Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Palm Memory Maximum Increased

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the more-to-remember dept.

Trillan writes "PalmSource has announced that it has developed a technology for increasing the maximum RAM on a Palm handheld from 16MB to 128MB. Hopefully new devices will come out soon to take advantage of it." This looks to me like Palm's plan for remaining competitive against handhelds like Sony's that can add more memory in via memory stick. As more and more multimedia apps are written for PalmOS, more storage space only makes sense.

13 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Erm... by lingqi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So, - what in the world does RAM size has to do with application storage? Last I checked applications / data / whatever are stored in ROM?

    And it's interesting that Palm would be able to handle that much RAM - I mean, I still know some full blown computers straddling around with 64M... I won't even talk about the time when 8M was a lot, or when some idiot thought 640k was enough for everyone, and before that when stuff were represeted by holes on paper, and before even that when wooden beads on a frame were used in asia.

    anyhoo... can't imagine anything that will take advantage of that much RAM (right now), though, it'd be interesting what comes of it if they tried - Palm don't have the processing power, but if it did, much more powerful software can be written for it.

    Otoh - DRAM (I am assuming they are using DRAM for the extra RAM)needs to be refreshed which means that even in standby / whatever, they still draw a non-insignificant amount of power. I am seriously hoping that RAMTRON will get the density up so we can have some MRAM action.

    (side note - SRAM draws more juice when operating but uses nearly none when in standby (only leakage current - which on modern cmos is equilavent to counting electrons) - I wonder how does manufactures of PDAs determine which ones to go with, if cost wasn't a issue (with cost an issue DRAM-or-SRAM is not even a question))

    Okay, end rant.

    --

    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  2. Re:Oops... by any chance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd rather see somewhere near 256/384MB on my Palm. With increased dependence on larger media files and interactivity with many databases on many machines, it only makes sense. With desktop ram amounts commonly hitting 1GB for most people, I've always subscribed to using a quarter of that in my portable devices.

    However my laptop now is even breaking that rule, with 512MB of RAM. If Palm stop at 128 I fear they could be left behind and soon.

  3. Gee, how innovative by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... to add 3 address bits to the Memory bus. wow, that must have been hard...

    When sales slump a little more, and their market research indicates people want more RAM, maybe they'll add another address bit.

    When are people going to realize that technological innovation ISN'T. Intellectual Property law has completely ended innovation. All we can do is expand, complicate, and repackage, the same damn IP that we invented 10 years ago because we're not allowed to innovate anymore. Even if we could, it wouldn't be worth it because we'd just get sued by some jackass that thinks he invented it first and the lawyers would bleed us dry..

  4. Re:i'll invest when by vano2001 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You can have something similar to that with Sharp Zaurus 5500 / 5600.

    Check out http://www.zaurus.com

    Except the laser thing.

  5. it's for marketing competitiveness by g4dget · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Adding 128M to Palm doesn't make it the equivalent of even WinCE (which itself is nothing to write home about): Palm memory management is, and remains, pathetic.

    Both Palm and Microsoft love churning out these messed up, non-standard APIs because it ties programmers to them and creates a market niche. The messier the API, the better, as long as a company has a captive developer population.

    From a purely technical point of view, both systems should be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with a decent POSIX-compatible kernel (Linux, QNX, whatever).

  6. Probably used for Palm's new Tungsten C by abischof · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is probably used for the new Tungsten C (to be released at the end of this month, so they say). In addition to integrated WiFi (w00t!) and a 400 MHz processor, it's also said to include at least 32 MB RAM.

    --

    Alex Bischoff
    HTML/CSS coder for hire

  7. POSIX/Linux is *NOT* the answer. by fmaxwell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Both Palm and Microsoft love churning out these messed up, non-standard APIs because it ties programmers to them and creates a market niche. The messier the API, the better, as long as a company has a captive developer population.

    Palm's API is clean, intelligent, and well-designed for its intended purpose (a PDA). The tools to develop for it are readily available and it's a very good interface.

    From a purely technical point of view, both systems should be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with a decent POSIX-compatible kernel (Linux, QNX, whatever).

    This is the kind of Linux-on-everything idiocy that makes my head hurt. Linux is great for some things and complete crap for others. A POSIX-compatible kernel is completely inappropriate for a Palm-style handheld. Have you ever tried to write a GUI-based Othello program that's 15K long on Linux? How about a 47K full scientific calculator? And those are big programs compared to many PalmOS apps.

