3Com To Charge $20 For Palm OS 3.5

Alex Bischoff writes: "According to this NY Times Article, 3Com will release Palm OS 3.5 in the fall, but for about $20. 'Mr. Cook said that he had already heard grumbling from some Palm users about the upgrading fee and that some future releases might still be free.' ObCredit: PalmStation." (Free registration, worth every penny.) I wonder if this is a way to sell more (new) Palms?

Comments

An interesting move...

[Millennium]

OK, so Palm wants to charge for upgrades. Fair enough.

Now, could someone run down a list of differences between 3.3 and 3.5, for those of us who would like to determine if it's actually worth what they're charging? If it's not worth it, I'll stick with 3.3, thank you very much.

Honestly, I don't like this. PalmOS upgrades have always been free in the past; to delay upgrades for several months and then start charging for them with no warning whatsoever is questionable at best. Further, this isn't about R&D costs; Palm and Palm-related products are so popular they had to have recouped those costs ages ago from the devices they sell that run it (not to mention royalties from other companies who make devices that run the OS; I'll bet they don't have to pay nearly as much per unit).

But, as I said, fair enough that they charge $20 for an upgrade. Provided, of course, that the upgrade's actually worth $20. I'm not yet ruling out that it might be; unlike certain companies based in Redmond that change a couple lines of code and use that to try and justify exorbitant prices for their "upgrades," Palm might actually have a product worth selling. We'll have to wait and see.
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Re:Heavens forfend

[BinxBolling]

That the company actually tries to get R&D costs back somehow.

Heavens forfend that customers express an opinion on whether or not the product being sold is worth the price charged.

Heavens forfend that customers develop expectations based on a company's past behavior, and express surprise and disappointment when those expectations are not met.

Re:2 words: Handspring Visor

[Speed Racer]

Well, considering the Visors can't be updated (no Flash ROM)

How quickly we forget. . .

Up until the most recent crop of Palm devices, no PalmOS based system had Flash ROM yet you were still able to update the PalmOS. It was merely a patch that was one hard reset away from being wiped from your system, not a permanent update like the Flash ROM upgrades of today.

Here's what 3.5 adds

[alee]

For those that are curious about what PalmOS 3.5 adds to/improves upon over 3.3, visit the link below:

http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/docs/p almos35/

Some of the more "significant" changes that Palm touts include:

• The Graphics System includes support for 1, 2, 4, and 8 bit color and grayscale.
• The Datebook's new Agenda view combines a view of a day's appointments with the day's ToDo tasks
• The Alarm dialog now has larger buttons to facilitate finger operation, as well as a "Snooze" button
• When beaming an entire category, the receiver's dialog allows selection of the destination category in which to place the items
• The Title, Company, City, State and Country fields in the Address book support auto-completion of the input text
• Masked records
• The Command bar
• Tapping the title tab of an application shows the menu bar
• Double-tapping on a word in a field selects it; triple-tapping selects the line
• The category indicator has changed to differentiate between when the data is changing versus when the view of the data is changing. See the memo pad edit screen for an example.

Personally, I don't think that it's worth a $20 upgrade. Not only are the changes minor, but from all indications I've seen, 3.5 is SLOWER.

Re:Totally unacceptable.

[Tony Shepps]

Consider that their competition IS Microsoft; a few years ago Palm developers figured they had about a year to migrate over to WinCE.

Consider that Palm is one of the few vendors out there that has totally blown Microsoft away.

Consider that most Palm owners are loaded with either corporate expense report money or spare cash, already having paid up to $450 to replace their $20 DayTimer.

Consider that most Palms will do exactly what their owners want *without* the upgrade, and that's what they paid big money for.

I just can't find any outrage here.
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Haiku Summary for the bandwidth impaired.

[enneff]

A new palm os,
3com charges twenty bucks,
Bad publicity.