palm (and WinCE) handhelds have really small screens. But, what's this deal about the pull-down menus? One of the reasons I like my Palm organizer so much is you don't have to worry about the pull-down menus because you rarely use them. And, with MenuHack or PalmOS 3.5, to pull down the menus you just tap the application tab at the top of the screen; what's so hard about that?
I had been thinking lately about how Palm was going to take that next hardware leap. As much as we all like it, let's face it: the DragonBall is a 20Mhz 16-bit processor in a world that is demanding 32-bit processors more and more. So, the StrongARM sounds like an OK choice. But, this new CEO dude sounds like he doesn't care about the famed "Zen of Palm." It sounds more like he's willing to sacrifice the simplicity and elegance of the Palm design to get a few lame options like "voice activation." If that happens, I think he'll find a lot of Palm faithful going somewhere else (or buying up old Palm units!), and those new users he's trying to attract buying PocketPCs.
My $0.02, of course.
--Mythos
What the real killer application for the next generation of wireless palm devices should be is wireless communication over about a 10-100m radius. This would allow the USER to own the base stations that the device communicates with - who is going to use wireless internet billed per KILObyte? Not me. Not a lot of people.
Make the palm have a wireless serial connector - like an RF serial port (Bluetooth, ahem, vapour, ahem), then all sorts of control applications will spring up. Applications to automagically download the weather and slashdot whenever you walk into a micro-service area. If the devices can talk to each other, you can synchronize schedules by walking by friends in the office. The applications are endless!
If palm doesn't do it, RIM or someone else will. People are in love with 100% connected internet, but that's missing the boat. Remember what made the palm great; It was cheap, and did what you expected it to.
The trick will be doing it without losing that V form factor.. my Palmpilot Professional looks obese next to the nice shiny new Palm Vx. The microsoft offerings are too fat to get into my pocket; I had a Newton Messagepad (Not the latter generation, though) and it had no-fit-in-pocket-itis.
Get us programmable wireless palm, with lots of $75 base stations, and you'll see applications pop up everywhere. If bluetooth would ever become available, I'd do this myself. :)
Kudos
..don't panic
The DragonBall has a 68000 history behind it, so it was a simpler move for a number of embedded engineers.
When Mr. Jobs cancelled the spin-off of Newton Inc, within 2 weeks 32 of the engineers from the Newton Project left in mass to Palm.
They followed a few others who had left eairler, and I'm sure told the 32 how wonderful it was to work at Palm.
As for the Newton technology in a Palm....
1) The original Graffitti authors are gone. So the sacred cow of graffitti can go. Same for the Dragonball.
2) The authors of rosetta are at Palm. They COULD do the handwriting on the palm (and rumor is this has happened...;-) ) BUT the Apple lawyers would sue.
SO....If Apple wants to market a re-labeled Palm, and Palm wants handwriting, the simplest way is to swap IP.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!