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."

Comments

If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[dada21]

I've owned PDA's since the original Newton MessagePad, including every Newton model, numerous Palm Pilots, tons of proprietary junk models, halting with the HP iPAQ h6315 PDA Phone (for now).

The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.

In my experience, basic users tend toward basic devices. I'd say nearly 30% of my consulting income for 5 years was helping basic company managers getting their Palms to work. Once they worked (synced, etc), these basic users spent more time navigating the software than using it efficiently. The working install rarely worked for long. My corporate customers hated the software. "Just get it working" was common to hear.

I'd considered teaching users how to really achieve PDA efficiency, but the Pilots that were so plentiful were just not powerful enough and frustrated me. I can't handle spending 30 seconds finding information that took 5 seconds in a paper dayplanner.

Then I started to realize something: people were buying these in a fad fashion. Many used only the calculator or a simple name+phone contact list. Not a renewable market there.

My PDA Phone is great because it is easily customizable, has enough software to give me options, and it has the Internet. But in the hands of a basic user, I'd see them using only the phone part. These devices just don't scream "easy to use."

Apple can turn this market on its head. I don't see them doing it (again), but if there is any market that needs a unique interface, the PDA market is it.

I'm not a pro-Apple guy. My lady has an iPod, I have no Macs. Yet I loved my Newtons. I can still efficiently use them, and basic users loved mine.

The Palm's limited resolution, limited speed, amd limited memory killed it. The market wasn't ready. There were too few customers. The economy of spending millions on the ultimate interface is not there, yet.

The cell phone market will help, as the best interface models get combined with one another. SMS messaging will usher in the perfect mini keyboard someday.

It will take time.

PS The Blackberry has to be a fad fluke. It feels like a Speak 'N Spell.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[KiltedKnight]

Sometimes, having something basic with a good, widely available SDK can be an advantage. It allows people, companies, etc, to build applications to do what is needed. It's how DOS and Windows got so big... they made SDKs widely available while trying to cover the basics, and others started developing the applications.

Me? I don't like having my PDA and phone as a single unit. I don't like overly large cell phones, and sometimes find myself needing to use a PDA while talking on the phone... so unless you have a speaker phone built in, it can be rather difficult.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[borawjm]

I only see Blackberry's and Treo's being fully utilized on the corporate level.

The two main uses, aside from cell phone usage, of a Blackberry/Treo device, for these corporate employees, would be e-mail and calendar/appointment book.

• E-mail so they can monitor their inbox for important messages and send/reply wherever and whenever.
• Calendar to keep track of their meetings and appointments with clients/etc.

Other than that, I really don't see the average Joe utilizing the full potential of the PDA.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[FreezerJam]

While you might think the Palm devices weren't really powerful, compared to the vast majority of "organizers" that sold at low prices (that is - everything else besides the Newton) they were quite powerful and highly flexible. You could write software for them!

One thing not mentioned in the article is that cell carriers may not have liked the Palm precisely because it offered that flexibility, limited as it may have been. Carriers want to be solution providers, not platform supporters. If you need software on your mobile device, they want to be in the loop. The Palm devices work against that idea, making them a tougher sell to carrier buyers. Remember the first Windows phones from Orange - and the first thing the users did was hack them to allow users to install their own software?

The one item that truly irks me is the poor support for WiFi. The WiFi SD card was announced in early 2003. The Tungsten E came out in late 2003 - but it has never supported the WiFi cards. Palm in general seems to have given only a passing thought to wireless LAN support. That just won't fly anymore - heck, the NINTENDO has WiFi!!

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[mhollis]

I'd say nearly 30% of my consulting income for 5 years was helping basic company managers getting their Palms to work. Once they worked (synced, etc), these basic users spent more time navigating the software than using it efficiently. The working install rarely worked for long. My corporate customers hated the software. "Just get it working" was common to hear.

I have used Palm devices since the Palm Pilot Professional and have reveled in their simplicity. I have a Palm m505 and couldn't do without it. I regularly and routinely sync it into my Macintosh and everything works perfectly. In fact, since I use Apple's iSync, my .Mac calendar and address book are kept up with data I enter in on my m505 every time I synchronize, which means I can log onto my account from any web browser and retrieve information. This is the epitome of Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips."

So you're wrong.

My fiancée rarely takes her m505 anywhere. She used to have all of her contacts on it but lost all of the data in a divorce when her ex-husband kept the computer and she did not hot-sync her data to anything (he probably did it for her). When her m505 lost power, it lost everything (I think). I don't think she regularly hot-syncs. She has a Dell laptop and is minimally-functional in Microsoft Excel. She runs a home-based business on the side and understands the value of data entry in order to track clientele, but simply won't do the work. She would not know how to harness the power of a template in Microsoft Word unless someone set it up for her and also wrote most of the document for her (thus making her need the "consultant" as a permanent appendage). She has two paper calendars where she keeps numbers, addresses, contacts, schedules, appointments and so on and leads a busy life that is pretty disorganized -- all things that could be organized with a little more computer literacy and better use of her Palm m505.

So you're right.

The Palm was designed to do few things and do them extremely well. I use my m505 for my date book, appointment book, address book memo pad, and play solitaire and chess on it. That's pretty much it. I have a cell phone that works just fine as a cell phone. I have an iPod that works just fine as a music player. I totally understand the desire on the part of many to reduce these three personal electronic gadgets into one -- fewer cords to haul around, fewer adapters needed, fewer things to plug in every night and so on. The Palm devices I have used over the years have always had more than enough memory, more than enough speed and more than enough features to please me. And they do one thing perfectly: They sync with my Mac (it is my understanding that Windows CE devices won't).

I noted that there were a few specific things that the Palm folks wanted put into the Windows OS for the upcoming Treo, like clicking on someone's face in one's address book to initiate a call. Microsoft still doesn't have "ease of use" down -- even for handhelds.

Perhaps it's time I got another Palm device -- quickly because the new ones next year won't work with my Mac. There are lots of people who wrote code for the Palm OS who are probably really unhappy about this announcement.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[Dr. Manhattan]

The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.

