Details Of Palm OS 6 - 'Cobalt'

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."

Comments

Hmm...

[JoeLinux]

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

Hmmm...

[dustmote]

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?

Re:Hmmm...

[AKnightCowboy]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[iSwitched]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[lpret]

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.

32K

[ColonBlow]

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

Re:32,000x32,000?

[NanoGator]

"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?

Re:32,000x32,000?

[Sparky77]

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.