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Palm's Mistakes
putko writes "Mike Singer has an article at ZDNet called Five reasons for Palm's slide which describes succinctly how Palm went from owning the palmtop platform -- OS and apps -- to getting chopped into pieces (some recently sold to a Japanese firm), using an OS from Microsoft and teaming up with Microsoft. The author claims, among other things, that Palm's stuff never worked well enough with Windows (while the RIM Blackberry did), which ultimately allowed Windows Mobile to eliminate them. A hard fall for a company that really did innovate."
"Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales. Palm announced its m500 and m505 products early in 2001, before they were ready, stalling sales of older devices, such as the Palm V. Then, to compensate, the company massively overproduced the m500 and m505. In 2001, it got stuck holding onto excess inventory when sales of the devices fell short of expectations.
Some of those devices still linger in inventories..."
They did not see that the Palm cost too much and delivers too little. I don't think anyone likes to write with a Palm stylus either, it was just too slow and difficult. Cell phones were being given away, Palm prices stayed high and could not communicate with each other easily. Innovate quickly or die seems to be the motto in this industry.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Count me in that group. I've always found everything on the Palm to be intuitive, especially Graffiti. I even take notes in some classes on it.
As for the Pocket PC stuff, I can't figure out how to use the OS on them, much less the rest of the software. Plus I've never heard of one with more than a few hours battery life to it. My Palm gets plugged into my USB port approximately whenever I remember to (read: not often,) and I've never had the battery below 75%.
I guess I'm just in the minority on this.
People have been saying Palm lost the market for years, but don't they still own as much of the market as any competitor? Isn't the Treo 600/650 a huge success?
I own a Win Mobile 2003 device, and I would never give it to one of my users. It's far too complicated. To the degree that most people want the basic address book, calendar/todo, and notes, the Palm is far superior: Endless battery life, far more stable, far easier UI.
No, that's why it was so sucessful at first - it did exactly what people wanted to do, at a sane price point. Making something that worked, and had weeks of battery life at typical usage (and many hours of continuous use), with the hardware available at the time (remember, they were designing this thing in 1995), was a major achievement.
It was usable, acted very well as a 'tentacle' of a desktop machine, and had just (barely) enough juice to attract third-party developers, which ended up coming in droves. Programming for it is quirky but doable, and despite some limitations stemming from the very restricted original configuration (128KB of RAM - remember, 1995), very neat things could be done with it. The sycing Just Worked - unlike ActiveSync which still has issues from what I gather.
But Palm didn't expand the platform very well. I don't mind using Dragonballs per se - their power consumption is tiny compared to even modern ARM processors - but their software model needed updating badly. You just can't write a reliable server-type program on PalmOS, or do any multithreading (or even multiprocessing). That makes it way too hard to get anything sophisticated done on the device.
Even given those limitations it's remarkable what can be done on a Palm platform. See, e.g., this little gem. Does all kinds of neat things (including WiFi and such) and yet a wondrous battery life (6 hours of continuous WiFi traffic, anyone?).
If they'd gotten a real update to their OS to at least enable multitasking of some kind, even cooperative multitasking - they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. There were ways to do it without even trying that hard. Oh, well.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Why is the parent modded as a troll? Just because he said Microsoft's OS was better than Palm's? For a whole lot of things, like synching with Outlook, it was much better, and that's what the vast majority of Palm users wanted their Palm to do, and which it didn't do well for years. If your entire OS is built around providing PDA functionality, and you can't synch with the most widely used email and contacts program on the planet, your OS is lacking.
I stopped using Palms for one simple reason: Those things were never really very durable. My first Palm died because of a simple static discharge. My second one died because I slept with it in my pocket once, causing the screen to break. Don't even think about dropping a Palm. At that point, I realized that the technology was not mature enough for me to have a true carry-anywhere device.
Compare this to my cell phones. My first cell phone was dropped countless times, and still works like a charm; the only reason I don't use it is because I changed cell phone service providers. My second cell phone (a cheap, "fragile" little Samson) survived over a year of being in my pocket all of the time, countless drops, etc., before finally giving out. My current cell phone (A Nokia) has been dropped a few times, and shows no damage for it. I can sleep with a cell phone in my pocket, have never had static discharge fry a cell phone, etc.
I've only used one Palm, it's an m505, I have it for almost two years, and I must say that this is a very good device, and one of my most precious gadgets.
