Slashdot Mirror
Pictures Leaked of 3 new Palm handhelds
ahecht writes "On Thursday, Palm's Solutions Group's CEO Todd Bradley announced that 3 new handhelds will be released in October. Within 24 hours, pictures of all three handhelds have leaked out
on the web. The first to be released, the sub-$100
Zire, can be seen here. The second handheld,
previously known as
Oslo, now has
the name Tungsten T,
and features OS 5 and built in bluetooth (pictured
here).
The third handheld is the
Tungsten W,
pictured
here,
which is a GPRS smartphone (although it does not have a built-in speaker or
microphone). Zire will be released October 7th, while
both Tungsten models will be released on October 28th." Could just be rumors or fakes, but it seems reasonable.
Product development since then? Zero, zip, niente, nada de nada. They let go all of their competent techies, and are now a mass of marketeers without guindance, slowly sinking to the sound of Titanic's band.
It's really sad that these guys took Psion's market, and then managed to give it away to M$.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
I see two problems with these handhelds.
... if something moves, it's a weak point. Part of what makes handhelds worth spending money on is their longevity, and adding a weak point to a relatively fragile device is a mistake.
1) Moving parts (sliding parts). Face it
2) The Tungsten W will end up in the courts with a lawsuit from RIM. A good reference is here where they've had success thus far.
It's about time that they have some reasonably priced models. This is really, really gonna help them. Very few people need a $500 PDA. At that price, you can get a full featured laptop that isn't a whole heck of a lot bigger. I'd consider a $100 PDA for basic organization stuff. I would never consider more than that for something that's not a laptop computer.
I saw this headline, and immediately jumped for joy when I heard Palm was going to release a new sub-$100 handheld. "Finlly!" I thought, something that could replace my aging Palm M105.
But then I checked the details. 2 meg of memory? Exactly what can you do with that much space these days, even on a handheld? The idea seems to be to attract new customers, but why would you sell something that's obviously less powered than the lowest current model?
You're not going to attract new customers by putting out lousy hardware. Palm's gotten bad press lately for failure to innovate, and this is not helping.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
every shot of OS5 looks just like every other Palm OS since... well since the beginning. Didn't Palm buy Be? Weren't they going to do something new with their OS?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
A palm unit with an ARM is _long_ overdue. I want a decent, useful, modern handheld, and I don't want more windows.
Palm can't compete in the low-end electronic-diary market - Casio, Sharp et al will eat their lunch - and currently their concept of innovation seems to consist of putting the same unit they've been making for years in a cool new case.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Why do Palm/cell manufacturers insist on putting a keyboard on their combination Palm/cell devices?
If I am going to buy one of these devices, it is to reduce pocket-bloat by one device. That means that my primary motivation in getting one is size. Adding a keyboard only adds size.
I suppose I can see adding a 3x4 number pad for dialing, so if they are going to add anything I would rather see a usable 3x4 pad than an attempt at adding a full keyboard to aid in data input.
Currently I have both a Samsung SCH-3500 phone and a Sony Clie PEG-T665C. I would consider a combination phone/Palm device if one could do things as well as both of those devices. While I am all in favor of reducing pocket bloat, I find that dedicated devices do their job better than any combination device.
In the mean time, I will use a data cable to attach the 665C to the Samsung. Although I am really eyeing the new Vision-capable phones from SprintPCS...
Also - I have a Canon S200 camera. Until such time as a camera added to a Palm device can come close to the quality of that camera, do not even think about adding a camera to any device I am going to buy.
That camera is portable enough (and durable enough) to end up in my pocket for times I think I *might* want to take pictures.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
yes yes, i agree, a Palm with an Arm just makes total sense to me. =)
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Of course, instead of admitting that the competition just plain sucked, most people throw up their hands and blaim MS's monopoly.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Well I guess that's how you solve the problem of leaked pictures. . . You post the site on slashdot, and the problem kinda works itself out.
Anyone have a mirror?
...one of these. Spiffy little bugger. Stylish as hell. The two buttons are for the datebook and the address book...isn't that what you most work with on a Palm, anyway? It would be nice to have a spare in reserve in case my m100 goes south. 2MB is a surprisingly large amount of space when you use lightweight Palm apps. It's like having a Mac SE in your pocket. I like it. It's not a replacement for a laptop or a Zaurus or an iPaq. It's a Palm. It's the right tool for the job.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Personally, I feel excited about the form factor of the new Kyocera 7135 I like Graffiti, but I feel a number keypad is very necessary. It seems like this Kyocera might finally get it right. (Although many people are complaining that it doesn't have the new features of PalmOS 5)
When reading "PDA" I've thought about what a PDA would have to be able to do for me. Well, an SSH client would be enough. I could read an write mails on my server, manage my text-based calendar and administer my server. But why a PDA with SSH and a cellular phone to transmit the data? Why not just a cellular phone? They can handle mail, pictures, online-games already. SSH should be relatively trivial to add. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Yes, please correct my spelling and grammar mistakes, I'd like to improve my English.