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.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[dada21]

The 'solution provider' note is a good one. T-Mobile killed off my model based on excessive platform support costs. Mine never gave me trouble but thousands of users did.

As for WiFi, my model has BT, WiFi and GPRS. My GPRS hits about 3.2K/s down and 0.9K/s up. Its perfect for slashdot, news.google, lewrockwell, e-mail, basic FTP and other tasks. WiFi sucks because the battery life is horrible. There's no solution for this yet, but WiFi needs constant polling whereas GPRS' packet based transceiving is more energy efficient.

The upside of using only my GPRS connection is that I don't deal with data bloat. I had DSL since the beta stages, now I'm back to sub-dial-up speeds and ecstatic.

WiFi is useless to me now. No data bloat = no need for high speed anything.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[plumby]

The main use of Blackberries at our place is to look important, as only senior people are given one, so they all wander around reading them wherever they go.

Their secondary use is to indicate boredom in meetings by starting to read their email in the middle of a conversation with you.

And their final use is to 'impress' people, and show how busy they are, by sending replies to your email while they're on the toilet.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[dada21]

Good info.

Unfortunately, in the free market, items that cost incredible amounts to develop need an incredible amount of users to bear a profit.

Devices need to work for your fiance before they're accepted by everyone.

The days of 128k memory were truly an alpha stage for the market. The hardware is almost where it needs to be.

The software is still in that alpha stage. The interface needs a breakthrough. The syncing is hit or miss for most.

I feel bad about Palm programmers but the same thing happens in any hardware market with declining numbers, especially when the numbers weren't large to begin with.

I love my MS based system. It rarely crashes, I can browse 3 sites, work in Excel, and still answer the phone without a bog down. I'm also a rarity as others I've met with the same device can't run theirs for more than an hour without a problem.

The PDA market will continue to be in flux for years. The interface pot of gold has not been found. I'm not sure myself where the solution is (less hard buttons, better text input, maybe finger swirls for common app needs?).

Someone has to find it, and soon. My PDA using customer base is about 70% down in 12 months!

I'll keep using mine, keep buying new models and keep finding what works for me. 1 person spending $500/year makes not a market.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[borawjm]

The main use of Blackberries at our place is to look important, as only senior people are given one, so they all wander around reading them wherever they go

It would be fairly expensive to give everyone in a large company a Blackberry/Treo device. Therefore, unless they purchased the device on their own, only the seniors and upper management would receive one, that is, only if they requested it in the first place.

And their final use is to 'impress' people, and show how busy they are, by sending replies to your email while they're on the toilet

The fact that you _can_ send and receive email while on the toilet demonstrates the ability and convenience of these devices. No longer do you have to lug over to your computer, wait for it to boot up, wait for the web client to load and wait for the OWA to load up to check your email.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[hey!]

I've used most of the devices you talk about. I used to develop for the Newton, the the Palm, then Pocket PC.

The Achilles heel of PalmOS was always HotSynch. It wasn't bad for individuals on their home computers, but it didn't cut it in the enterprise. And the consumers just aren't there anymore.

The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.

As a PDA, simple is what you want. Well, we use PDAs as mobile data entry devices. The palm was probably the best overall. PocketPC is overcomplicated for users in my opinion.
Simple is good. As PDAs accrete more functionality, they become more annoying (IMO) because (a) there's more opportunity to screw up and (b) the functions run up against the limitations of the form factor. And if there's one thing Palm understood in the early days, ti was form factor, form factor form factor. Apple of the Newton era didn't understand that, but Apple of the iPod era does. Palm didn't do a lot of things, like multitasking, even though the underling OS could handle it, because it didn't fit well.

I don't think convergence killed Palm. I think what happened here is that time and technology has passed Palm's natural niche by. Palm's market position used to be great basic PDA functionality in a practical form factor. But you can buy a good enough PDA now for under $50; there's no margin to support the kind of business they had before. The market position they owned is not lucrative anymore, and the positions they might move to are occupied already. Blackberry owns the email junkie market segment. Microsoft owns the "I only want to buy from one vendor" market segment. Apple will own the mobile multimedia/PDA convergence market if that ever emerges.

The only market segment they have any chance in, thanks to the Handspring acquisition, is the converged phone/PDA segment. But it's not a great segment. I carry a Treo 600, but I'd rather have a really good phone with basic PDA functions. Any device you'd call a converged PDA/phone is likely to be a mediocre phone, and for most people phones are way more important than PDAs. If you compare the Treo to, say, the original Tungsten T, it's impossibly clunky as a PDA. If you compare the Treo to any reasonable phone it's impossibly clunky as a phone. And as a camera it's complete trash. There's nothing to buy it for, other than if you are already carrying two devices. On the other hand, you buy a Blackberry for email and live with its other limitations. Most people I talk to don't care much for the Blackberry as a phone, but live with it.

Palm's developing a MS based phone seems like a really bad idea to me. How can they possibly be anything but an also ran?

What I'd really like to see a vendor stake out as a position is to be a leader in personal networking. This would involve creating a constellation of devices that are task appropriate that communicate with each other and with corporate networks. The centerpiece of this would be a phone with big battery capacity, large buttons and an easy to read two or three line display. This would work with my laptop or if I chose my PDA. If I happened to bring an MP3 player with me, I could fetch playlists through the phone, but I wouldn't have to bring the phone with me to the gym. I could maintain my contact list through my PDA or my laptop, and I wouldn't have any rituals to perform to get them synchronized, it would just happen.

In many ways, my perfect PDA would be a Tungsten T which used a bluetooth phone for comm services. The problem is finding a phone with bluetooth that doesn't also want to be a PDA. It's a catch 22. The devices don't work well enough together to build purpose specific devices. But until there are a set of purpose specific devices with personal networking capabilities built in, then you pretty much have to buy what's available and try to get it working together. If anybody could do this, it would be Apple, who seem to be the only company that understands how to assemble several bits of technology to create a favorable user experience.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[soft_guy]

The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.

Are you kidding me? The original Palm Pilot sold in huge numbers and was wildly successful by any measure you want to take. At the time I remember reading it was the most successful consumer electronics product ever. People were talking abouts adoption curve being steeper than television, VCRs, transitor radios, personal computers, cell phones, etc.

