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!"

Comments

Is evolution inevitable?

[CaptainZapp]

Call me a ludite, but as an avid Palm user (Vx) this might well be a step backwards.

The thing I love most about the Palm and the PalmOs is that it works, that it's extremely simple and that it's extremely reliable.

I didn't like when they introduced colour and I care even less for all the fancy features promised with PalmOS 5.

Frankly, if the only direction is more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video and other such assorted crap, then I guess it's time to ditch the Palm and go for a Symbian smart phone.

At least then, when the good old b&w simplicity of the V series is no more supported.

Re:Is evolution inevitable?

[cdipierr]

I think you're confusing the OS /w the specific designs of a given OEM. There's nothing in OS/5 that would prevent an OEM from coming out with a Palm V-like device (although they'd likely use an ARM chip for better performance).

You're not likely to see one, of course, since OEMs seem to believe that people want all the stuff that's packed into PocketPC (which is color, hi-res, MP3, etc).

But don't blame PalmSource for creating an OS that the majority of PDA OEMs want. Instead, lobby Palm Inc. (which is a separate company) or Sony or Handera to create a device like you want.

Re:Is evolution inevitable?

[bark76]

It's up to the Licensees as to what they do with their devices. You aren't going to see everyone oftering top of the line 320X320, 16 bit colour devices that play MP3s and video. The OS is scalable enough that Palm Vx devices can still be released. Palm, Inc has their m1XX line up of 'affordable' devices, what makes you think that they'll go cold turkey on those?

What we'll see from the release of this OS is a greater range of hardware available, all running the same OS.

Plus it's got 128 bit encryption, gotta be happy that they're adding security features.

Re:moving slowly...open the source!!

[tps12]

Maybe I'm being trolled, but...

Any operating system...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...

Palm does a good job with it, and I don't think there's enough "flashy" jobs to keep OSS programmers going.

Okay, I wasn't suggesting that you (whoever you are) should work on the Palm OS. I don't care if you like assembly programming, or if you find OS coding "flashy" or interesting. Your comment about assembly is especially telling. Clue: assembly languages are written to be programmed by people. Lots of people can understand and write assembly code. It is not javascript, but it is not voodoo either. Check out the Linux kernel source, and you will find plenty of assembly, all written by real life volunteers.

Check out the traffic on LKML sometime. Lots of people in the community find this kind of stuff very interesting and are quite capable of doing it.

Not to mention that they need the royalties from other companies licencing it.

That is only to recoup the costs of closed source development. Costs that would not exist were the source open.

Wow.... 320x200

[Rahga]

You know what this means.... time to port the AGI interpreters to Palm.... Space Quest II is comming to your handhelds!!!!

It shouldn't even matter if your high-res screen doesn't support color.... Many of us used to play that game on a monochrome monitor in those days. The only part that really got unplayable (before I was stuck for 4 years, damn "rub berries on body"!) was the swamp-creature-with-vines-maze. It's easy on a color screen, because the lines ar pink-on-green, but on monochrome, it looked like jibberish. :)

Not that revolutionary...

[pstreck]

As a Palm OS developer by trade I've been using the OS 5 development kits for about 4 months now since they were released at palm souce, and I must say that the end users really aren't going to get that much out of this latest release. Reasons being are that the ARM enhancements are designed as what are being called "armlets", small peices of code within the m68k code that is accellerated for an ARM proccessor. Palm isn't pushing native ARM applications which has pluses and minuses, new apps will still run on the older devices minus any armlet functionality, but the new ARM devices are going to have apps that are running slower than they should be do to the m68k -> arm translation. The other thing about this release new API, they've cleaned up a lot of the garbage and added a lot of new functionality so as a developer you got lots of more toys to place with, but as an end user don't expect this to be some holy grail of pda os's. Another downfall of Palms current plan for OS 5 is that they are targetting a handheld unit with a 66mhz arm proccessor, yes a 66mhz proc.. It's rediculous because the new xscale arcitechure which has 400mhz+ cpus has dropped the ARM prices dramatically. But anywho, I am excited to see a unit running OS 5.

Re:Not that revolutionary...

[hattig]

Another downfall of Palms current plan for OS 5 is that they are targetting a handheld unit with a 66mhz arm proccessor, yes a 66mhz proc..

Erm, PalmOS licenses the OS to PalmOS licensees like Palm Inc, Sony, Handera, Handspring. It is up to these manufacturers to build hardware. Palm have approved a 200MHz ARM chip from Texas Instruments IIRC. Sony can be guaranteed to use a damn fast processor as well.

Maybe you are confused, or you are spreading FUD? Maybe the OS developers are ensuring that PalmOS5 performs well on processors as slow as 66MHz (presumably the speed in power-saving mode) which is good surely?

Of course, a low cost ARM based PalmOS5 PDA running at 66MHz, with a 320x320 monochrome screen, at under $199 would be wonderful. As one of the articles pointed out, Palm are doing well because their devices are cheap and do the job, whereas PocketPC devices cost more than the sweet spot pricing...

Re:Multi Tasking

[nesthigh]

My understanding is that they may only expose one thread to the user because of the license on the PalmOS (1-4) kernel. They didn't write it, and were limited by the authors. Fun, eh?

Next

What worries me ...

[Mr_Silver]

We are taking full advantage of the technological advancements in Palm OS 5," said C. E. Steuart Dewar, president of Pimlico Software.

Pimlico software make DateBk, which is a diary replacement because Palms own version is ... well, crap. It's just too limited when you compare it to Outlook.

As much as I don't like a company going down the pan, if Palm have done it right, Pimlico would find that they won't be able to sell DateBk on the new OS. Because Palm's own diary book should be so good, that people would have no reason to update.

I've said it many times, if Palm can get their new Datebook/Memo/ToDo/Address book to sync 100% with Outlook, then they're onto an instant winner. Just because the population of /. would avoid Outlook like the plague, doesn't mean the rest of the world does. If they can take an *exact* copy of their PC stuff on their new Palm, then they'll be a happy bunch.

(I'm led to believe that even PPC doesn't sync over everything - but at least it's more than Palm)

Re:320x320

[micahjd]

This is the critical limitation of PalmOS- no matter how much the OS is improved, if they want backward compatibility they have to deal with applications that assume the display is 160x160 pixels.

Other GUIs like GTK and PicoGUI solve this problem by specifying the relative layout of widgets instead of their position. If Palm really wants scalability, they need to switch to a layout-based system.