Slashdot Mirror


Palm OS Spinoff

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."

3 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

  2. I went to respond to this and look what I got by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Internal Server Error
    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

    Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

    Great job, guys, you've got an amazing piece of shit taking up space on the world wide web. I'm not going to be back anytime soon, perhaps in the future you should spend some money on a real OS to power a web forum.

  3. Stupid troll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Your troll is old, now go get a life, recompile your lignux kernel or something, okay?