I too was/am a fan of the Newton, but you shouldn't be blind to the reasons why the Newton did not sell anywhere near the numbers that Palm sold. I think it comes down to three factors: size, speed, and connectivity.

Most Palm organizers can go into your shirt pocket. There was no Newton ever close to being that small. The OMP was the size of a day runner and three times as heavy. The best of the group - the MessagePad 2X00 was even larger. I worked for a company that made medical software for the Newton and we would advertise it as "fits in your lab coat pocket." which it did. Shirt pocket - no way.

Also, the Palm did a great job of feeling responsive to the user. Remember how on most of the Newton models, you would press the page down control and the whole system would stop for about 5-6 seconds? I think that was something people wouldn't put up with. The Newton 2000 fixed that, but Palm was able to pull that off with a motorola 68000 processor and still have better battery life than Newton. The Newton OS was engineered to be a nice modern OS that would be easily maintainable and nice to use far into the future - at the expense of some of Apple's immediate needs. Palm was like the opposite of that and that's why today the thing seems long in the tooth.

And finally, connectivity was an area where the original Palm far exceeded the Newton. Do you remember Apple trying to charge like $150 for the Newton Connectivity Kit on the original MessagePad? That was insane - and the connectivity just got worse from there! The best Newton connectivity solution by far was Dan Rowley's X-Port product. There was a thing you could get to synchronize with Outlook for Windows, but again it was third party and not available until Newton 2.0 had shipped. Apple's connectivity SDK for developers was always buggy and perpetually late. They never shipped any connectivity solution worthy of the device.

Palm, on the other hand, had the hot sync and their conduit SDK which was relatively easy to program. They had good synchronization with Outlook and other apps - at least via the cradle.

I will agree that in recent years, WinCE devices have surpassed Palm in synchronization and so have Blackberry devices. Also, Palm screwed themselves by not standardizing on one type of cradle/charger and sticking to it. It hurt their customers and it hurt their own inventory management.

In short, Palm got a lot closer to the mark than Newton, but still never followed through on what their cool devices should have been.

Oh, and not releasing a device with WiFi and Blue Tooth together was stupid. I am aware of the technical reasons why, but it is still stupid. They should have had Blue Tooth and Wifi on the Treo 600 and had a nicer screen, and more built in software. Towards the end, they just couldn't get all the cool features on a single device.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[Solder Fumes]

I've actually been trying to hold off getting a Blackberry, though everyone else on my team has one and keeps telling me to request one. It seems the Blackberry would be the final straw in converting my job into 24/7 with no overtime. With telephone, there is at least a barrier to calling at certain times of the day, some people don't like to leave messages, and you also need to prepare yourself mentally a little bit. The Blackberry (at least in my company) is not a status symbol or toy, it's a big plastic wart that shows you have sold yourself into slavery.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[110010001000]

Palm fails for the same reason that Symbian will fail and eventually every Smartphone will be using Windows Mobile:

Windows Mobile uses the same developer tools and API that desktop Windows uses. This is huge. You don't need a huge effort to retrain developers to develop for Windows Mobile. Everything is integrated with Microsoft's desktop and server offerings and other technologies. This is the same strategy that they used makes the Xbox the #2 game system in a single generation of releases. If you had told most people five years ago that Microsoft would beat Nintendo in the console market, and beat everything in the PDA market, they would have laughed.

Everyone makes fun of Ballmer and his "Developers, developers, developers" tirade, but he is right. Thats exactly what it is about. Microsoft understands this. This is why they own the PDA market and are slowly taking over the high end mobile device market.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[Moofie]

It's got a power switch, you know..

Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke

[Moofie]

I don't use the same tool to drill holes and dig ditches. Why would I use the same tool to develop for a low-resource handheld and a high-resource desktop?

What you call an advantage is, to me, the key failure of Windows Mobile. The apps are too big (memory footprint) and kludgy (because they really, really wish they had a 1024x768 screen available).

My daddy taught me to use the right tool for the job. He was right.

Well

[TarrySingh]

"Synchronization between the Microsoft and Palm became a critical issue, particularly since Windows is already in 95 percent of corporate environments" And that's the crux of the whole problem. And indeed poor decision/timing were also palm's mistakes.

What about successes?

[AKAImBatman]

Mistakes? What about what Palm did right? e.g. Realizing that everyone didn't want to play movies/music on their handheld? Or their strong focus on using the Palm as a satellite device, and not as a REALLY SLOW desktop replacement. (I don't know what Microsoft was thinking with their Word and Excel CE versions... no wait, yes I do. They weren't thinking.) Not to mention their slowness to move to color screens when high quality grayscale provided a better experience and better battery life.

If anything, I think Palm's biggest "mistake" was their push for expensive networking features when no good infrastructure existed. Their devices kept going up in cost over useless features all while they stuck with that hideous dragonball processor and low-res screens. Thank God for Sony and their Clie series, or Palm never would have gotten their heads out of their rears. Sadly, it may have been too little, too late.

Re:What about successes?

[KDan]

Agreed... I recently got a Tungsten E2 for waaaay cheaper than any of the non-Palm PDAs and it does everything I want it to do perfectly - read books, keep track of calendar entries, write down ideas, put tidbits of info on the scratchpad, etc. Why pay more than twice the price for extra functionality that I don't use? Palm fills a very useful niche for me.

Daniel

Re:What about successes?

[DaveFromChicago]

I agree. I use a Tungsten model to store info I use as a volunteer educator at the zoo here in town. It's just the right tool for the job. Pocket-sized, durable, easy to use (and to train others to use), saves us from carrying books, papers, and notebooks in a backpack. No complaints here.

Re:What about successes?

[MadChicken]

You trust Pocket Word[pad] with your documents?

BTW, Palms come with Documents To Go out of the box, and they support native files, so no conversion necessary.

Re:palm os

[MyLongNickName]

Pushing Palm? Palm fell on its rear, and got drug along. I owned a Palm, and it was the most frustrating device. Interoperability was horrible. I swore off PDA's at that point. Years later, I picked up an iPaq. Took me months to decide to bite the bullet after my prior experience. I still use the thing every day.

