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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.
In the bad old days of the dotcom boom, Palm Pilots were the hottest executive PDA piece of flair out there. And all it really did was manage contacts.
Technology has really made a lot of progress since then and that old Dragonball chip looks like a Hyundai when compared to an XScale Ferrari. The processors can handle much more than the simple PalmOS requests, and in some respects this is a good thing. It means that the underlying OS is relatively light and lots of power can be used to run apps. Unfortunately, that also is a limitation of the OS.
Embedded Linux provides a full operating system with a plethora of drivers and applications. It uses the capabilities of the chipset without being too heavy. It is definitely the way to go.
And actually not just Linux, but any general-purpose embedded OS is the way to go. You'd obviously want something that had guaranteed real-time performance as well as a well-done threading model. The API would need to be very well understood too. This brings up a whole slew of embedded operating systems. It also leaves out PalmOS.
PalmOS is like the Apple of the business. It may not be the cheapest (but often is). It may not be in the lead marketshare-wise (but currently is). But the interface is hella streamlined, and it Just Works (tm). Besides that, it's not too bad to code for, and it's got a firm old of the hardware it's on.
Even so, it wouldn't be all that bad to port PalmOS to the XScale chip, or any other archetecture. I'd be interested in seeing it run on x86 natively (emulators already exist).
I guess you're one of the few that actually like Windows CE or Windows Embedded or whatever they're calling it today; an existing system ported onto a system with ten times the restricted ram, and even more so when you speak of CPU power and battery power. Why not let PalmOS, the operating system designed to fit embedded PDA systems, do the job it was created to do?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Actually... it was only their business-to-business arm that was ever called Consignia (and I think they kept that name for quite a while) but, point agreed.
You don't get a much better name than THE ROYAL MAIL. It's just about as good an endorsement as you could get. Why, then, change it to some wishy-washy, made up word which, I assume, is supposed to be a concatenation of Consignment and Insignia?
Mars/Snickers, Cellnet/BTCellnet/O2, Opal Fruits/Starburst, etc. all did the same for little reason. T-Mobile was somebody else as well, most phone companies have changed their name at least once (with the possible exception of Virgin Mobile).
Imagine the reprinting costs alone, not to mention customer confusion, disappearing brand loyalty and reputation, and not actually GAINING anything out of it (a company could be called Shit Computers for all I care... if they do what I want at the right price, I don't care what their name is).
The thing that gets me more annoyed, though, is when the company name is not obviously linked to their business AND they don't state their business on any slogan, advert etc.
M25 J26/27-ish, there is a MASSIVE warehouse with "Sericol... More than ink, solutions..." on it. I don't know what the bloody hell they do from that. They could be squid processors for all I know.
Previous application compatibility: Palm OS Cobalt (6.x), which is being waited for with bated breath in the handheld industry, is being built as a combination of Linux technology gained through CMS (a China-based mobile company) which palmsource purchased last year, and the BeOS which Palm purchased when still a combined company (IIRC). 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.
That sounds more like my experience with the Pocket PC. So long as you use the Palm software, which all works well together, it's been absolutely reliable for me since 1999. I've gone through 3 Palms and 2 Pocket PCs, and the only time I've lost data has been on the Pocket PC. Even when my Visor was sat apon by a less than watchful 17 year old, I was able to replace it, sync, and EVERYTHING came back, applications and all. I was never able to perform a complete recovery from a backup on a Pocket PC even on the same handheld (after an embarassing data loss when Microsoft Pocket Streets crashed while I was trying to give someone directions).
It's a pity Palm lost the plot. The whole handheld market has turned very strange, with Microsoft crippling the Pocket PC to make it more like the Palm, and Palm trying to cram so much into the Palm to compete with the Pocket PC on features. The last of the 68000-based Clies, Sony's Palm-OS devices, ended up being the best of the lot.
I have no idea what handheld I'll get when my SJ22 breaks. I can't see anything in the current lot on EITHER platform that really attracts me, but I suppose it'll be a Tungsten or a Zire. There's no way I'm going to trust a Pocket PC again.
Yeah and I bet the tiny screen and lack of real keyboard are real convenient, too.
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement. People who constantly try to put ten pounds of shit in a one-pound bag are rather amusing, because it's usually those same people who give up after a while, claiming that the Palm platform sucks balls because it can't replace their computer.
If it works for you, great, but you are one of the very small minority who can function in such a restrictive environment. And hell, I'm an embedded systems designer, I know all about restrictive environments. :-)
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement.
Palms are "a real computer". They're not "a desktop computer", but then a desktop OS makes a crappy server OS (hey, Microsoft, I'm talking to YOU here) and a mainframe would be out of place on the desktop (though IBM's first personal computer emulated the IBM 360 mainframe... and almost nobody's ever heard of it). There's lots of "real computers", just like there's lots of "real vehicles" from a pushbike to a space shuttle.