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Details Of Palm OS 6 - 'Cobalt'

Posted by timothy on from the that's-a-big-palm-you've-got dept.

Splezunk writes "Looks like Palm has finally released some details on Palm OS 6 a k a 'Cobalt'. Palminfocenter has more on it, and I have just noticed that there are now screenshots. Highlights are a 32,000x32,000 screen support, BeOS like multitasking and threading. Currently 256MB memory, but this will be upgraded in time."

22 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. 32,000x32,000? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Man, that's a pretty high resolution for such a tiny screen.

    1. Re:32,000x32,000? by NanoGator · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Man, that's a pretty high resolution for such a tiny screen."

      That's a pretty high resolution for a sheet of paper.

      Or are they just forward thinking? I wouldn't be totally insane if I predicted that display resolution will take a radical turn much in the same way that RAM and HD storage did in the not too distant future. I think we're all looking forward to 1200 dpi monitors. Microsoft's already pushing in that direction. Longhorn's UI is vector based with the idea that you can scale it up to really high resolutions and still maintain the same proportions. The image just gets clearer, as opposed to getting smaller. It has even been reported that MS is working with an LCD manufacturer (I want to say Viewsonic, but I'll just have to come forward and say I don't remember too clearly which company was mentioned) to develop displays that ran up to at least 5,000 pixels wide. That's almost 300 dpi on a 19" monitor. Crank that up to 1200 dpi and you almost arrive at that 32k number.

      Does it still seem excessive on a Palm sized display? Sure. Given how the numbers work in the computing world, the next digit down was probably a little too close to what is practical in the next 2-3 years. Better to be safe?

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    2. Re:32,000x32,000? by Sparky77 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Specifically, the article says "The new graphics system is designed to support screen sizes up to 32,000 by 32,000 pixels!" (emphasis added).
      All they are saying is that the software is less limited in what resolutions are supported, not that they expect the device to actually have a screen that size.

      --
      One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
    3. Re:32,000x32,000? by mrseigen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if they don't use it, it sure looks good on a spec sheet, right? :)

  2. Hmm... by JoeLinux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honest question: Is there any design that you can think of that doesn't result in a bulky cell phone/palm, or an impossibly small screen, with no stylus? I'd love to use this. But I don't want to feel like I have a mini-computer as a phone.

    Joe

  3. Hmmm... by dustmote · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know these are pretty ubiquitous among business users and those who can afford them, but are they really that useful to the terminally broke? What functionality does a PDA offer that makes it worth the price tag to someone who is making something in the neighborhood of 20k a year? I'd love to play with one, but I just don't know what I'd do with it, apart from hold my phone numbers. My cell already does that. Anyone?

    --


    -1, "1337" speak
    1. Re:Hmmm... by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I'd love to play with one, but I just don't know what I'd do with it, apart from hold my phone numbers. My cell already does that. Anyone?

      Well then they're really not targetted at you. If you only make $20k/year then blowing $400 on a PDA isn't that great of a decision. These are for people that need the newest and greatest gadgets and have gads of disposable income. If you don't fit in there then stick with a paper day planner from a dollar store. I've still got a Palm M505 and hardly ever use it. Once in awhile I play Tetris on it or jot a phone number down, but I could've just bought a Game Boy and used a piece of scrap paper for the phone number (or programmed it in my cell phone like you said). I honestly don't know what people see in PDAs.. I'd prefer having a subnotebook like the old Toshiba Libretto that I can type fast on to take notes in class or something.

    2. Re:Hmmm... by vondo · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Well, a monochrome Palm can be had for $80 and a color Clie for about $150, so I don't know if that's something you'd want to afford.

      The first thing a paper organizer can never do is beep to tell you were to go. Also, with Palms there is an amazing amount of software out there (www.palmgear.com) which will do all kinds of stuff. My two favorites are a great shopping list program (HandyShop) and a program to keep track of all my business travel (TravelTracker).

      You'd likely find other things that were very useful.

    3. Re:Hmmm... by cnkeller · · Score: 2, Insightful
      What functionality does a PDA offer that makes it worth the price tag to someone who is making something in the neighborhood of 20k a year?

      Money is relative I guess, but I use either a Palm or iPaq for my keeping track of my gym workouts. Yes, it's a little geeky, but I find that it works far better than paper for estimating goals and graphing history of bodyfat, weight lifted, reps, etc. They also make great places to hold grocery lists and generic shopping lists around holidays and birthdays.

      Yeah, I know paper works wonderfully for that. But lets face it, for 99% of the world (me included) they are toys that you buy with disposable income. At 20K, you don't have any discretionary income if you live in first world....

      --

      there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots

    4. Re:Hmmm... by iSwitched · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I love this question, and I'm hoping you get lots of opinion, and not modded 'offtopic'.

