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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."
You say you have 160,000 PalmOS developers. I say you're lying.
What you have are 160,000 people who may have once downloaded an SDK.
Or maybe you have a few thousand people who forgot their account information and created a new account.
Or maybe you're trying to count anyone who may have ever been a developer once for the OS in the last 10 years.
But any way you slice it, there's no way in hell you've got 160,000 developers actively working on your OS.
Neither Netcraft nor Kreskin need be sought out. Reality confirms it, PalmOS is dead.
PalmOS developers tend to be amongst the most loyal out there -- not quite fanatical about the platform, but very pragmatically into it. I guess something has to come out of the fact that applications written for Palm IIIx devices are still running, even on the latest devices, without any rework. Which, come to think of it, is strange -- you have an OS where native applications have to be written in C (with a plathora of inconsistent although good C++ frameworks), with a somewhat quirky event handling model.
I think that Palm's early-days decisions of releasing the source code to all their native apps as examples of well-coded applications, and of having really good testing tools (Gremlins are brilliant! I wish we had them in the Java ME world for non-palm mobile phones) played a huge role in creating folks who, well, still like writing for the PalmOS despite the massive changes everywhere else in the PDA world...
***Foucault is watching you..***
And Im being very truthful about it. One of my biggest problems with the Windows line of OSs has been how bloated it is. True Palms might not be as capable BUT honestly, its a PDA... do you REALLY need it to be a full blown computer when most of the time your going to be using it to take contacts and stuff. Whats worse is how even Windows Mobile emulates a full size Windows OS when on a 2x4 screen its uncalled for, even our barcode scanners piss me off because of that. And the sheer library of programs out there for Palm OS means you can tailor it for anything.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
When Access bought PalmOS last year, they announced they were rewriting it into a PalmOS GUI layer for backwards compatibility, and putting that on top of a Linux distro (from the China Mobilesoft company they'd also bought). They said they'd release it by the end of this year, on a new Palm phone. There's a new Treo750 out: does it run Linux? If not, there's a newish Treo700W that runs Windows - can that phone's full functions run some other Linux that runs on "Windows" mobile PCs?
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make install -not war
I used to think Palm was great. The ability to sync with my desktop and get my contacts from Outlook was a nice feature. It was even better with the Treo, as I was able to keep everything in one device that I could run applications without having to "buy" it though Cingular. Sure the Treo crashed several times a week, but I was willing to pay that price for a somewhat open OS with sync.
But ever since the phone died and I picked up this windows mobile phone, its hard for me to want to go back. I know Microsoft is a big evil company that locks people down to their OS, but they offer a flawless sync to your desktop with USB. While the Palm Treo offers this, the main problem is that I just see some better apps for the Microsoft one.
It also doesn't help things that I can fire up VC.NET and write a quick app for my phone.
Palm licensed perpetually Palm OS 5, currently known as Garnet and used in many Palm PDAs and smartphones. This is has nothing to do with the future version of Access Linux, which Palm has yet to license. The problem with Palm OS 5 is that Access completely dropped support for it, because it is focusing all the effort into Access Linux. On the contrary Palm still believes there is potential in Palm OS 5. There is an interesting issue with the name. Palm bought the exclusive right to use the name Palm OS from Acess a year or so ago. Access Linux is NOT going to be named Palm OS. There is plenty of speculation about future moves from Palm. They are pretty tepid in licensing Access Linux, and the current move to use Palm OS 5 is a sign in this direction. Since now they have the right also to apply any modification to OS 5 and to use this technology in other products, I think they are going to build an emulation layer into Windows Mobile. In other words you would be able to use both Windows Mobile and Palm OS applications... If so there would be no need for a new, totally untested linux-based OS....
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?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Palm separated into hardware and software divisions in 2002 and split in 2003. Last year it seemed like Palm (the hardware company) was trying to buy back PalmSource (the software company), but they were beaten to it. The split happened originally because it seemed like it would most benefit the software side as the Palm OS could be licensed to multiple hardware vendors. Now Palm is the only major company using the Palm OS and the platform is hurting. The next Palm OS is supposed to be built on top of Linux but from the recent news it seems that the project has not yet gotten off the ground. There was a lot of comparison between this strategy and Apple's original strategy to transition to OS X. The main difference between Palm and Apple here is that Apple controlled both the hardware and software and was able to effectively control the entire platform while right now the hardware and software of the Palm platform is fragmented. I think everyone is realizing that the split was a terrible idea and that complete integration would have been ideal.
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From Wikipedia:
In January 2002, Palm, Inc. set up a wholely owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS, which was named PalmSource in February. In October 2003, PalmSource was spun off from Palm as an independent company, and Palm renamed itself palmOne. palmOne and PalmSource set up a holding company that owned the Palm trademark.
