A Palm for Every Purpose

fm6 writes "We can look forward to a round of niche devices running PalmOS. According to the Forbes article, we're looking at PalmOS in: a game device called Helix , a platform for developing 'customized handheld instruments' called the Meazura, and of course, the usual round of PalmOS cell phones. On the other hand, fewer manufacturers seem to show any interest in making general-purpose PalmOS PDAs. Food for thought."

Comments

Re:The Battle Rages On

[pauljlucas]

I haven't seen much with integrating pagers, but I sure know that if I had both cell phone and pager service, I'd much rather have an integrated cell phone and pager than I would an integrated cell phone and PDA or cell phone and digital camera.

The thing is that nothing on the current crop of cellphone/PDA devices or even just plain cellphones has to change one bit to incorporate paging since SMS exists.

All that needs to change is software/hardware on the back-end in cellular providers' switching centers to provide a POTS-to-SMS gateway just like there are already e-mail-to-SMS gateways.

There are any number of reasons why this hasn't happened:

• Paging companies are too entrenched and defend their markets against cellular companies.
• There's not enough of a return-on-investment for cellular companies to get into the market.
• Companies can probably make more money keeping them separate. For example, they can charge at least $35/mo for cell service and probably as much for pager service (athough I actually have no idea what pager service rates are). If they offered paging as an add-on service to cell service, they couldn't get away with more than $5/mo additional (probably).

Note: the above are educated guesses only. If somebody knows the real reasons, I'd like to hear them.

Re:and look at the buttons. . .

[druzicka]

Actually, check out the video at the following URL:

http://www.godoplay.com/tapwave2.html

They show a brief glimpse of a guy using the hardware itself. He's holding it so that the screen is landscape... Looks like a layout similar to the origninal GBA, with Dpad and action buttons on either side of the screen. Plus there are clips from a couple of games. They look like they're in 3d. There is a Spy Hunter and a Tony Hawk game... Graphics appear to be as good as a Gamecube. Beats the hell out of the GBA's Super Nintendo-style graphics.