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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."
Anyone with some experience with both? I used Palm Vx with Palm OS 3 and found it too buggy. I saw ads about Zaurus and found it interesting. I am really close to get Linux PDA. But before I cash out, is there anyone here who found a reason to migrate from Linux PDA to Palm OS?
Less is more !
Alternatives to PalmOS, anyone?
Has anyone tried LinuxDA? It sounds like an interesting alternative, even being a commercial product.
Palm OS is the OS for low-end devices with simple functions which do not require the headache of viruses/spyware/BSOD etc, and which do simple monotasking applications on budget ram and flash and no MMU.
Try to overdevelop Palm OS into a GUI layers, multitasking, and other higher end stuff, and youre directly competing with Linux, QNX, BSD and BeOS (maybe they plan to merge their BeOS with Palm on higher end). They should not want that. Linux with the community backing, applications, tools, hackibility etc will win hands down and we'll see people buying Dell machines, replacing Windows XP with Linux, getting the free PDA and replacing its PalmOS with Linux + XFree86 and its tools.
I think Palm should try to remain as simple as PalmOS 3.5 or 4.0 and instead focus more on applications. The OS should be developed to deal with more hardware, make easy-to-use SDKs to gather applications from the community and to handle nice themes. Thats all. Pretty soon someone will shrink x86 to palm size and make it consume power as little as the ARM720T, and Microsoft will rush to modify Windows XP for it, and people will just replace that with Linux. Palm will then have to rely solely on their lower end OS on even smaller devices.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"Strech the Palm OS concept to a tiny cell phone screen that doesn't even have a touch screen, all the benefits and reasons that design choices were made break down."
I don't think that they're trying to cover quite that broad a range. The sense I get is that they're intending for PalmOS 5 to run on the class of machines it already runs on (ARM processor, 160x160 pixel or larger touchscreen, 8 MB or more of RAM, perhaps an SD slot), which they project will drop in price over time. PalmOS 6 will run on more muscular hardware (larger touchscreen, more RAM, faster CPU, SD slot) and provide richer multimedia and multitasking capabilities. So it's not so much for this year's cell phones as perhaps set top boxes, G3 cell phones, or high-end PDA's or tablet computers.
It's not clear (to me, at least) how much of a fundamental difference there is between PalmOS 5 and 6. So it's hard to say if it's essentially the same OS with more frameworks (like NT vs. NT Server) or a real forking (like Win95 vs. NT). Perhaps someone with some inside info could comment?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Plus, it doubles as my mp3 player to take to work in the morning (with the addition of a handy SD Cruzer drive) and it impresses the heck out of people.
sic
Perhaps PalmOS is built for the job, but also it's built for the crash in the middle of the job. Usually people associate reliability with servers, but it's getting really annoying whn your PDA locks up at the middle of meeting. Even more - you have to press hardware reset and all you data is gone.
Less is more !
I paid $50 for a refurbed Palm m100 about two years ago. The thing is still running, fat, sassy and happy. I now basically run my life on an m125. Again, bought refurbed, this time for $60 after you factor in the rebate.
I had to move to the m125 because there's a glitch in PalmOS before version 3.5.2 that conflicts with certain apps running on MacOS 9.x, and the m100 can't have its OS upgraded because it's burned to ROM. The m125 has PalmOS 4.0.1 burned to ROM and it coexists beautifully with my Mac G3 Blue-and-white, my Windows desktop and my dual-booting Thinkpad 600e.
The thing that really kicks ass about Palm is Palm Desktop. You can still download it from palmone.com for FREE as in beer (not free as in freedom but what do you expect from a closed-source for-profit software/hardware company like Palm) and it is a great little PIM program regardless of whether you use it for syncing your Palm or just keeping your appointments straight.
Sure, a Zaurus would be able to do more. Yes, PalmOS is crashy and cranky...what do you expect from something that basically is like MacOS before the MultiFinder was born? Still and all, it does what I need it to do, no more, no less.
Most importantly, carrying around my little Palm is easier on the shoulders and back than carrying around a 3 pound paper-and-pencil planner. That you cannot deny.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm a developer of PalmOS and WinCE/PocketPC applications and I realised that fighting any kind of multiple-platform market required a cross-platform tool that works under top-notch IDEs like Eclipse. And there is one. And it's Free.
:)
:v)
By writing programs in SuperWaba - a cut down Java VM - I avoid most of the crap associated with who has what version of what device. Palm V2.0 to WindowsXP/CE, I have just one application to develop and it runs on all platforms - even in a web browser.
