Apple to Buy out Palm?

JFlex writes "According to a story over at Personal Computer World 'Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies.'"

Comments

Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!

[Archibald Buttle]

Palm Source is working on Palm OS.

Palm Source isn't owned by Palm. It's owned by a Japanese company whose name I can't remember.

Palm don't own their own OS these days.

Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!

[AKAImBatman]

As for rewriting in Linux - does that mean their current Palm OS is such a dead end that they can't evolve it?

Yes. I've developed for it before, and it's got cruft coming out of its ears. It was designed around the idea that a device would never have more than 8 Megs of RAM, and that the controls/screen would be fixed in their design. In addition, memory is partitioned into small "databases" with explicit record sizes. These databases are the only thing keeping the data separate. If something goes wrong, one database can easily overwrite another. No MMU exists to prevent this.

Other issues include:

• Applications are identified by 4 byte codes.
• Databases are associated on those same 4 byte codes.
• Libraries are non-existant, and have to be hacked into the OS.
• Large memory areas are handled by bank-switching, putting limits on where executable code can run.
• Large programs or data sets cannot be loaded into memory because of the bank-switching. They usually need to be constantly swapped out.
• The graphics facilities are primitive, representing the hi-end of portable technology in the mid 90's.
• Lack of libraries and program designs tend to result in large amounts of duplicated code.
• Poor acclimation to network facilities, due to its original design as a "satellite" device rather than a wireless portable.

There's more, but those are just off the top of my head.

It's hideously expensive to rewrite software from scratch and a lot of companies will fail in the process.

My best suggestion would be an emulator. Given that a new OS would be able to take advantage of the greater speeds of modern ARM processors, most software could be run under a port of the current desktop emulator that developers use today. Performance critical software would do best to port, but new versions have always been an issue for them anyway.

Re:BeOS

[firewood]

So does this mean that the BeOS will be under the ownership of Apple as well?

Mod down. BeOS was formerly purchased by PalmSource (not Palm) which was recently purchased by Access of Japan.

Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!

[hackerjoe]

As for rewriting in Linux - does that mean their current Palm OS is such a dead end that they can't evolve it?

Yes. I've developed for it before, and it's got cruft coming out of its ears.

That's true for Palm OS 4. Palm OS Garnet (the first version of the ARM OS) lifts a few of those restrictions, but it's still pretty much a hack.

But PalmSource has been working on Palm OS Cobalt, their next gen OS, for the last few years. They actually had a preview ready at the Palm Developers' Conference I attended in 2004: it has next-gen databases with a built in sql-like query language, next gen PIM applications, threading, real process separation, berkeley socket networking, well-thought-out security model, etc. It is a Real OS.

You've been able to get an emulator and tool suite since that conference: if you want, you could develop a new Cobalt app today.

The problem? No hardware. Since PalmSource didn't have a hardware division anymore, they couldn't force anybody to actually use the OS, and Palm opted short-sightedly to stick with Garnet.

Thus, the move to Linux, to make the platform more attractive to phone manufacturers. But keep in mind it's just the underlying kernel that's Linux: on top, everything is Cobalt, both to the user and the developer. The advantage is that phone makers can reuse more of their existing software infrastructure (drivers, etc.) if they've been developing Linux phones.