:-) [and yes, I forgot to backup my existing ROM]
:-) etc
Those of you who wrote that Palms are great as PIM-tools but they suck at everything else - you're wrong. If you take your time to learn the device's habits, you can become very efficient with it. I understand that some random person in the street might not have the skill needed to become a power-user, but I am absolutely sure that any slashdotter has what it takes.
I use my PDA for these things:
- book reading
- dictionary
- writing articles
- schedule/contacts/notes [but this is an obvious one]
- mathematical calculations [see EasyCalc on sourceforge]
- and as soon as I get a decent mobile, I'll add 'email and websurfing' to the list.
Maybe this is caused by the fact that I am getting along well with computers, but I had absolutely no problem with getting used to grafitti, or the Palm GUI - I just used the tool to do my work, rather than "a lot of work had to be done before the tool became usable".
IMHO, Palm is a perfect example of how mobile devices have to be built. So, did they go wrong from the technical point of view? NO.
Where did they go wrong? Well, I will not say that they weren't wise enough to anticipate the competirors' actions, yada yada... What disappointed me, a dedicated Palm-er, is their attitude towards some customers... The story is below:
Some time ago they announced that PalmOS 4.1 is available as an update, and I told myself that I had to go for it, as I needed to work with memory cards of a capacity which 4.0 couldn't handle properly. Their official updater only worked with English Palms, while I had a multilingual one.
I found a 4.1 ROM somewhere on the web, flashed it, everything worked fine... Until the moment the PDA started crashing out of the blue, when running various applications. I tried this and that, but everything failed. It happened many times that I was writing something for several hours.. and then the whole doc is gone after a crash..
Sure, the flasher told me that the ROM is not designed for the device I have, etc.. but what was I to do?
Then I decided to switch back to 4.0, screw the new features.. but get my stability back. Nope.. it never happened... I flashed the ROM, but now it keeps crashing anyway. It's not that bad anymore, it only crashes when I'm in DocsToGo, and only when I am editing a WordToGo document. [which still sucks, because this is the application I need most].
So, at the moment, the only explanation I can find is that I need to flash it with a multilingual 4.0 ROM [the 4.0 ROM I used was an English one]... That must be it, as I am very cautious with my devices, I never dropped my PDA, never got water on it, never hit it too hard with the stylus
I contacted Palm, via email asking them to provide me a ROM, or some troubleshooting tips - because I could not rely on my PDA anymore. But I got no reply. I used the feedback form on their site - nothing.
Now THAT is what makes Palm not attractive to me anymore. Sure, it could be my fault, but can't they at least explicitly state that, so that I will stop trying to find the non-existing solution and move on to a different device?
So, to summarize, there are two things I don't like about Palm:
1. they let me down from the tech point of view; by designing an instrument which is not entirely fail-safe.
2. and then there's the 'social factor' - their actions can be interpreted as "we don't give a damn about European users" and then they don't even reply to people's emails.
The only reason I am still that supportive, is because I know that it used to be a great company that did a lot of great things. There are many people who chose a Palm over a PocketPC after my 'intervention'... Palm, don't make me feel sorry for supporting you.
The truth is... that my next PDA is still going to be a Palm...
And since I'm here:
Could someone with an 'untouched' multilingual m505 please dump their ROM to a file and let me have it? Please?
The saddest poem
Anecdote: I've owned 4 Palms over the years, from the original Pilot to two Kyocera Smartphones, and I've yet to have a problem syncing with any version of Outlook (from 98 - 2003).
It would be fairly expensive to give everyone in a large company a Blackberry/Treo device.
It's about a thousand bucks a year on a 1-off basis. If there's any kind of productivity to be gained by having one (ah, the $64M question) everybody should have one. That's 1/70th of the average yearly loaded cost of an employee.
Maybe that everybody doesn't have one says more about their utility and their role as a status symbol.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
NTP isn't holding a "very vague patent" either. They're holding a half-dozen patents which RIM has violated. Last but not least, RIM's actions in court have been, not to put too fine a point on it, mendacious. The citations they've received from the judge are nothing short of astonishing. At one point they appealed to Congress to throw the case out of court because Congressmen make heavy use of the Blackberries RIM gave them, and thus fining RIM would somehow create -- get ready -- a dent in national security.
The problems for me arose with the Outlook/MS Exchange combo. A stand-alone Outlook tends to work okay. Its really kind of hit or miss. My earlier palms seemed to work fine worked fine, but my Lifedrive won't synchronize with Outlook/MS Exchange (although it does work fine with stand-alone Outlook). I contacted Palm, but they couldn't figure it out.
Fortunately, that wasn't a critical feature for me, or I would have been up the creek.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you