Bottom line: Palm would still be the leader had it supported better OS interoperability, and not been so anal about 3rd party developers back in the day.

Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little

[digitaldc]

"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.

Re:Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little

[SillyNickName4me]

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.

I partially agree with you, they were too expensive. I wouldn't say too late, more like wrong functionality.

The last Palm device that I have been satisfied with was a m505, but only because I bought it after the price dropped substantially due to the introduction of newer models (Tungston, Zire). The Zire I have now works sortof, but it has features that I really don't need (wtf do I need yet another crappy digicam for? like the crappy one in the typical phone isn't enough already, while lacking any out of the box connectivity other then IR, gimem a brak, IR only in 2004??)

With a little practise the handwriting on traditional (upto m series) palms worked very well however. I learned it when I got my frst Palm Pilot (pre Palm III), and got very profficient with it. I strongly prefer it over any type of mini keyboard simply because I do not have to look at the screen for taking notes etc. It makes it far more acceptable to use during a conversation for example.

With regards to the article, is there a beginning and end to it? to me it just reads like a random collection of things that were already known to about anyone interested in such devices.

My take at why they failed is:

- they had no clue what their market was and ended up with overpriced devices that were somewhat decent, and cheap devices that were utter crap, all of them having features people don't need, while lacking features people want.
- quality control went out of the window with the low end m series and anything after that (the m5xx and m7xx are imho the last high quality devices they made)
- After OS 4, they failed to properly develop the OS.
- A general lack of sense of direction.

It is too bad, I really enjoyed using the Pilot, Palm III and m505 that I had (the III is still working, my girlfriend has it now, the m505 gave up due to a failing battery), but as it is now, will not buy a new device from them.

It's all the Internet Porn.

[gowen]

Wait... I've misunderstood what "Palm's slide" means, haven't I...

processors

[minus_273]

or it could be the 20mhz processors they used to use. God,when i first bought a PDA it was the $150 ipaq 1300 with a 266 mhz ARM processor and a huge screen and the only comparable palm was a fricking 20Mhz m100 with a tiny tiny screen. It also helps that pocket pcs are jsut that, they are like little hand held computers.

Re:processors

[Anonymous Coward]

just as CPU frequency is a useless way to compare different processors, CPU frequency is equally useless when comparing diffent kind of PDA. The palms can do *way more* per Mhz than WinCE/WinMobile. They also require far less memory for the OS.

Re:processors

[Dr. Manhattan]

or it could be the 20mhz processors they used to use

Entirely aside from the question of how efficient the processors are (a 20MHz Dragonball is not ten times slower than a 200MHz ARM)...

If you can always be near a charging station, a high-MHz CPU is nice. But you can't always be near a charger, and then you have to manage your battery life. Those 20MHz Palms could run for weeks on one charge, or many hours of continuous use. How long could your ipaq hold a charge? Plus the OS could execute things directly out of flash so they needed far less RAM than any WinCE device.

Now, don't get me wrong. Palm should have updated their OS to support multitasking, and then they needed to come out with some higher-end models with some of the bells and whistles to keep the higher-end customers. But don't ignore the strengths of their approach...

Microsoft just had a better OS than Palm for pdas

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I have to say that Microsoft deserved to win this one. Their OS was simply better than Palms. It gave so much more capability for multimedia and had better sync support and played better with Windows on the desktop.

It really was a more functional product, and obviously the marketplace agreed.

Doing their wants against customer wants

[Dark Paladin]

After reading the article, I agree with most of the points, but think it can really be summed up in one way: Palm did what they wanted, not what the customers wanted. All the way back when Palms first arrived in my previous job, people wanted to:

Sync their calendars/todos/contacts list.

Simple enough. But then it became:

Sync their calendars/todos/contacts with what their secretary put in for them.

What a mess! There were trade off of Palms, then came the network sync which never really worked right. And that was the key thing: even if Palm put it in, it just "didn't quite work right". Syncing with Outlook? Well, sure - though they prefer you use their Palm Desktop, and even then the Outlook sync just "didn't quite work right". Palm wanted the universe to revolve around them and their Palm Desktop software. Users just wanted to sync the damn this with their existing Notes/Exchange/Groupwise information. They offered some sort of server system, but it had no plugins - they expected users just to do it. When Blackberry came along, they Got It: people want to have the same calendar/contacts/todos/email information as on their existing clients - of which is most popular in Outlook. So they did that. Put it in the cradle, push a button, and done. If you want to get your email, have the IT geeks install a piece of software to talk to the Exchange server and you could get email wherever you were. It was simple. And it was what people wanted. I've liked Palm for some time. I have book readers for entertainment, knowledge, and scripture reading on mine. Palm is the only one out of the big three - Palm, RIM, and Microsoft - that let me sync fairly easily to my Mac box. If one of the other two let me do that without having to buy third party hardware, I'll do that. Heck, I'll probably switch to the Treo 700 anyway or its equivalent in a couple of years anyway when its time to retire my Treo 650. Because then, I'll have my email/contacts/todos/calendar all on one device in a simple manner. Anyway, that's why I think Palm lost out: their software became too difficult to use for too many users, while other people, even if their software wasn't as good in some ways, just made it work. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Or Macs

[Quiet_Desperation]

They never worked so hot with Macs, either.

Although I was one of the only people who liked Graffiti. I thought it was really intuitive.

Re:Or Macs

[erlenic]

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.

pioneered not failed

[BozoTheScary]

Palm helped pioneer the industry (following on previous work by Apple, etc.), then the leadership sold it and moved on. As such, it has been little more than a copyrighted name since then. It represented some visionary work and when the visionaries walked away, the copyright's value slowly disappeared. It wasn't a failure, even though the products that now are Palm are failures. Microsoft, et al, have picked up where Palm's visionaries left off, much as Palm did with its predecessors.

"Nobody buys traditional handhelds anymore"

[houston_coder]

Obviously that analyst slept through the Zire phase of Palm's business. Getting that line out proved that people were still willing to buy a low-cost non-convergence device.

Technology

[mysqlrocks]

This is yet another reminder that no matter how dominant a company may seem there will someday be another company that comes along and replaces them. It's just a matter of when and how. Look at Novell, for example. Who that they would lose there dominance in local area networks? Yes, eventually even Microsoft will be replaced.

