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.'"

Comments

Visual Studio.NET

[rd4tech]

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.

Re:Visual Studio.NET

[Doktor Memory]

Agreed. People got very distracted over the whole "browser war" circa 1998-2000 because it was an obvious, visible instance of Microsoft abusing is monopoly power, to the point where I think a lot of people forgot how MS got its monopoly power:

Visual Studio on the development side, and Office on the applications side.

In a lot of ways, MS got very very lucky: if Borland, Novell, Lotus and WordPerfect/Corel hadn't spent an entire decade shooting themselves in the foot over and over again, the competitive landscape in 2005 would be a very different place.

Re:A deathblow for Palm OS

[ciroknight]

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.

Palm OS killed Palm OS

[CarrionBird]

The current version is just too unstable to trust on a cellphone. The "Cobalt" version is suppsoedly ready, but Palmone wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Even palmsource gave up on it and decided to go to a linux core, all that should give you an idea of how bad the codebase had become. (espically since palm usually has no reservations in putting out badly flawed products and patching later)

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.

Palm is Dead, Long Live Palm

[Aron S-T]

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.