    It's that I-have-a-hammer-so-every-solution-involves-a-nail kind of thinking that has ruined many embedded systems. The PalmOS devices continue to be successful because they don't try to cram some variant of Unix or Windows in them and, instead, stick to an OS that is appropriate. As a result, the devices meet users' needs for speed, storage, and battery life. If you Linux pushers had your way, PalmOS handhelds would need faster CPUs, far more RAM, and would drain batteries so fast that Rayovac shares would jump up 50%.

    1. Re:POSIX/Linux is *NOT* the answer. by tzanger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The PalmOS devices continue to be successful because they don't try to cram some variant of Unix or Windows in them and, instead, stick to an OS that is appropriate.

      Actually I don't consider Palm all that successful anymore. Power-hungry colour screens, MP3/voice capabilities, cameras, wireless... They are running into the PocketPC/Zaurus arena and they will fail because their API was never meant to handle these things.

      IMO, my Palm Vx (well maybe the m500 because it has the SD/MMC port) was the pinnacle of Palm's capabilities. More rugged than the plastic cases before them, enough memory to hit the 95% of what people want, easily 8-15 days runtime on a single charge and a clean, unencumbered API.

      If you want an ultraportable computer, get yourself a PocketPC, Zaurus (I have one of these too) or even those mini Sony Vaios. If you want a PDA, get the Palm Vx or m500. They are for totally different markets.

    2. Re:POSIX/Linux is *NOT* the answer. by g4dget · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Palm's API is clean, intelligent, and well-designed for its intended purpose (a PDA).

      Palm's intended purpose these days is to compete in the consumer and enterprise markets. Even if you could make an argument that its pathetic excuse for APIs was "well designed" for the handful of PDA functions that Palm originally had, Palm OS 4/5 just is a no-go there because programmers aren't going to go back to what amounts to a 16 bit segmented architecture. Even Palm understands this, which is why they are rewriting things.

      A POSIX-compatible kernel is completely inappropriate for a Palm-style handheld. Have you ever tried to write a GUI-based Othello program that's 15K long on Linux? How about a 47K full scientific calculator?

      I used to do graphics programming on PDP-11s; those things had a 64k address space and ran somewhere in the single digit MHz range. So, yes, I have written GUI apps that, by necessity, used that little memory. Of course, why one needs to undergo that kind of self-flagellation on a 175MHz RISC processor with 16M of RAM is somewhat beyond me. I mean, are you planning on running 1000 simultaneous copies of Othello (fat chance that PalmOS wouldn't crash first anyway). And with all that "efficiency", why is PalmOS actually so damned slow? I mean, I could grep faster on a PDP-11 than the search function on my Palm.

      Incidentally, my first personal UNIX machine had a 20MHz processor, 4M of RAM, and ran X11 plus many command line tools we still get today.

      You see, the UNIX APIs were well-designed: they scale from 16 bit machines to 64 bit machines and let you take full advantage of the capabilities. If you give them a Gbyte of memory to play with, users can fill it with applications, images, and other stuff. If it needs to run in a few hundred kbytes of memory, it can do that, too. That is unlike incompetent attempts like DOS, Windows, or PalmOS which need rewriting every time the wind shifts.

      It's that I-have-a-hammer-so-every-solution-involves-a-nail kind of thinking that has ruined many embedded systems. If you Linux pushers had your way, PalmOS handhelds would need faster CPUs, far more RAM, and would drain batteries so fast that Rayovac shares would jump up 50%.

      If "us UNIX/POSIX pushers" had our way, handhelds would get by with a fraction of the power and resources that they are using, and they wouldn't require major OS and application rewrites every couple of years.

      The notion that something like the Tungsten T is a dainty little machine that is too delicate to UNIX/Linux is just ridiculous. I mean, were you born yesterday? The T|T has more CPU power and memory than UNIX workstations from the early 1990s.

      It's only people like you and the PalmOS developers who are completely ignorant of history and keep reinventing the wheel--badly.

    3. Re:POSIX/Linux is *NOT* the answer. by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 2, Interesting

      POSIX-compatible kernel is completely inappropriate for a Palm-style handheld.

