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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."
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.
PalmOS 3.1 is for desktops.
PalmOS 3.11 for Workgroups is for small networks.
PalmOS NT is the server platform.
PalmOS 95 *is* *the* upgrade for PalmOS 3.1.
This is gonna end in tears...
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.
I thought this was a really cool article, then I realized its not 1998.
Does Palm have any kind of momentum at all anymore?
"Sig free in '03!"
how about "Palm OS Full-Speed" and "Palm OS Hi-Speed"?
If all I need is just a PIM (calendaring, contacts, notes, money, short messages), then what would be the reason to choose PalmOS vs Linux on PDA?
If all you need is just a PIM (calendaring, contacts, notes, money, short messages), then why would you ever consider choosing a Linus over PalmOS on a PDA?
PalmOS is built for the job, fast enough to do what you want (and more), power efficient, etc.
Stop looking for a sledgehammer to crack a nut and give serious consideration to a Zire or Tungsten. Which one is best for you depends on how honest you are when you say you're looking for "just a PIM".
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
Yellow Tab has a version of BeOS called "Zeta".
I think the story is that they could licence everything but the name. There's an awesome preview up on Zeta Journal.
And there are also the two open clones in the works: Blue-Eyed OS (by building BeOS-workalike bits on top of Linux) and OpenBeOS (a from-the-ground-up reimplementation of BeOS)..
I want to root for Palm. Really.
Even broke down and bought a used IIIXE... which died a month later. I know there is much newer tech out there now, and geeky individual buyers are not the preferred target market. I could probably get this doorstop fixed - but my cell phone and Blackberry are covering the basic PIM and game bases.
And I've never had to reboot the piece of paper in my wallet with all the phone numbers on it. Even a phone with an OS of any complexity makes me nervous. Again, I know they don't care about incidental sales...
This is a toy I would like to be able to con myself into "needing" -but at $300-$400 and formidable network access charges, it isn't that inconvenient to check e-mail with the cell phone or haul the laptop around.
While there many not be many people with the same mindset, I wonder if a $100 price point (for a device with some expansion capabilities) wouldn't get people like me off the fence.
<grrr>
PalmSource has made a mess of the platform from a developer's perspective. It used to be that all Palm OS systems were more or less the same--slow 68k processor, very small address space, small 160x160 monochrome touch screen. As the technology moved down in price, Palm OS systems started to get improvements like faster ARM processors (endian change!), more memory, and high resolution color screens. The problems are several:
So in summary, life has been frustrating for Palm OS developers. But the real losers here are the users. What used to be a vibrant community of 3rd party developers has somewhat dried up. People simply aren't writing as many good, device-neutral Palm OS apps as they used to.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Boy are you guys gonna hate me for even suggesting Microsoft....
A lot of people are asking for alternatives to PalmOS... well, how about it's #1 competator: PocketPC?
I have been playing with the HP iPAQs recently, and am trying to find one at a reasonable price, and lemme tell you I am in love.
I owned a Visor Delux back when they came out, and it just sucked after a while. Handwriting was a pain in the ass; the software worked, but was limited; there was no good solution for document editing/viewing; audio, video and networking functions were nonexistant at the time. Even then, the top of the line HP Journadas could play mp3s and had a color screen.
If you want something to replace your pocket pad of paper, go with a palm I guess. If you want a *computer* in your pocket, go with a PocketPC... I personally am drooling over the HP h1945, h2215, and h4155's.
no comment
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.
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
This isn't news at all. This has been Palm's strategy for the past few years -- one OS for low-end devices, one for high end.
The only difference is the previously high-end OS is becoming the low-end. Which will happen again one day with Palm OS 6.
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.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
It cracks me up to see all these PocketPC fans compare their latest big, heavy PocketPC beast to the ancient Visor Deluxe or Palm IIIXE. Those machines are at least two generations old!
I had just about given up on Palm -- until I got hold of the new Tungsten T3.
The Tungsten T3 has a gorgeous aluminum case with the same form factor as the classic Palm V-- meaning it will actually fit in your shirt pocket, and it runs at 400mhz with 64mb of RAM. It plays movies, it plays mp3's, has a built-in voice recorder, bluetooth, and plenty of other *actually useful* features, plus a huge library of software.
So please, if you're going to compare, be fair.
I've heard PalmOS bought a while ago the old good BeOS, might it be they are planning to use it as the new PalmOS 6?
By the way, just yesterday I bought a Tungsten T2 and it's my first PDA, and the first thing I see this morning is Palm is changing something, I've broke in cold sweat while reading the story. Slashdot is going to kill me one day.
DON'T PANIC
It's very easy to see why Palm would be doing this - there is a fairly big stock of devices out there.
:) If there are two real market segments for the two operating system versions, they would be "people frustrated with crippled non-multithreading 16-bit legacy OS" and "people who just don't care". Unfortuntely, you can't sell Tungsten @ 400 USD for the second group.
Touting the new OS 6 as the best thing since sliced bread would make it extremely hard to ship pre-6 devices, both for themselves and all the licensors. So understandably they have to downplay its meaning to avoid sitting on warehouses full of Tungsten devices nobody wants to buy.
It's somewhat amusing that the only named benefits they can find for the old OS is smaller footprint and cost.
I will hold my judgement on whether Palm OS 6 really is the savior of Palm, but as with any projects this magnitude, expect this too will take a while to mature.
Jouni
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant