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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.
Palm(One|Whatever) seem to be more like Apple before the "Second Coming of Jobs": lacking direction, floundering around trying to bring a new OS to market to replace their increasingly outdated current version, full of infighting and confusion.
I hope they can sort themselves out, because I really like the PalmOS platform.
Completely correct analogy. They're caught up in dozens of pointless rewrites of everything, nothing actually gets accomplished, the hardware and software are just getting more complex without actually improving, and they're losing sight of the core simplicity and "it just works" aspect that made them so successful in the first place.
Microsoft, to their credit, soldiers on, getting slowly better, version after version, as they always do. Palm had a huge lead, and squandered it on stupid stuff like splitting up into different companies and trying to sell the OS to clone manufacturers (sound familiar?).
I HOPE and PRAY that the embracing of linux on Palm will have the same effect that embracing UNIX had on Apple -- finally building in the robust multitasking and hardware management that have long been needed while letting more resources be spent on the actual user side of things
I quake in terror for the day when i have to use a Pocket PC device daily -- a horribly mangled UI designed for a regular computer and just shrink-rayed down to an unusable abbreviation of an interface. *shiver*
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.