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PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux
gandell writes "CNET is reporting that after only two years, PalmOne is spending $30 million dollars to become "Palm" again. From the article:
"PalmOne, which makes handhelds bearing the same name, plans to change its name to Palm later this year, the company said Tuesday.
At that time, its product line, which currently includes the LifeDrive, Treo, Tungsten and Zire devices, will be branded under the Palm name..."
Some will remember that Palm split into two companies, Pa1mOne and Palmsource (which made the Palm OS). According to the article, "...At the time the two companies created a third company, called Palm Trademark Holding, of which PalmSource held a 55 percent stake. That stake will now be transferred to PalmOne for $30 million, the companies said.'" As well, at a recent show Dave Nagel gave notice that Linux is PalmSource's platform for the future.
It was actually Marathon->Snickers, and there was a slight difference in that case, in that Snickers was the US name for the product and they just brought it in line. As for all the others, totally pointless indeed!
I've seen that warehouse myself from the M25, and wondered... A quick google just revealed they make screen-printing ink - so when they say "more than ink", they just mean "ink" :)
There are no Cobalt devices. When PalmWhatever kept pushing out more iterations of the PalmOS 5 platform, it became pretty obvious that the BeOS curse was alive and well and Cobalt was never going to show up.
Linux, though? OK, it's not as badly adapted to handhelds as Windows, since the UNIX API doesn't have nearly as much desktop-nature built into it, but... sheesh.
Unfortunately the latest OS5.4 Palms (Tungsten 5 and Treo 650) are not branded under the JustWorks(tm) trademarks. Crashes with wired error messages are very common. Substantial bugs (such as the global find function that does not work) are persistent and not resolved by PalmOne. Daily work with my new Tungsten T5 with 416 MHz XScale Processor is slower then with my 5 year old PalmV (e.g. opening up a split screen in DateBK5 takes 50 seconds - 0.5s on my old PalmV), due to the inefficient handling of the data management between flash and ram. The flash memory has 512 byte minimal cluster size. This increased the DB sizes substantially and did not help to make the slow flash access faster... There is a patch out there for some Treo650. The Tungsten T5 is still waiting for the second patch. The first patch improved the TT5 from unworkable to buggy! Hope there *will* be a second patch. Hope is all we can do... Together with me there are many other ex-loyal Palm follower that are severly disappointed about the latest models and the way Palm is not dealing with it (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tungsten-t5/).
In case anybody is wondering what the parent talks about.
PalmSource acquired the rights for BeOS and he's right, they didn't really do anything with it, but at the same time people who wanted to do anything with it had the problem that they couldn't get the rights needed.
P.S.: Why BeOS should be the polar opposite of Linux is beyond me.
Although PalmOne (now Palm) switching to Linux _by themselves_ may sound a great idea at first, there could not be any backwards compatibility (licensing), and there would therefore be no apps - and apps are the reason p1 remains in the game.
Quite to the contrary: PalmOS on Linux will be highly backwards compatible with existing Palm applications according to Palm, probably more so than than Cobalt would have been. That's one of the big attractions of doing this.
PalmOS started out as Palm libraries on top of a third party kernel. With PalmOS 5, they added a 68k emulator into the mix. With that history, moving to a different kernel while preserving backwards compatibility should not be all that hard.
BeOS. Which Palmsource bought, refused to licence even to people who had pre-existing reseller licences, and never used in (any|a major) way in a product, and not at all in a shipping product.
When I've tried to use my Palm as a "laptop replacement" then I've had that experience too, though I never managed to suffer irrecoverable data loss no matter HOW hard I pushed it.
Yep. That's why "soft reset ten times per day", not "hard reset". Very annoying anyway and doesn't really speak well for PalmOS programmers.
I don't use PDA as a laptop replacement. As I posted some times before, generally I read books and use PIM. I don't even have a laptop and feel no need for one, that's why I didn't say anything about vast superior multimedia or whatever capabilities of Windows Mobile line, because I see no use for it anyway in a handheld.
better, get a cheap PalmOS device and quit looking for something that isn't "technologicaly retarded".
You know, some basic stuff like font anti-aliasing and fucking normal multi-lingual support with unicode wouldn't hurt even for a "simple handheld". Cyrillification issues (I'm a russian guy) of PalmOS are an endless torment.
Some real multitasking (no, horrible hacks don't qualify) so I could use IRC and book reader simultaneously if I ever wanted to would be kinda nice too, don't you think? Even for a simple handheld? :-)
My point is, PalmOS is nice interface wise, I like it very much, it is easy to use and all that, give or take a few quirks. But as of year 2005 it is very outdated and needs refreshment, just like OS9 before OSX.
I don't know what Palm is thinking with their two last half-assed flagship products (T5 and LifeDrive). Maybe they just need money to survive until new OS will be ready, I dunno.
By the way, recent PalmOS devices use the same Xscale processors and ARM architecture and under the hood (IMHO) are very similar to the PPC line.
That's why "soft reset ten times per day", not "hard reset".
I get soft resets occasionally running "find", I'm sure it's some application that I haven't managed to identify yet. I don't like it, but at least recovery is reliable, which hasn't been the case on the Pocket PC... I've had corrupted files and occasional hard resets following a soft reset. And hard resets on the Pocket PC are MUCH more traumatic than on the Palm, because ActiveSync only backs up part of the system on a sync.
I don't use PDA as a laptop replacement.
I suspect that if you're even considering doing things like IRC, you probably are using what I'd call "laptop replacement" tools.
Some real multitasking (no, horrible hacks don't qualify) so I could use IRC...
Oh, man, you would be SO unhappy if you got real multitasking and discovered just how limited the PalmOS TCP/IP support is. That's the real problem that's keeping you from using networking from the backend, not the "cooperative multitasking" model.
I don't know what Palm is thinking with their two last half-assed flagship products
They're thinking "oh, shit, this BeOS stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be". Palm OS 5 was originally going to be a stopgap while they got the BeOS-based ARM-native OS working. When they started shipping updates I figured they were running into problems...
I think at this point their best bet would be to go to a UNIX kernel and UNIX apps and treat the old PalmOS API like something between Carbon and "Classic" on the Mac.
I want their Palm OS Developer Suite (eclipse kitted out as a full Palm OS ide) on Linux. I have the sources and their patches but haven't been able to put aside the time yet to see how far I get and what problems I hit. In fact, their desire to maintain their own Free Software based ide was a significant factor for choosing Palm for our product. I'm not complaining about PalmSource not having done this work already, they have done it a free software way so their work is there to pick up.
It may only be available for Windows (90% of the market?) but how much easier do you want then PODS? A complete, Free software based ide, using standard tools, register as a developer (basically to get access to device roms), download one file and install it, you know have a small cygwin setup with all the command line tools, plus a kitted up eclipse to act as a full ide (including Palm documentation).
You say that you asked why tools for developing Palm OS apps on Linux are neglected, but you mention pilot-link as an example. pilot-link is a hot-sync program, not used at all to develop programs (though perhaps to transfer them to a device for testing, or to test conduits under Linux).
Note that I am not trying to refute any arguments you make about the history or levels of co-operation, I don't know enough to say anything sensible about it.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source