The Palm Trilogy

[Luddite Slayer]

"Where Palm Went Wrong", "More of Palm's Great Mistakes", and "Who is this Palm Person ANyway?"

Re:The Palm Trilogy

[sharkey]

You left out my personal favorite: "Well, That Just About Wraps it Up for Palm".

Nooo...

[the_skywise]

I seem to recall that 3 incarnations of Windows PC (Windows Pocket Computer) worked perfectly well with Windows and flopped big time. Then when Palm came out, Microsoft "innovated" again and "invented" the PalmPC which everybody knows was far superior to the Palm Pilot except that it required 10 times as much memory.

Palm got into Cellular phones BEFORE PalmPC did too.

Palm didn't flop so much as its purpose was absorbed into cellphones and laptops with instant wireless connections.

It was an calender/address book with some note taking capabilities. No one really uses snail mail anymore for "quick communication" so the phone directory in a cell phone is more than enough and if you need more than that, most people are carrying around their laptops or can access GMail or Yahoo where their address books are stored online.

That leaves the calendar function which these days is stored centrally on company servers. So it's just easier to access it via the laptop everyone has then carry around yet another electronic device.

That plus its confusion as Handspring/Palm/Trio its hardware missteps over the last few years, lack of a clearcut development vision of what a PalmPC should do (it's been almost 10 years and its main functions are still... calender/address book/notes) and the perception of not being a multimedia device.

But it died because it didn't hook up to Windows properly? Nah... I still use mine and it hooks up to Windows just fine.

Innovation?

[andreyw]

Inovative? That would be the Psions, or the Newtons - Palm just brought the idea to the masses. After the initial success, Palm managed to pretty much introduce no innovation into the product line. Yes - Palms eventually went color, then had a TCP/IP stack, then BT stack. Too bad there is still no commercially-available native ARM PalmOS environment, or an environment that doesn't allow tasks to blow out each other and the OS.

Palm's Mistakes or Microsoft's Tactics?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Analysts say Palm just couldn't nail down the formula for over-the-air synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, which business users demand and RIM nailed with its BlackBerry device.''

That's not Palm's fault. Microsoft keeps their protocols and file formats secret, so as to make it difficult for competitiors to develop products that interoperate with Microsoft's. One more instance of Microsoft driving competitors out of the market by using their desktop monopoly, and one more reason why we must demand open formats and protocols.

Re:Palm's Mistakes or Microsoft's Tactics?

[Noaccess0]

Oh come on, there are literally thousands of vendors who "magically" manage to connect to Exchange Server. Exchange has had an "add-in" friendly architecture since version 5 (1995). Neither MAPI nor LDAP nor SMTP are secret. It's all on MSDN. Heck, there's even open source MAPI integration here:http://www.omesc.com/modules/main_module/ .If Palm couldn't bother to put forward an effort, it's their own fault. Research in Motion could do it and they are invading the market as a result.

Microsoft can be blamed for a lot, but not this one. Palm is dying because it's not innovating - Microsoft is just there picking up the pieces. It's the evil of two lessers.

Re:Really did innovate- not recently

[AKAImBatman]

The Palm OS has stagnated. Windows Mobile for all its flaws is simply a better OS.

This really isn't true either. The truth is that both OSes and devices sucked, and that consumers are finally giving up on them. On one hand you had the Palm Pilot. It was a good device, sized perfectly for a satellite device, but failed to keep up with improvements in embedded technology, memory needs, and display resolutions. In the end, the device ended up being overpriced for too little power.

On the other hand you've got WinCE devices. They're far more powerful, have color screens, run Microsoft software, play multimedia, and they do it all for seemingly no reason what-so-ever. In the Real World(TM) it seems that no one really is looking to play movies on their tiny handheld screens, nor are they looking to wait five minutes for Excel CE to come up so they can do computations they could have done on the back of a napkin in less time.

So then along comes the Blackberry. The idea is seemingly stupid. It's a super-simple email reader with an analog coupler for a modem. It flops. Then they add wireless support. Suddenly, everyone loves the thing. It's the pager/personal organizer that everyone wanted. It does what they need and it does it simply. You have your email at all times, and you can even type a simple message without resorting to a stylus. So where are all the Palms and WinCE devices now? Replaced by BlackBerries. Funny how the world works, eh?

(Disclaimer: My wife uses her Palm everyday to manage our home and finances. She can't live without the thing.)

What killed Palm for me

[DrXym]

Was the lack of bluetooth and wifi in the same device. I wanted my next PDA (after my Palm Vx) to be able to do a little web browsing and be able to share contact numbers with my phone. The various Palm devices just stunk - either offering wifi or bluetooth but not both. Of course I could have purchased some SD wifi dongle, but it's too bad if you want to use your device with a memory expansion. Since there was nothing like it (two years back) I got an iPaq instead.

Now it has to be said that PocketPCs stink as PDAs, but they great all-rounders. Whereas Palm Pilots are great PDAs but just awful for anything but PIM functionality. I guess that Palm's problem was that the world started expecting more than PIM functionality from their devices and they couldn't deliver.

One would hope that they would still follow through with their plans to run over Linux - it offers the opportunity to leapfrog CE - but somehow I doubt it. I wonder if MS didn't throw a lot of cash at them to throw the towel in on that front.

Isn't Palm a success?

[guanxi]

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.

Re:Isn't Palm a success?

[ivan256]

I don't know why this is marked funny. It's true.

The fall of Palm has nothing to do with the technology. The Treo 650 is wildly successful, and does what it does very well. Palm is failing because they are screwing up the business side of the company.

What happened to the innovation?

[achesterase]

US Robotics and then Palm had a great thing going for them. My first Palm was the Palm Pilot Professional back in the late 90's and it was a blast to use and it boasted a great feature set and unbeatable simplicity. Looking back at the introduction of Windows CE-based devices, I think this was Palm's primary advantage. Windows CE has a huge potential, but for many things, it's just too complex, at least in my opinion. Of course, for some power users, this complexity is welcome, but many people just want to hit a button and get their contacts and don't want to have to make 7 clicks to get there. Palm of course knew that they had a good OS that many people liked, but unfortunately, their platform has been stagnating for years.

