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Palm OS Spinoff

Posted by Hemos on from the interesting-move dept.

iCharles writes "According to this SEC filing per this Palm Infocenter story, it would appear that Palm is spinning off its OS devision. I'm a Handspring user, so it sounds quite interesting to me."

1 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. The future of handhelds by CmdrTroll · · Score: 1, Troll
    Palm sees the writing on the wall. Faced with slumping sales and negative earnings, they're spinning off the least profitable part of their business and letting it sink or swim. Good for them.

    I predict that within two years, every Palm-like device will be running embedded Linux. The advances in CPU power, embedded-friendly features (can you say realtime scheduling), portability, and ease of development will make PalmOS (still stuck in the 90's) and WinCE (never a serious contender anyway) very unattractive, expensive options. As margins fade away and manufacturers look for ways to gain an edge on the competition, Linux will have the clear advantage from the cost perspective. Additionally, Linux-based devices are very popular amongst the technical crowd because of their configurability and stability (especially when compared to other embedded OSs like QNX), which will help prop up sales when the number of rich MBA-types dwindle.

    Don't forget, also, that KDE is approaching its 3.0 release and the embedded version is gaining in popularity. I won't be surprised at all if it becomes a serious contender for PDA and cell phone desktops. Porting KDE to PalmOS, WinCE, or QNX would cost some money - but on Linux, it's practically native.

    -CT