      Here's my $0.02

      For the average person, and even average geek, there is absolutely nothing to see here. I carried a PDA for years (Palms of gradually increasing fanciness). At first I would whip it out at the drop of a hat, take notes on it, etc. Kept all my calendars, addresses, the usual, even had some cool games, like a version of Galaxian with real authentic sound.

      Over time - it started running out of charge more and more frequently, as i started ignoring it more and more. It was rare that I ever need to look up someones full address, and my phone has all the numbers. My calendar wasn't that busy, so I hardly ever referred to it.

      I gave it to a friend - I simply didn't need another gadget weighing me down. Nowadays, I carry a good laptop in a nice backpack. The thing has decent battery life and wakes from sleep reliably, so if I really need to look something up I just open the lid. Not as convenient as the handheld, but quite a bit more powerful.

      If you don't travel extensively, and work in a field where you're gonna carry a laptop and a backpack anyway (sounds like virtually every programmer I know), save the dough until you can afford a nice portable, something under 6 pounds or so, and just use it.

      This works for me, as usual, your results may differ.

      --
      "That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
    5. Re:Hmmm... by lpret · · Score: 3, Insightful
      As much as I wanted to mod you down, here's my response instead:

      The beautiful thing about PDAs are their flexibility. I'm a college student and I use one, my father is a systems administrator and uses one, and my mother is in human resources and uses one. My mom has a Zire71 and uses it for keeping her meetings planned out, all of contacts for people in her office (as well as the many family and family friends), and she keeps her recipes on a mobile database.

      My Dad uses his (Toshiba e755) to do remote network administration and to give presentations in meetings (yes, full-blown powerpoint presentations) among the reasons my mother uses hers.

      I use mine (Sony NZ-90) to take notes in class, take pictures (2 megapixel camera built-in), email/browsing with wifi, mp3 player for walking to/from class, and keep track of my diabetes, among the other things my mom and dad both use it for.

      It's all up to you what you want to do with it. I have art friends who use it to quickly sketch ideas, finance majors who keep track of every expense on there, and my sister who's a nurse and keeps her drug dictionary on there. Get a cheap Zire, see if you use it at all, and go from there. It's not for everyone, but for those of us who use them, it becomes incredibly important.

      --
      This is my digital signature. 10011011001
    6. Re:Hmmm... by tyen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...but are they really that useful to the terminally broke?

      You don't say what you do for a living, but if you are learning how to sell, just a few tools can make you stand heads and shoulders above other salespeople in your field. A PDA is one of those tools. If your raw sales skills are about par, employing these tools with the savviness of a geek will set you apart. The really outstanding salespeople I've met had some things in common. A biggie I've seen is they follow up until they get a sale (then they keep following up to get the next sale), and they stay hyper-organized to do that. They also organize a systematic way of selling and marketing. Keeping track of hundreds, even thousands of sales leads and clients simultaneously is ridiculously easy when you are systematized and computerized.

      If you are like most Slashdotters, you'll dismiss sales and marketing work. Before you do however, consider this. High end sales and marketing skills (that is, involving more than phone monkey work, and require domain knowledge of an industry) are the one set of skills that have never been outsourced. Ever. If you learn how to market and sell, and you are a geek in even a modestly-growing area, you will never lack for a job. Hell, you can always create your own job when push comes to shove. Remember, even during the Great Depression, the worst economic calamity the U.S. has experienced to date, there were still want ads in the paper...for sales positions. If you are a rainmaker, doors open. Geeks have natural talents that can be applied to sales and marketing tasks, with tremendous leverage. If you just have to get over the awkward social skills you currently labor under, there are coaches and mentors to help you with that; if it helps you learn how to market and sell, their fees are repaid orders of magnitude over.

      So even if you only make USD 20K per annum right now, a PDA is appropriate if you are at the stage where you are applying your sales skills, and need a way to keep track of your contacts. I say this as a geek who eventually learned how to market and sell well enough to do it on my own. Believe me, it was worth it in spades.

    7. Re:Hmmm... by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 2, Insightful
      As much as I wanted to mod you down, here's my response instead:

      BTW, WTF is up with that comment? You really need to read the moderation FAQ sometime and quit using moderation as a way to censor people who have differing opinions from yourself. Fine, you use your Sony NZ-90 a lot, I don't use my Palm M505 at all.

      A guy making $20k/year who can't come up with a reason on his own why he needs one certainly shouldn't be blowing a couple hundred bucks on one just to satisfy his curiosity. The fact of the matter is, if you need a PDA you will buy one, if you don't then get a dayplanner, they're much cheaper.

      As for using a PDA for network administration, why would I bother with a kludgy pen interface for debugging issues when I can just grab a laptop if I needed a mobile device (which I don't since we're sane and have everything on terminal servers). I can quite comfortably sit at home at my desk and bring the entire network up or down via a modem.

