New Palm Pictures?

New Palm writes "It looks like pictures of a new Palm os5 device codenamed 'Oslo' have hit the web. www.pocketpcthought.com had them up, but after a phonecall from Palm's Director of Global Information Security, pulled the pictures. A number of people are mirroring them. Looks semi-legit - but who knows, and who knows how long the images will stay up?

Comments

sucked dry

[Alien54]

Looks semi-legit - but who knows, and who knows how long the images will stay up?

Probably until the Slash dot effect kicks in, and their monthly bandwith allowance is sucked dry like a raisin in the sun in Death Valley.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Better Mirror

[kawaichan]

Here is a better Mirror

About the device

-Interesting way to make the device smaller
-Still hard graffit?
-320x320 screen

Looks like a minipalm.

[inkfox]

Aesthetically, that's a good way to make a small screen look even smaller. Cinching the sides like that draws a perceptual barrier between the screen and the writing area, making the thing look unusably small, even if the profile hasn't changed.

This might swell well in Japan where smaller is seen as better, but it seems more likely to stay on the shelves in the US for average consumers.

New Marketing Tactic

[NiftyNews]

I can picture the marketing meeting now...

Drone 1: Alright, listen up. So I leak these pictures...
Drone 2: Then we go out and tell everyone not to post them!
Drone 1: Brilliant! Let's all go home early and drink expensive wine.

Great for games!

[John Harrison]

Finally a Palm with a button layout that can be useful for games! This has taken too long! If they had put a little bit of thought into this in the first place we never would have had to deal with non-intuitive control layouts for so many games.

That alone might make be purchase one since my Handspring recently died.

Apple iPod/Palm hybrid?

[theolein]

This might of course just be one of those attempts to troll /., but that jog wheel in the lower portion of the device looks very much like Apple's iPod control wheel. Given that there have been many rumours of Apple/Palm cooperation and that Palm OS5 is supposed to have all sorts of new features, examples of which are improved QuickTime compatibility, and possibly inclusion of Apple's Ink handwriting technology, there could be some basis to these rumours. Apples' cracking down on rumour websites, as well as Palm offsetting risks to Apple entering the PDA market would be further grounds for interesting news next week at the MWNY.

Re:Keyboard

[rleyton]

Moving parts are a Bad Thing(tm). They're always the first thing to go wrong, and the most expensive to replace.

*Sigh*

KISS is a sensible design methodology that I fear organiser manufacturers are forgetting.

Collapse

[sehryan]

To me, it looks like the lower half will be able to slide up to cover the graphiti area. That would make it have a pretty high "whoa" factor, but honestly I don't think it would lend itself to being very productive.

Not that I have ever been all that productive with graphiti.

Bad design

[totallygeek]

Moving parts are a Bad Thing(tm). They're always the first thing to go wrong, and the most expensive to replace.

You are right. While speaking about bad design, the worst is the CD jewel case. I mean, they come out with compact discs -- awesome, but make the hinges on the jewel cases the weakest two pieces of cheap plastic known to man!

Be folks working on v6

[brokeninside]

AFAIK, the engineers from Be are working on v6 which is currently a nebulous "next generation" OS for Palm Computing.

Palm OS v5 is essentially the Palm OS kernel hacked to run on ARM with a few kludges for a bit of functionality that Palm OS currently lacks to make it competitive.

If these pix are real, they are far more likely to be of a unit running Palm OS v5 than v6 as v6 doesn't really exist yet except on whiteboards in the heads of the OS architects.

I have two hopes for v6:

1. Palm Computing doesn't pull an IBM (OS/2 PPC) or an Apple (Copland, the original MacOS 8).
2. The Be invasion of the software division of Palm Computing proceeds a la the NeXT invasion of Apple.

And I still think it a shame that Palm Computing decided that Linux (because of the GPL) was incompatible with their business model in relation to IP. It is also a shame that they didn't (apparently) look into one of the BSDs.

Of course, the Be crowd was purchased at a fire sale price. I bet JLG is kicking himself in the head when the company he refused to sell to Apple for millions barely managed to get hundreds of thousands in liquidation.