Today I still can't believe that they never introduced proper handwriting recognition. Of course you can enter data faster and more precisely with their Graffiti system, but let's face it, nearly everyone would prefer using their own handwriting. Palm should have been releasing new API's and SDK's to extend the potential of their platform, but instead, they made incremental improvements to their hardware and software, hoping that their past dominance and legacy would keep them afloat.

The book isn't closed on Palm yet, but if they want to be around in five years, something has to change - fast.

Re:Really did innovate- not recently

[Bastian]

Yah, but that's like saying that pine cones taste better than used tires.

Mobile computing in general has been stagnating. PalmOS completely failed to grow with the technology. Windows Mobile has never quite grasped that the hardware on which the OS is about the size of a stack of index cards and has a usage pattern that generally consists of pulling it out of a pocket, using it for 15 seconds, and putting it back in the pocket.

I killed my Tungsten|T2 last month. I'm making do with a dead tree notebook and my laptop until something worth spending money on comes out - not that I think that will happen anytime soon.

Palm's Windows software killed them

[fsck!]

Our network is heavily FOSS-biased and run Windows only on the desktops, jumping through hoops to avoid giving Microsoft a cent more than I am legally obligated to. That being said, I won't let my users connect their Palms to our desktops. It's way to hard to get working with non-privilaged users. If they want a PDA, they have to go PocketPC. The software does what you expect it to do. Works regardless of privilage level, syncs with Outlook without clumsy and expensive 3rd party software, and did I mention that it actually works?

Palm, who buys PDAs? Business people. What software do business people use? Windows and Outlook. In most businesses that have a lot of people with PDAs, do they all have Administrative rights? I sure hope not, but that's what you designed your software for. You deserve to loose your market share, you bastards.

Flaky operating system, that's the #1 mistake

[TheHornedOne]

I think this has been addressed already in other comments, but I have to vent anyway. From what I can see, a major mistake on Palm's part has been shipping one flaky-assed operating system. Let me illustrate: I was in the market for a new PDA. It HAD to have 802.11 and decent Mac OS support. I settled on a Sony CLIE TJ-37 running PalmOS 5.x. This machine was GREAT! It could surf the web, get my email, monitor RSS feeds, take photos, play MP3s, act as a bookreader, AND sync with my Mac OS X addressbook and calendar. I was happy with this machine for about a week, until I got the first hard crash. While using wireless, the OS would grind to a halt with some crazy error in Datamanager.c line 9052 or something like that. Turns out the only way to recover from this is to hard reset the machine (ie Erase it) and restore from backup. Fine, whatever, it's like owning a really flaky pre-OSX Mac. Until the crash returns. And returns. And returns AGAIN. There is NO rhyme or reason to how this error comes about - not that one certain website, email address, RSS feed, wireless network, or anything. There is NO information about it on the web. Calls to Palm and Sony are equivalent to running into a brick wall. So, I have abandoned using networking functions on the damned thing because its TCP/IP stack is apparently less capable than WinSock. Brilliant move, guys.

Re:Really did innovate- not recently

[Glsai]

Have you seen the Treo? Out of the box it allows you to check e-mail surf the web, manage your calendar, manage your contacts. Plus it's a good phone straight out of the box. You have the ability to take pictures/record movies (although movies are in a proprietary format). The 600 and 650 are great devices and in my opinion are better than the Blackberry

Paradigm shift

[trurl7]

Right when I read that, I realized the article was ... well, if not nonsense, then at least half-way there.

I think Palm's biggest mistake was being idealistic. They had a great concept - zero start time, a low-power, very long-life device that works as a powerful memo book with some automagic features.

Their documentation is solid, the OS was great - simple, straightforward, and geared toward exactly the ideas that were a part of the hardware design. They even wrote a book - "The Zen of Palm" describing the guidelines and software design considerations that were to go into writing software for the platform. They said from the very beginning - this is not a palmtop notebook. It's a low-power digital memo pad/calendar.

Compare this with other PDA's - iPaq's, Dell's Axims, etc. - bulky, overpowered monstrosities. Oh yeah, great - I can read word documents on the PDA. Sweet. But someone better be running behind me with a diesel generator to power it. Axims have 5-10 hour battery lives. Palms could go for a month (sometimes more, depending on usage) on a pair of AA's.

But I guess the WinCE systems do have one advantage - you get to write windows code (oh joy) for them. Oh wait...there's something wrong with that statement.

So, palm in it's conception of the purpose of a PDA was just too naive - they thought people would realize that current technology doesn't let you have a portable workstation, and tried to get the best of what was available. But Joe Schmoe can't live without checking his email on his PDA - god forbid he should miss that all-important email from the President of the US. Basically, the windows devices got ahead on the whiz-bang factor, by pandering to people's sense of self-importance, and by counting on people to be stupid and not realize what they truly needed. How typical. So, to the extent that palm failed to recognize all this, they were too idealistic. What a pity.

Palm Dominance to Palm Insignificance

[Alpha_Traveller]

Palm's biggest problem now is that they went to Win Mobile. What made Palm unique for years was their innovative operating system.

What made Palm truly suck was their unwillingness to upgrade the OS and to make it easy to upgrade as it went along. There are no decent controls over the quality of products out there and everything you could even consider adding to the OS costs too much money for what we've already spent on the device.

There are two versions now of the PalmOS that have yet to really see the light of day, and now they probably never will. Sad. They restricted the OS, when they could have made it free to download and even easier for people to get rid of their old palms, recycle them and get into the newer models. Moving from old to new was a pain in the ass.

Last year I bought a Palm 650. Now I'm sad I did, despite using everything from the Contact Book, getting an instant messenging client (Agile's an ok client when it's not crashing), Web browsing all the time (why is it so difficult to find a new browser for palm? the one they have onboard stinks!) for a variety of important tasks, and Versamail for email checking.

