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Birth of the Pilot PDA
Sabah Arif writes "Braeburn has published an in depth history of how Palm Computing transformed itself from a software company that published software for the Zoomer and Newton, into a hardware company with the wildly successful Pilot in 1996."
...and this is the first time I have read TFA all the way through.
A couple of months ago I finally retired the second of my 1996 vintage PalmPilots, and replaced it with a Zire 31.
In the nine years since I shelled out my $500 aud I found one or two bugs in the os and bundled applications. I used it practically every day for all those years. Based on that record the Palm is the most bug free application I have used, by at least an order of magnitude.
The Zire has better hardware. The digitiser doesn't go out of calibration at all (so far) it has better hardware and somewhat better software, but it is not nine years better.
The original Palm deserved to succeed because it was well engineered. Before I had the palm I mucked around with a little casio organiser. It cost be $70 or so. I lost the data a few times and gave up.
The palm was a great example of how sometimes you have to go up in the market to create a product worth buying. I mean from the 70 buck casio to the 500 buck palm. I paid the extra money because it was worth it.
Okay, back to OnboardC.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Part of palms problem in my opinion is the fact that their devkit still only caters to the 68k, now that we see palms using 200mhz (lowest end) to upwards of 400mhz ARM processors, were still forced to use 68k code and let their emulation environment handle it (you can write really tiny portions of arm code though, but still limiting the size to like 4kb isn't nice) I think they should have done what apple did, when the arch changes, drop all support on the new arch of the old programs, sure in the early stages backwards compatibility was heavenly. Now however it's just plain silly forcing everyone to code for the old arch, also they need some form of audio chip in their device, playing pcm sound is handled through the cpu (drains battery immensely) and I can barely get 4 hours playback out of it. also their filesystem which goes by the principle "nothings a file" was apt back in the original palm days, but nowadays is just plain annoying. These are just some of my gripes with the system. why i think we don't see more serious programs for the new devices.
I'm surprised there is no mention of radio shack. Tandy was a leather/crafts store until it became one with radio shack ( I forget who bought who ). I always thought it was amusing that the half I used to buy moccasin kits from was the brand name used for the computers
The reason for this is because the companies producing Pocket PC hardware are producing superior hardware. I'll grant you that Pocket PC may not be the most elegant OS for a PDA. I prefer Palm in this regard. But I own a Pocket PC, even though I use Linux and thus have to install all my software via Windows running over VMWare, precisely because the Pocket PCs are better devices, IMHO. I don't know what's happened lately, but Palm, in my opinion again, has gone downhill with regards to their hardware. The screens are often hard on the eyes. Or they often develop in a few months this problem where the screen buzzes or makes a high-pitched whine. I just find they're not making quality products, currently. And all the other players (Sony, Handspring, etc.) were either bought out or don't make Palms any longer.
It's sad to see, but I think it's important to recognize that Microsoft is "winning" in this case because Palm is doing a really poor job.