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PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux

Posted by Hemos on from the from-the-world-of-small dept.

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.

2 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history by drmaxx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/).

  2. wrong by cahiha · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.