Palm Changing OS Strategy

profet writes "CNET.com is reporting that PalmSource plans to change its OS plans and simultaneously develop/release OS 6 and continue development on OS 5. The names shall be changed to reflect that they are both current. The plan is to have OS 5 for low end devices ($100 price point is a goal), and OS 6 for high end devices. This is a drastic change from their current practice of having one current OS drastically customized (read: hacked) to suit the manufacturer's needs. It looks like PalmSource is aiming directly at Symbian's success with Nokia's series 60 platform."

Comments

What's not mentioned

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that under the plan, the company will simultaneously develop multiple versions of its OS and aim them at different parts of the cell phone market. With OS 5, PalmSource was focused primarily on making a hardware transition.

Re:linux PDA?

[bwy]

I have owned a Zaurus and a Sony Clie (Palm OS 4). They are two different beasts. The Clie is a great address book, calendar, etc. and has good desktop software that I like since i refuse to use Outlook for calendaring. It is a small device and great at the traditional PDA functions. Synching is very refined and works well with XP and OS X 10.3 using iSync. I can sync right to Address Book and iCal.

The Zaurus was excellent at web browsing, hacking, running Java, running a real pop3 mail client, etc. Plug in a cheap WiFi CF card and you are good to go. But here is the thing. It is horrible at calendaring, synching, etc. The desktop software is pathetic. You almost certainly have to consider the Zaurus a very small linux based PC that stands by itself and forget about the desktop integration part.

All that being said, I sold the Zaurus on E-Bay recently and kept the Clie. The Zaurus is by far the best "toy". However, having a handheld Internet connected device wasn't that useful (for me, anway) especially since I own a 12 inch iBook. Having a list of important phone numbers and my calendar with me at all times and available instantly is important though and Palm devices do that very well.

Depending on what you want and need, the Zaurus might be a great choice. I had no complaints. It was stable and overall really cool. There is just something cool about using a handheld as a web server. (but then you inevitably end up asking "WHY"!)

Re:Where have I heard all this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between PalmOS 5 vs. 6 is similar to Windows 95 vs. NT and MacOS 9 vs. X. Basically it's the transition to a real protected-memory OS, requiring a new underlying system architecture. So, similar to the Windows and MacOS transitions, PalmOS 6 is a completely new operating system, with a compatibility layer to provide the same APIs as on previous versions of the OS and maintain application compatibility.

Re:Palm is losing their niche

[GarfBond]

You have absolutely no idea what a palm device is used for. On a palm device, you *do not* load Windows XP on it. These are items with around 400MHz Intel XScale and around 32-64MB of memory.

PalmOS is for palm-sized devices (e.g. ORGANIZERS) that have very little flexibility as far as data loss, convenience, and user-friendliness. No user wants to open up a console and mess with XF86 settings to try and get their organizer working right in the middle of a meeting.

Part of the reason Palm is still popular is because of the fundamental design decisions made with the OS. Which is to be, above all, a damn good organizer. Part of what Palm realized (and what Apple hadn't yet with the Newton) is that user requirements for an organizer is significantly different from a computer. Users expect it to work just as well as their wristwatch. A great article to read on this is the "Zen of Palm" (http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/docs/zenofpalm/ ZenTOC.html)

In the handheld market, Palm is competing with PocketPC (or as it's less affectionately known, Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC) and to a very much lesser extent, Linux on the Zaurus.

In the phone market, Palm is competing yet again with Windows and then Symbian. And this division of markets is why they're concurrently developing OS 5 and 6.

And, for your information, PalmSource owns Be. Part of the whole point of OS6 is that Be engineers are putting significant efforts into it.

PalmOS =5.x limits what you can get from the hw

[schmaltz]

Look, Palm devices have gone from being about as fast as your wristwatch, up to today's being as powerful as laptops of a few years ago (400mhz, 32MB+ RAM, hundreds of megs in SD/MMC.) For a handheld computer that runs for days on battery power, that's quite a bit of power, and possibility.

They're powerful enough to play mp3s and movies, they do wifi, the pen interface has gotten simpler and more accurate. But it's all limited by the operating system. The problem with PalmOS is, it's built around a Windows 3.x-style event loop with no threading. "Cooperative multiprocessing," if you can call it that.

Word today from a developer at a biggish PalmOS app development company, is that Palm has gotten some of the BeOS blokes to develop a microkernel, threading, and device driver architecture; that'll be OS 6.0. It won't be open source, sadly, but it'll have Palm's usual level of documentation and support.

Look at the Zaurus for the example of a pocket computer that's reaching in the right direction: Linux with multitasking, device drivers... mad extensibility. Palm don't got that today.. although I think running KDE is a bit of overdevelopment. Who needs a terminal window, these things have enough power to process speech recognition? That's why the O/S needs to grow.