The thing is, the power users DO want Video and Music on our handheld. We want to be able to customise it. We want to be able to use it as a checkbook register AND to track our finances when we're not in front of the computer (thank you PocketQuicken!).... But no matter what you do, the applications are painfully outdated and as the UI gets more and more frustrating to use...Why spend $500 to get into a PDA that just doesn't expand and doesn't really allow innovation?

For Palm, going to Windows is an easy out for them. Their phone/pda (which isn't that great. It's just a shell to most folks, they just want it to work) at least has a solid if not innovative platform for what will amount to serious inflexibility.

No amount of Windows goodness (blech, I hate saying that) will change the hardware limits, and let's face it, we're entering a time when the Sony PSP is a step away from becoming a phone, when Apple's iPod is a step away from becoming a PDA, and basically everything handheld wants to really be a Phone/PDA/Media Device combination. It's use and adapt the technology time or lose the battle, and instead of releasing what was going to be a really innovative new operating system (Cobalt's next generation) out into the wild as open source for people to work with, Palm sidles up to this to keep the hardware sold. Again, Sad.

Within the next few months, I'm going to go buy a new PDA, and it's going to be a Linux or Windows box, since the Palm Hardware with Windows on it is crippled at best and horrid at worst.

Re:Mistakes?

[Anita Coney]

"So what was Palm's big mistake again?"

You must be new here: Teaming up with Microsoft.

Hardware

[Mr_Silver]

Let us not forget the hardware. Whilst PocketPC's were being produced by 5 or 6 different manufacturers who were constantly trying to out do each other with screens, battery life and form factor, you had Palm with ... well ... Palm.

Oh and Sony, who bailed out ... and that wasn't until they had to go and implement a whole bunch of Sony only API's to support colour screens and higher resolutions because Palm didn't.

I had a Vx, it was great for the time, but now I'm a Windows Mobile person as I haven't seen the Palm camp innovate for a very long time.

In fact, I still consider them to be the classic case of a company that owned the market, dragged their feet and suddenly found that everyone else had overtaken them.

I love and hate Palm.

[lauridsd]

First, let me state that I have both a Palm Tungsten T2 and a Dell Axim X30.

I have used Palm devices for over 7 years, and have gotten really attached to some specific Palm-only apps and peripherals over the years which has made me resist even looking at PocketPC devices for my personal use. I have The Axim is provided by work, and I only use it for testing my web applications. (/BIAS)

Here are my issues with Palms and PocketPCs respectively:

• 1. Palm cannot seem to build (and support) a device that has everything I want without any of the crap I don't want:

  a. Built-in Wi-Fi AND Bluetooth.
  b. Smaller form factor (I *much* prefer the Tungsten slider that they no longer produce. I hope my T2 never breaks.)
  c. No stupid thumb keyboard. I prefer the stylus, and the 5-way navigator button.
  d. Good battery life w/ EASILY replaceable battery.
  e. I have never needed or wanted a voice memo feature, but I won't complain too much since the headphone jack and expansion card lets me use my Palm as a pretty decent MP3 player (using PTunes.)
  f. a standard connector than can easily connect to peripherals. For criminy sakes, STOP SCREWING WITH THE CONNECTION! I hate having to replace all my cables and cradles each time a new model comes out.

  2. Palm seems to abandon all development and support for its penultimate model as soon as the newest one comes out. (Grr...No apparent hope of being able to get an add-on Wi-Fi card for my T2 even though one exists for the T3. They have since dropped the slider design entirely which totally pisses me off as well, etc.)

  3. The windows compatibility issues others have mentioned, I don't see as nearly big an issue. Third party vendors like Chapura and DataViz seem to do pretty well. Perhaps making their own email client (VersaMail) a bit more intuitive to set up would be nice.

PocketPC:

• 1. I abolutely hate the OS. I think it is cludgy and a complete mess to use. It is not as customizable as I would like (I hate icon views...much prefer list views of apps, files, etc.)

  2. Application file sizes are WAY TOO BIG (especially vs. Palm apps.) This further perpetuates Microsofts reputation for bloatware. My T2 holds MANY more applications than I can install on the Axim X30.

  3. I like the replaceable battery on the Axim and the ease of sychronization (even though sometimes the ActiveSync client can be a bit pesky.)

  4. A minor nitpick, but the stylus on the Axim is a cheap, thin piece of crap that is uncomfortable to hold, let alone use for any length of time.

  5. Battery life on the Axim sucks in comparison with the Palm.

I like my Palm being so versatile, and it only misses in a couple major areas (no Wi-Fi being the big one.) But Palm has totally screwed up the more recent versions, and I would be hard pressed to find one I can honestly say I like. If I have to upgrade, I will probably try to find a T3...after that, i don't know what I will do.

So?

[tengwar]

I'll shed no tears for Palm. It's always been a barely adequate platform for basic organiser functions, redeemed only by usable writing recognition. It's stable only by comparison to Wince machines. Psion, on the other hand, made rcok-solid machines that got turned on at the factory and usually ran for years without crashing, with heavy loads of third-party software. Those machines were general-purpose computers, not just adjuncts to a PC desktop. On my first Psion (6MHz 8086, 256kb RAM shared between core and secondary storage) I once produced a church address book by entering the data into the contacts application, exporting in CSV to the spreadsheet to sort, then move to the word processor for formatting and printing [directly, not via a PC]). That was, I think, before the Palm Pilot was on sale. The later machines moved to the EPOC OS and ARM processors. I used to use the precursor of the current TomTom navigation system on a Psion 5: I had maps for most of Europe on a small Compact Flash drive, with enough detail to show a 3' alleyway in my home town. Even the built-in applications were impressive: for instance the word-processor would handle embedded objects (spreadsheets and drawings as standard) perfectly . At the time MS Office applications attempted to do this, but tended to crash with corrupted documents if you actually used the feature. I find it easy to use the (rare) large Psions - Netbook and Series 7 - to take notes in meetings, since I can type, then move quickly to sketch a diagram on the touch screen directly into the document. Tablet PCs can probably do this now, but they are bigger, more expensive, and don't have enough battery life to work for a day away from the mains.