      It takes much more than a kernel to be POSIX compatible. Using Linux in no way implies all the POSIX miscellany (although that's what the other poster wanted).

      However, the more important point is that new PDAs being designed today are not "Palm style" handhelds. Today's new hardware is completely different from the 1996 PalmPilots. A minimalist, single-tasking, manual allocation API that was fine for scraping along in 1 megabyte of RAM becomes a drawback moving into a future of 64+ megabytes and always-on WiFi networking. Analogies to MS-DOS and the hardware evolution from 086 to Pentium are fully applicable.

      How about a 47K full scientific calculator?

      Ok, is 23k acceptable? (opie-calculator) And if it had been targeted for a smaller device, with a 160x160 2 bit screen instead of something better than 1991-era VGA, the size would be even smaller. Games for a more powerful PDA like a PocketPC or Zaurus will often use around 8 times as much graphical data than a minimalist Palm version. The programmers could reduce that storage use if they wanted, but they feel customers demand the artwork.

      Let me mention that the Zaurus is a bad PDA, because Sharp bought to fully into the idea that providing an interface basically compatible with desktop Unix (POSIX + Qt) would magically provide them with a suite of great PIM applications. But they ignored good old-fashioned listening to the customers and watching the competition. The fact that desktop-like programming worked on the device lead them to ship naively developed programs that, while functioning, were not intuitive, fast, or scalable. And the color screen let them draw pretty icons and shaded buttons that become unreadable in normal lighting conditions, where a monochrome Palm is still somewhat legible.

      The root of the Zaurus problem is that the manufacturer neither paid developers for continual software improvements in response to customer feedback, nor fully open-sourced their code to permit "community" upgrades. It's taken more than a year for the open-source replacement software to become adequate, and the Zaurus lost a big opportunity for marketshare in that time.

  8. Market Matured? by jmichaelg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm thinking "so what?" I don't want a PDA to be anything but a PDA that runs virtually forever on a charge. I'm on my third PDA only because I wore out the first two.

    For me that's it - the only reason I'll buy another PDA is when the one I have dies. What I have does exactly what I bought it for - don't need any whizbang, battery-draining geegaws on it.

    So maybe that's why Palm is hurting - they've sold their equipment to everyone who's willing to fork a few hundred dollars for an electronic rolodex/calendar/calculator. For everyone else, it's a device that's either too expensive compared to manual methods or they just don't need to be organized - their organic memories are good enough.

  9. Announcement is Significant by Coppit · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This announcement that Palm OS 5.2.1 can handle more memory comes just before the new Palm Tungsten C is rumored to be released. The T|C is supposed to have 64MB of memory and run--you guessed it--OS 5.2.1.

    Here is the original leak, and here is one for sale on Ebay. The thing is supposed to retail for $499 on the 25th, but some dumbass is willing to pay an extra $300 to get it a couple days earlier. Anyway, Quill Corp, Amazon, and Staples all jumped the gun with listings for the product but have since removed them.

    I for one am going to snap one up on Wednesday. It's got a hi-res color display, 64MB of RAM, a thumbboard (which I like), a 400MHz Intel XScale chip, no exterior antenna, and best of all... 802.11b. (No, damn it, I don't want to pay a stupid monthly bill for your wireless service when I can get it just about anywhere I work away from the office.)

  10. Re:Oops... by any chance by g4dget · · Score: 2, Interesting
    But Linux is generally tuned for a more capable class of hardware.

    More capable than what? A T|T is more capable than most Linux machines a few years ago.

    A full-up Linux system with shared libraries, multitasking, graphics, etc., etc., wouldn't fit comfortably in a system with 2, 8, or even 16 megs combined heap, stack, and long-term storage.

    Why not? Tom's rescue disk gives you a recent bootable Linux kernel and a pretty complete command line environment on a single 1.4M floppy (including vi, command line editing, networking utilities, and other stuff). Of course, for a handheld, we are talking Linux kernel together with a different kind of user environment.

    but Palm started out with 128k of combined heap, stack, and long-term storage..

    I'm not sure what that has to do with whether PalmOS would beat Linux in terms of performance.

    But yes, 128k is too small for a regular Linux kernel, but other UNIX-like systems do work in space that small. The question arises still whether Palm's quick-time-to-market and corporate success is worth the years and years of backwards compatibility woes for developers. I don't think so: Palm has to take the blame for what they did.