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PalmOS 5 Turns Gold
Stalke writes: "On sunday, PalmSource (the spinoff from Palm responsible for the development of the PalmOS) announced that PalmOS 5 has gone gold. This latest version of the operating system includes support for ARM processors, Bluetooth and 802.11b, high-res displays (320x320; although Sony already uses even high res displays in its NR70) and more. Products with PalmOS 5 should start shipping in just over a months' time!"
Open the source, Palm!
So they can get the nimble development cycle of such projects as Mozilla and Gnome? I'm sorry, but I don't think so. Any operating system -- especially something embedded like PalmOS -- is going to be over the level of many programmers. I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with lines and lines of palm assembly...
In the case of PalmOS, I don't see any advantage to opening the source. Palm does a good job with it, and I don't think there's enough "flashy" jobs to keep OSS programmers going.
Not to mention that they need the royalties from other companies licencing it.
I don't see them open-sourcing it anytime soon.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Ok, you're a luddite.
Not really, though: I see where you're coming from, but I think the real key to Palm's wonderful simplicity is in its UI. Color Palms, for better or worse, don't make tremendous use of color--generally just getting better readability and color icons, and of course allowing games and image viewers and what not to be in color. The UI is the same, and for my money is about as simple and reliable as ever.
Same thing with "more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video": if there are seperate MP3 and video apps, and the UI is the same as always (without CE's "i think i'm a small desktop" mistakes, and "Aqua"-like "enhancements") then what does it hurt?
It's always a set of trade-offs. If you want really robust, really simple, you mighta been happy with one of those old school keyboard/character based PDAs...a few even offer synching to the desktop. Palm needs to keep pushing its capabilities, since eventually those gee-whiz features will be cheap enough (in terms of battery life and usability) to make sense.
Of course, the super hightech feature I'm really jonesing for is a clipboard that can hold an entire memo (and maybe ditch the 4k memo limit while they're at it...) I mean, Microsoft finally made Notepad so it didn't choke on 32K files, can't Palm do the same?
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