I mean after all, the Zire looks like an Ipod mp3 player, and it has a speaker. Can't play mp3s, but hey, it's got the "look"...it's got the speaker!
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I see several posts about palm not being innovative, but there is more that should be said about the poor old palm ...
:/). After a lot of research, I splurged on the most recent generation of CE devices (Toshiba e740 FWIW) with built-in wireless, great expansion options, etc., all for about US$500. This machine is my mp3 player walking to work, an instant on recording device, plays movies (PocketDivX), and I can read slashdot from it, not to mention the regular PDA features.
... but aside from cool factor it was such low quality as to be not useful. It also only has memory stick expansion, which is much more limiting than the SD *or* CF that I have now.
... This is one of those things that basically should be plugged in on a daily basis. That's not really acceptable for a PDA IMO, but since I go to work almost daily, my PDA is well fed. I will be buying my wife a PDA, and it will likely be the Sony instead. She likes the "sexier" look (cool brushed aluminum) and lighter feel (it has to fit in the purse with a million other things). I can't expect that this will be plugged in daily. It's a pity battery life hasn't kept up with technology, but that is honestly the only downside I can find for the CE device (OS preferences aside).
I finally decided to dive into the world of PDAs after resisting for so long (forgetfulness being my main driver
I'm an OS agnostic - I just like what I can program, and this is infinitely more programmable, with ports of all your favorite unix tools already. In addition to that, I can get an expansion pack that allows me to plug in any USB keyboard and has a VGA port that will do 800x600 @ 256 colors - yes, I can put a powerpoint presentation on this and leave the laptop at home, and this thing is just a small attachment to the e740 - the functionality is all already built in. Way cool. (Note: the ipaq also has a Linux port, but not yet the newer e740 because it has new hardware)
What would I have gotten from Palm? Well, let's not even compare that because Palm gets blown away too easily. I was actually comparing against the Sony palm-based devices. They were a bit thinner and lighter, they had mp3 option in several players, and they even had the NR70V with built-in camera
All that for about the same price.
So what happened? Well, once upon a time, the only way you could get the functionality of these new CE devices was in mini-laptops (the original size of CE devices), and they were much more limited. Palm had the small form factor and all the same stuff. However, Palm is fighting an uphill battle against technology advancement by not adopting new stuff faster. Why are they still waiting to ship an ARM-based device? CE already is shipping units with the latest 400mhz Xscale ARM-based CPUs (think ~ to Pentium with MMX). Palm *was* great, but today all that "simplicity" just looks dated.
Two big groups buy these devices. For geeks, who love technology, it's hard to resist all the joy commanding this device can bring. For PHBs, who love spending as much as possible to get all the features that they'll never use, the CE devices are also hard to pass up.
OK, so what's the downside? I've been using my device for a while, and the only disadvantage is battery life. Using wireless without being plugged in can drain you fast. Add to that that it regularly powers over 100MB mem (32MB rom, 64MB ram, + whatever I'm accessing from CF or SD), color screen (standard on CE devices),
Just incase some of you have not seen examples of electronic paper before, an example of what I had in mind can be seen at http://eink.com/
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Thanks, www.palminfocenter.com
Damn! They're on to us! How are we supposed to slashdot sites if they do this?
Besides the fact that this could probably be shot down by prior art, all Palm would have to do (if they cared about being sued) would be to change the angle of the key rows a bit and they would be in the clear. Seems like a patent so specific as this one really shouldn't be a threat to innovation; all it really stops is exact BlackBerry clones.
But I agree with your first point, important moving parts on a thing that's supposed to ride in your pocket all day are a Bad Thing.
The mantle has been passed in the Palm front. Sony has one hell of a product right now. The NR70 has 320x480 res, virtual grafitti, and can do practically everything a PPC can do, but with 1/20 the MIPs. Plus it looks a lot cooler. And did I mention that the NR70 was just discontinued? Let's see what happens when they announce their Xscale version of the NR70 in a few days. Should be an interesting next couple of months. Competition is good.
Note to get here it took two things -- Sony to pump up the Palm brand, and MS to fumble and not support Xscale routines in the PPC OS. I find it amazing, after years of Palm letting its OS rot, that the Palm OS will actually have a (rather large) advantage in at least one aspect -- ability to actually use Xscale routines and power-saving modes that will have to wait until the next version of the MS OS. Not to mention the Palm OS can use other processors as well. I would never have guessed this happening a year ago, when PPCs had a large lead in both software and hardware.
Hate to say it gang, by I actually prefer most of the WinCE PDAs that I've seen (despite their clunky sizes). I say this becuase the lack of a 1/2" strip dedicated to handwriting really make sense to me.
I currently use a Palm V and while I love it's small size (thickness) it would be SO much better with out all that space wasted (hell, same goes even for the buttons).
My ideal PDA would have come with a very thin footprint, hi-rez color, and all screen... as big as they're going to make these things, why not get down to the business of letting us view, read, type, watch things on the _whole_ PDA?!?*
*Of course... wireless, tons of memory (slot upgrade), and good quality sound are also desired (in as small of a package as possible). : )
We're talking second-hand PII450, aren't we?