Why Palm Still Covets Palm OS

munchola wrote in with news that Palm has just announced a one-time payment for perpetual, royalty-free use of Palm OS. In 2005 Palm spun off PalmSource to an outside company, Access Systems Americas, and since that time has been paying out royalties for its use. At the same time Palm announced products based on Windows Mobile. Palm's latest announcement reduces the uncertainty among Palm OS developers. From the article: "In an unsurprising but symbolically important move, handheld and smartphone maker Palm this month signed a perpetual license with Access Systems Americas, which gives Palm the right to use Access' Palm OS operating system in whole or in part in any Palm device forever more. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the context is interesting, in particular what it means for the army of Palm OS developers out there. Believe it or not there are at least 160,000 Palm OS developers — and they're just the ones that Palm knows about."

Comments

Ordinary People still use PDA's?

[Penguinisto]

No, seriously... not trolling here.

I once used an iPAQ (w/ a brick-sized battery pack/PCMCIA slot accessory on it) almost religiously several years back. At that time, the iPAQ was great for keeping appointments, a few games stashed onboard, and to top it off, I could shove a PC Card adapter and a CF card full of mp3's in it, or a PC Card-based 802.11b card. It was fun to mess with and was even halfway practical.

Nowadays I can do pretty much all of that (and more) with an iPod and a decent cell phone - or just a really decent cell phone, methinks (except mine doesn't do mp3's, so...) So where does a stand-alone PDA fit in these days? Crackberries, yeah, I can see that - but it appears (IMHO) to be nothing more than a glorified cell phone with a really big screen, and definitely not something you'd want to tinker with under-the-hood too awful much, like you could with a PDA.

I guess I'm just curious, now with the increased power of mobile phone devices glommed together w/ PDA functions, if Palm's core business model even has a future, or if someday they'll just be sucked up by, say, Nokia or Motorola...

Does anyone actually use straight-up PDA's anymore?

/P

Re:Lying with numbers

[isaac]

PalmOS is definitely stone-age internally, but guess what: being a PITA for programmers has *NOTHING* to do with its unmatched usability for end users.

I don't care how good WinCE's CLR is - it's a usability nightmare on a phone-sized device (why should I care what apps are running? I have zero interest in quitting this program to free up enough memory to run that program. The PIM functions also blow. And a Start menu? Please die.)

And J2ME is a very decent programming model? Yeah, great for programmers. Shitty for users. Have you ever actually *USED* third-party java apps on a Blackberry? I had the displeasure of having to carry one for $WORK years ago. Here's four words that sum up J2ME: "loading... um... still loading."

PalmOS is a crusty nightmare under the hood but somehow it's still the only thing out there that delivers a seamless *USER* experience. No loading time for app launches, excellent mapping of functions to single button presses or taps, etc.

When I want a system that's great for coders and tweakers, I use Linux on my desktop. I don't want that experience on my phone - I want a device that JUST WORKS NOW and lets me run the apps I want to run (devices that are closed to open-source or freeware developers fail it.)

Maybe Symbian will get there someday but the impression that I have is that it's entirely too carrier-friendly, not sufficiently user-friendly.

-Isaac