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Palm Teams With Microsoft for Smart Phone
UltimaGuy writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that Palm Inc. is teaming up with Microsoft Corp. to launch a Windows-based version of the Treo smart phone, marking the first time the handheld computer pioneer will sell a device based on its former rival's software. 'In terms of the level of importance, this would be - in this space - the same thing as Apple announcing they were going to be using Intel processors.'"
shouldn't be "same thing as IBM announcing they were going to be using Intel proc
I've heard over and over from people who've done some programming in this area that, although alternatives to VS exist they are either with far less features or buggy.
Mod me troll but I believe that VS IDE is probably the best development environment around, and it might me possibly one of the reasons why many programmers are still coding for windows.
Palm building WinCE based handheld which will be distributed through Verizon.
Essentially Palm is going down (stock wise and tech wise). With Linux Zaurses becoming popular and new products like the Nokia 770 coming out, there's not much room between Linux and WinCE for Palm to build a niche market.
Microsoft helping might be a good thing for Palm, but in that terms Faust really got a deal for his soul too.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Also, hardly any software supports the camera, virtual grafiti area, or infrared port on my Clie TH55, because PalmOS was lagging in support for these things so Sony had to jump the gun and make their own APIs. Then finally Palm came out with their own incompatible APIs.
Palms market share may have faltered recently , but 18% market share is defiantly not crushed . ,which has a great many contenders .
.. they just have a great deal more competition these days
It makes them one of the top 3 major players in the market
I believe Blackberry at the number one spot with 20.8% and just after palm comes HP with 17.6.
So they are not crushed by any means
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I think the real problem is bells and whistles only get you so far. I think that's the reason most sell manufacturers are struggling for new ideas and having to go to things like iTunes; there are simply not enough devices they can cram into a cellphone and market anymore.
Sadly, Palm was one of the few companies that was trying to innovate cellphones. Though the Treo is clunky, it has real functionality that I would honestly use, and could be a lot better with compatibility with other devices. Though I think that the cellphone was a terrible addition for a PDA (why can't they be seperate devices and communicate with BlueTooth, is it really that hard???), I think that Palm made a proper job of trying to connect the two devices in a sensible way.
And yes, I agree with you on the antenna/amplifier part. There is really no excuse for cellphones being so bad inside of buildings except battery life might not be able to keep up with the devices, especially a SmartPhone that has an entire operating system including a huge power consuming LCD to drive. Hopefully as OLED prices come down it will help with the power constraints and the cell manufacturers will bring the quality back to where it should be.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
As much as I like my standalone palm, I could not deal with my cell phone crashing daily. If WM is more stable than POS (which shouldn't be too hard), then this may be a good move for treo.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
This news makes baby Jesus cry.
:D ]
I'm using my Kyocera 7135 Smartphone, It's old, using Palm OS 4.1, and quite underpowered, but I opted for it over the newer windows smartphones or RIM Blackberries, because I absolulty love the ease of use of Palm OS, as well as the clamshell design, a rarity in smartphones. If there is ever a smartphone with Palm OS 5, in a clamshell design, you can bet I'll be first in line. As far as intregrations go, this Kyocera is the best intragration of PDA software and cellphone features. [Well, I do like the palm OS treo too, but I need the clamshell
I've said this before and I'll say it again - this is great news. There are many, many people who grew up with Palm OS. I have been using it since the Palm III days and in that period I went on the desktp from Mac to Windows to Icewm to Gnome (version 0.7) to KDE to Gnome and back to Mac OS X. I write faster in grafitti than on pen and paper. I have several Palm OS add on apps that I use everyday, several times a day. The Treo is popular because of the Palm OS not Palm (which why, as others have noted, the Apple analogy is way off - its the Mac OS X experience that people love, not PowerPC chips).
Palm as a company has grown to suck big time (it began with the 3Com purchase and it has been downhill ever since). When I had a choice, I avoided Palm products. The only decent Palm since the Palm V is the T3, but Palm support is less then useless (lot's of horror stories here).