  4. Screenshots gone? by DamienMcKenna · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Are the screenshots gone? I don't see them there now.

  5. 32K by ColonBlow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    they better be able to support more than 256Mb of ram, since you'll need at least a Gb to represent that 32kX32K screen.

    --
    free online diet tracking.
  6. Coooool. by josh+glaser · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sounds sweet! I think it's actually a good thing that they are switching to a non-numeric naming system because OS 5 isn't going to be outdated anytime soon. I mean, you can still get new OS 4.1 Palms, so why give people the impression that they're outdated right out of the box? (Well, in the 4.x case, they might be, but OS 5 will be around for a while, I think.) The only downside is that having two "modern" operating systems might confuse people...should they want people to know that the newest is the most advanced? But that's they're call, not mine, so I'll move on. 32Kx32K is overkill. I'll be accepting my Obvious award now. From what I've heard, you will be able to upgrade from the some of the Tungstens. The T3 seems likely, and the C is a possibility (that's just my - well, mostly other peoples' - speculation). Oh, and where are the screenshots?

  7. Security by octal666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Industry standards-based security; I wonder what is that security, I don't see much security as a standard on industry.

    --
    DON'T PANIC
  8. Complicated schedule & poor temporal orientati by arsinmsn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Since I've got many meetings in a day, and am only vaguely aware of the passing of time, a palm is crucial to allowing me to anger as few people as possible during the work-day by accidentally blowing them off.

    Plus it plays MP3s; admittedly only a few at a time, but enough to get me home in a revised state of mind.

  9. Re:Was considering Palm, but now maybe linux-based by darrylo · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The Sharp Zaurus line is appealing, but the last I heard there was no syncing solution at all for the Mac, even from 3rd party's.

    Even if there was a Mac syncing solution for the Zaurus, I'd strongly recommend that you take a good, hard look at the Zaurus PIM apps before making a decision.

    I have both a Zaurus and a Palm (a Clie, actually), and the Palm is what I use, because I need a PDA with good PIM apps. After being spoiled by DateBk5 on the Palm, there's no way I could use the Zaurus. And, I'd be willing to pay US$100 for Zaurus PIM apps with equivalent functionality and usability (DateBK5 is soooo incredibly polished).

    Here's a basic example: on the Zaurus, create an appointment that's five minutes long, and give it some descriptive text. On my Zaurus, this is displayed this as a completely unusable and unreadable line of pixels. On the Palm, it's just displayed as completely readable text.

    (Oh, and don't even get me started on the fact that I have to use a #$%^&*()?%! dialog box to enter text. On the Palm, I just write or type. For the virgins out there, this is the difference between on-screen editing (the Palm) and using dialog boxes for all editing (the Z).)
  10. Re:OT: What is the dpi "resolution" of reality? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Think in terms of angular resolution rather than dots per inch.

  11. Re:32000 x 32000 -- not really by Xeger · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Right.

    The cynic in me reads this statement as "The graphical subsystem on previous versions of PalmOS suffered from extreme lack of foresight and failed to allocate enough bits to device coordinates, thereby preventing PalmOS from supporting any reasonable screen resolution. We're not quite so myopic now, and we've allocated 32 bits for the same purpose."

    Big whoop. By this metric, Windows (and X) are capable of supporting TWO BILLION x TWO BILLION resolution screens, because they use an entire 32-bit unsigned integer for the device coordinate along each axis!

  12. Lack of out-of-box-support a very negative message by michaeldot · · Score: 2, Insightful
    As a longstanding Palm supporter and a Mac user, I too am quite disappointed at this "unfortunate" turn of events. So disappointed that I've felt it necessary to drop Larry a polite note:

    Larry Slotnick (larry.slotnick@palmsource.com)
    Chief Products Officer
    PalmSource

    Dear Larry,

    I am extremely disappointed to read that you no longer intend to support the Mac OS with your future products.

    As a Palm user since 1996, having owned six iterations of them up to my current T3 and recommended them to countless numbers of buyers (both Mac and PC users), I feel that my support of the Palm platform may now be drawing to an end.

    I am aware that 3rd party solution(s) may be available to provide the missing synch support, just as they exist for using Pocket PC devices on a Mac. However, by not providing "out of the box" support for the Mac platform, you are sending a clear message to both the press and the Mac-using community that you believe the platform no longer worth your attention.

    I strongly urge you to reconsider this short-sighted and potentially damaging move. You may not be aware that many of us Mac users do actually talk to PC users and influence their PDA buying decisions. To jettison the minority Mac platform because of its low marketshare is one thing, but to cause them to become disgusted advocates for competing products is another.

    Please reconsider your strategy.

    Sincerely,

    Michael -------
    Palm user since '96