When Psion stopped making consumer hardware, it was like hearing the news about Concorde stopping flying. We'd taken a great step backwards: there was nothing out there which would come close to what a Psion would do routinely, in terms of stability, application support, usability, and preceived speed. I've used Palm and Wince before and after, but both are too unstable to trust completely. Wince these days is fast enough, at the expense of battery life, but Palm hardly seems to have changed. The closest equivalents to the Psion 5 now are the Nokia 9300 and 9500, which use a later version of the OS. Nice smartphones, but they have a fraction of the battery life, perhaps 20% of the speed, and my 9300 reset itself within a week of buying it. In a sense Psion deserved to fail in the consumer space. They spent very little on advertising, and never moved to support features we would now consider essential such as USB and Bluetooth. Still, they remain the only "real" PDAs in my entirely unbiased opinion.

Have you actually used both OSes?

[sracer]

I respectfully have to ask if you have had any extensive use with Palm and Windows Mobile devices to draw the conclusion that "they both suck".

I have an Audiovox SMT-5600 Windows Mobile smartphone and it has replaced all of my portable devices.

Here's a link to a review I wrote about my experiences using only a Windows Mobile smartphone for a week.

Review - SMT-5600 as a notebook replacement

It happens, though they could have avoided it...

[gr8dude]

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.

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? :-) [and yes, I forgot to backup my existing ROM]

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 :-) etc

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?

Re:Really did innovate- not recently

[Pxtl]

Many people have been making comments like that - a similar windows mobile phone device is being touted below.

The problem is that those doodads are really, really late to the party. The Blackberry had a dog's age to dominate the market of phone-PDAs, and dominate it did.

Plus, Grafitti2 was Palm's inexcusable blunder. That, and the overly high price point of the Zire 21 - no machine that does that little that late in the game should cost that much (and I know it was still PalmOne's cheapest device ever).

Re:He's not wrong

[mhollis]

You obviously didn't read my entire post.

Microsoft Outlook worked just fine with the Palm -- until Microsoft upgraded it so that it wouldn't. Apple developed iSync so that their software would never suffer from the same version incompatibility as Microsoft's. Microsoft could have done the same thing, the specifications for creating a conduit for the Palm are out there in public for all to see and use.

I quoted Bill Gates' vision for what computers would do for us. I should not need to remind you that Mr. Gates works for Microsoft, not Apple or Palm. The problem I have with Microsoft's inaction with respect to publishing the standards for Outlook/Exchange is that apparently Mr. Gates' vision works only if you use Microsoft's software and operating systems. This is typical of how they use their monopoly. They do not play well with others because that is what they choose.

My fiancée (that would be the story in my earlier statement that you didn't read) uses the third party application to sync with Outlook/Exchange. And even failing that, she also has Palm's Desktop application on her computer (she is pretty minimally-functional in most applications and tends to not be able to find her files when she saves them anywhere, save her desktop.

I have been recommending to corporations for years that they do not use Internet Exploder as their web browser or Outlook Express or Outlook as their e-mail client due to how these programs connect to the Internet and are fat targets for black-hat hackers who want to exploit others' personal computers. The corporation I work for uses Outlook and Exchange for all e-mail and we regularly have problems with viruses, worms and other exploits

I will imagine that the proliferation of Windows devices on the palm of one's hand will cause that segment of the market to be more susceptible to exploits as well. I can well imagine someone radiating virus programs through a WiFi connection to steal data or destroy data on cell phones using Windows.

If I were your neighbor and drove into my driveway in a brand new Mercedes, would you pity me? Mercedes-Benz has about the same market share in autos as Apple has in personal computers. They also make similar profit margins. Just because I have a better computer than you have doesn't make my comment less worthy.

One should also mention...

[75bhp]

...the rift that grew between Jeff Hawkins and 3Com CEO Eric Benhamou, resulting in Hawkins', Dubinsky's and Colligan's leaving to found Handspring.

Hawkins' longtime wish was for Palm to be run by Palm. His frustration mounted under the wing of US Robotics and later 3Com, when his requests for a spin-off fell on deaf ears.

Read Piloting Palm by Butter & Pogue for that account.

Re:He's not wrong

[ckaminski]

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).

Jot - WTF?

[Just Some Guy]

The reason I upgraded to a paper-based DayRunner was that Palm abandoned Grafitti for Jot. Yeah, I know about the patent licensing issues (Xerox owned the idea of single penstroke character recognition, or something equally asinine, IIRC), but Jot was an absolute travesty compared to Graffiti. Yes, it had a shallower learning curve. That was great for the first two days of owning your first ever Palm. However, I've never talked to anyone who was as effective after a month of Jot as after a month of Graffiti. It just never seemed to work right.

I really lost out when I bought my latest Palm a couple of years ago, an m130. It came with OS 4.1.2, whose whole claim to fame is that it "replaces Graffiti with Graffiti 2 on the same Palm OS 4.1 code base". Since the m130 is a ROM-based model, that also means I can't "backgrade" to Graffiti - I'm stuck with Jot forever. Yay.

I couldn't care less about Palm's Outlook integration or lack thereof. For me, it died whenever they destroyed the most important feature: its handwriting recognition. See ya, Palm. At least my DayRunner has a place to put a pen and pictures of the kids.

Just bought an m500

[digitect]

I just bought a near-new Palm m500 on eBay for $43 (to replace my ancient m105). New, it was 10x that. I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Palm, but they somehow missed that usability was their #1 asset and their price point could only match the usable features they offered.

Palm was always a simple device that did all you needed to manage contacts, memos, calendar, and todos. But once telephone, wireless, music, media, games, etc. began to be demanded by customers, they couldn't figure out how to integrate them into their concept. The basic idea was good, but it wasn't extensible. It didn't match what was demanded by their customers. For example, I spent two days just trying to get their Palm Desktop installed on Windows XP. It works well on Windows 95, but it never became dead easy for XP, a complete failing on Palm's part to make their devices useful with the current generation of technology.

Palm failed to understand how to keep going. They tried to merely extend their current offerings instead of re-designing and growing them in scale to market demand. That included a more sophisticated operating system and better interface with desktop systems. This explains why I can be happy buying a legacy unit at 10:1 original cost and be happy while at the same time explaining why I will never buy a new Palm.

Re:He's not wrong

[tkrotchko]

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.