Now that Palm has become just one more Microsoft OEM it will die a long, protracted painful death. But its customers like me, won't have to endure the death rattle. We will be able to go out out and buy Palm-enabled or rather ACCESS-enabled devices. And there is a great likelihood there will be many of those from multiple vendors and with multiple options.
Here's why: Let's face it - the PDA market is dying, and the cell phone market is rapidly on the rise. Does Palm/Microsoft really think it can compete with Nokia, Motorola, Sony/Erricson, Samsung and China Inc? How many cell phones do those companies sell? How many does Palm sell, with all the success of Treo? How many of the latter companies are using Microsoft's WinMobile? How many of those companies do/plan to sell embedded Linux phones?
In case you don't know the answers to the above rhetorical questions, it is likely the case that by now Motorola has shipped more embedded Linux phones in China alone than all the Treos out there. These phones will soon be available outside the US. Isn't it likely that these companies will add ACCESS as a feature/add-on to entice millions of Palm customers like me? When that happens, how many TreoNGs do you think are going to be sold? All of you can count on one hand.
So yes, Palm is dead. But fortunately, Palm OS has just been reborn. With it's old master dead it will take off even more rapidly.
"...the same thing as Apple announcing they were going to be using Intel processors..." I disagree. Most people don't give a rat's ass what processor is inside of a Macintosh; the thing that makes it unique is the operating system running on it. The Apple transition (if done right) should be seamless, with the OS running as it does today (or faster) and most existing apps continuing to work as today. Palm is doing essentially the exact opposite. They are changing the OS, changing the look and feel of the software on the Treo, and breaking compatibility with all existing Palm software. As a current Treo owner, I'm pretty sad about the transition.
(Okay, I accidentally hit "reply" in the wrong fucking tab so this comment is actually posted in the "Developers: RMS Previews GPL3 Terms" story.)
I was planning on getting a Treo and setting it up with a Socket Communications barcode reader to explore that kind of functionality in a PDA. I hope they don't outright kill the Palm OS on their devices but rather carry both. I'd like to have an alternative to Microsoft when trying out those kinds of device setups. I keep coming across hardware I want that only works with Windows, like mobile phones and sheet-feed scanners, and it is frustrating.
Years ago, I had a top-of-the-range Toshiba laptop that came with Windows 95. When I upgraded to Windows 98, all of a sudden, the power management got all screwed up. To turn the machine off, I had to Shutdown, wait for it to hang, unplug the AC power adaptor, and pull out the battery. This was extremely frustrating, considering it wasn't exactly an obscure brand that was unsupported. Because of those kinds of experiences, I would really like to use another company's product.
Yes, there were things about their products that I did like. Despite the major security problems that came with it, I did like the whole COM thing from a development perspective. Being able to use the same controls in Access, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Internet Explorer did have a nice consistency. And I don't recall having problems with my Palm on Windows the way I do now on OS X. If anything happened to your computer, all your PIM data was backed up on the Palm, so all you had to do was re-install the system and hit a button to restore it on the computer. But on OS X, I've had the computer wipe the data from my Palm when I did clean OS upgrades. They also managed to include programs along with their main products that helped you do more, like a graphics application that came with Office which was useful for web design. On the Macintosh, it seems like it costs much more to do really basic web design compared to Windows.
But that power management thing was really a bitch to deal with. I couldn't believe that any company would be so incompetent as to cripple a computers ability to simply turn off. The security problems were also unbearable. Allowing remote code to install itself on your computer automatically was just pure brainlessness. I can recall that there was an exploit in which an attachment could open itself up automatically in the preview pane in Outlook Express, and I had read about it as a proof-of-concept security hole possibly a year or two before virus writers actually started using it. The fact that a company would allow a common-knowledge exploit to go unpatched for so long was ridiculous. I've seen friends who's jobs depended on their computers lose all their data because of exploits like that.
So in the end, I opted for a more expensive computer setup that had less third-party hardware support, but could turn on and off like a television and actually allow me to do other things instead of having to constantly patch and implement work-arounds for newly discovered exploits. I got a computer I could use rather than one I had to maintain. Maybe things have been different since, but I think that it is just a fundamental issue that consumers have alternatives when piecing together computer systems.