Don't leave home without it
Vik
I don't intend this to be a troll.
They don't currently have a RealOS(tm), so why is acquiring/building a real OS considered a change in OS strategy?
When I say they don't have an OS right now, I mean:
- It doesn't do preemptive multitasking, so multiple tasks don't run simultaneously very well. It requires tasks to voluntarily yield, much like MacOS's before OS X. (Palm software people are old Apple software people anyway...) The Palms I've used also did very little in the way of letting multiple tasks run simultaneously. Usually the "top" app is all that's happening (possibly ignoring some interrupt driven background I/O).
- It doesn't have process memory space protection, AFAIK. Without multiple tasks actually running at the same time, this is less of an issue. Palms do, however, "crash" and need to be rebooted sometimes. Certainly this happens more often than on ucLinux PDAs...
If they're making those things possible (and PalmOS 6 is claimed to be "better at multitasking," so it sounds like they are), then it may be worthy of actually calling it an Operating System.
There's a reason why most industrial PDAs are Palm based. It's very solid. It may not look like mini-windows (like Pocket PC) but it's fast, solid, and just works.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Others'MMV, but I've owned / used / beaten to near-death 4 different Palms since the III (c.1998) and I can count on my fingers & toes the number of crashes I recall. The preponderance of those are recent*.
..." I'm talking every day, shutting the thing on and off probably 20 times each day, taking meeting notes (~40 WPM with Graffitti), and reading AvantGo news and PDFs as well as playing games. This in addition to the calandar and To Dos tracking I originally intended.
When I say "owned / used
Never have any of them (III, IIIx, IIIxe, Tungsten T) locked up in the middle of doing these things - they've locked up when syncing, when Finding (searching) against "bad apps," when attempting to switch from a live "Arkanoid" game, but never in the middle of real usage.
*- Also, at least in recent Tungsten memory, when I have reset it, it hasn't lost a damn thing - Not a Note, not a To Do, nor a Calendar entry.
OS 6 - architected and built by the BeOS engineers - looks interesting. I use it much more for "traditional PDA" stuff, but the BeOS was always smart and ass-kicking.
S
Basically it's the transition to a real protected-memory OS, requiring a new underlying system architecture.
How "real" of an OS PalmOS 6 ends up being remains to be seen. From what I have heard so far, it still falls short in many areas. Unfortunately, it looks like Palm is going to try to prolong the pain by giving us multiple, wildly incompatible upgrades before reaching some reasonable, stable point.
Yes, the Palm market does have momentum. The lower prices of the Zire and similar models is making them more attractive to non-technical consumers. One instance of this is Rymans (a UK office supply chain commonly found in the center of towns), who have recently begun stocking them.
The biggest threat to the overall Palm market is Dell's recent low cost bundle of the Axim. I haven't seen any manufacturer bundling Palms with system purchase...
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.
I have a Palm (a T3 if you must know). It crashes with regularity, it hangs with regularity, it has weird "breathing spaces", where it doesn't respond for a few seconds. When migrating between different versions, I have lost data (all the birthdays went away going from one Palm to another) because Palm's database design sucks. Don't give us this b.s. that the Palm "just works". It doesn't. PalmOS can be a royal pain and require hours of fiddling.
And stop trying to assassinate Linux by raising the dreaded "messing with XF86 settings" issue. If you buy an organizer running X11, it graphics system just runs, there is nothing to "mess" with. People "mess" with Linux and XF86 settings when they are trying to install it on hardware that the manufacturer doesn't support it on; that's not a design flaw with XF86, it's a testament to its flexibility and openness that you can do that with it.
So, if it is such a pain, why am I using a Palm? Because its PIM applications are fairly usable, because the file and communications formats are open and documented, because the devices are pretty small, and because they are comparatively cheap. In part, that's because the platform is so old, and in part it's because the platform is so dominant. If someone gave me an X11-based PDA with Palm-like applications, I'd take it in a minute and I'd know already that it would require less "messing with" and crash far less than Palm.
But the notion that PalmOS is a well-designed or stable OS, or that the Palm developers have some special touch ("The Zen of Palm") is ludicrous.
is that user requirements for an organizer is significantly different from a computer. Users expect it to work just as well as their wristwatch
Yes, and I'm still waiting for a PDA for which that is true. Palm, at least, is moving further and further away from that goal. Maybe a Linux PDA will be able to deliver this.