In May 2005, palmOne purchased PalmSource's share of the Palm trademark and two months later renamed itself Palm, Inc. As part of the agreement, palmOne granted PalmSource certain rights to Palm trademarks to PalmSource and licensees for a four-year transition period. Later that year, ACCESS, which specializes in mobile and embedded web browser technologies, including NetFront, acquired PalmSource for US$324 million. In October 2006, PalmSource announced that it would rename itself to ACCESS, to match its parent company's name.
I've used multiple Palms, starting with a handmedown USR Pilot. I moved to the PalmIIIx, then to the Handspring Visor for the expansion port (CF & SD card reading goodness). I switched from a pager to a cellphone sometime during the Visor era and when my Visor started dying at the same time ATT fell into the Cingularity I went for the Treo650 and a new phone carrier. My Treo runs virtually all my old apps. I added Grafitti-1 to it and enabled shortcuts. It is, from a UI standpoint, identical to my Pilot.
My Treo650 is pretty stable, with the occassional long pause when I manage to do a major memory swap (close/open an ebook on the SD card) at the same moment the email auto-download occurs. I get a crash or hard freeze maybe once every 2-3 months, usually when I manage to have the above happen when listening to MP3s or when an alarm is set to go off, or when I turn on the internet at the exact moment a call is coming in (CDMA doesn't let you do both).
I don't know anyone with a WinMobile device that has half the stability I do, let alone with the same degree of customization. It works, it's reliable, and it's pretty (PalmOS supports higher res screens than WinMoble).
Palm has 2 hurdles: 1) the carriers have so many special requirements some of them destabilize the Treos (I'm looking at you Cingular!) and 2) they need mindshare. Palm doesn't have any buzz anymore. They need to advertise the Treo. Mine plays MP3s, videos, takes acceptable pictures, reads office docs, etc. They almost need the PC/Mac commercial but with "Mobile Office" on one side of Treo, "Rock'r" on the other.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
I think Palm will continue to survive, if not thrive in various vertical markets but their heyday is clearly over. When my T3 finally died, I thought about going to a PocketPC device, but it's just too easy to buy another Palm and plug it in (changing the sync cord of course grrrrrr) and get up and going.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It was more a case of spinning off the hardware division.
Palm wanted the OS to be in loads of devices by loads of manufacturers.
Their os partners didn't really trust the Palm OS folks because they kept thinking that the Palm hardware folks would steal any innovations.
So, they spun the hardware side of Palm off as Palm One and called the OS side PalmSource
their major OS customer (sony) ditched Palm OS and the new customers they must have been hoping for didn't materialise.
so PalmSource only had one customer - Palm One.
Gradually, the child has been buying back the parent - first they bought the brand, now they've bought the OS.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
A few months ago we started a pilot project testing Groupwise Mobile at work which runs on both Windows mobile and PalmOS. So we ordered several Verizon devices, a few Treo700W's a few 700P's and 2 motorola Q phones running WinMobile. Most of these devices went to users who had either previously been using Blackberrys or did not have a smart phone. As of today, all of the users who received WinMobile based devices except one (who previously owned a WinMobile device) have complained incessantly about their performance or pretty much stopped carrying them and either gone back to their blackberry (if they had one to go back to) or just stopped using the devices all together. The main complaint I hear is in regards to the device locking up and becoming unresponsive 5-6 times per day and/or just spontaneously rebooting in the middle of use and/or when it is just sitting there apparently doing nothing. Our site director got one of the Q phones and she positively despised it after a week. She was the first to switch back to her Blackberry.
The few of us who got a 700P refuse to give them up. That is not to say that there haven't been some issues with them. Personally mine has rebooted like twice when I was doing a lot of multimedia stuff like watching a movie. Occasionally during an over-the-air sync with GWMobile my phone will become unresponsive for a few seconds. The only reproducible bug I have with this 700P is if I go into the multimedia player with my 2GB memory card inserted the phone will reboot every time. If I eject it, enter the app, then reinsert it it comes up just fine and then reads in the memory card.
I think the fact that we handed these devices out to mostly novice users and almost all the WinMobile devices have been abandoned while the PalmOS based devices are still in use speaks volumes on the points made in earlier posts regarding usability.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
That's not exactly what happened — the story has its history wrong. Palm did not sell PalmOS to Access. Palm split itself into PalmSource (software) and PalmOne (hardware), with joint ownership of the Palm brand. Later, PalmOne bought back the right to call itself "Palm", and PalmSource got bought out by Access.
Am I picking nits? I don't think so. All the investors in the old Palm ended up with stakes in the two new companies. And a software-only company was better positioned to be bought out by a company like Access, a buyout that must have been very profitable for PalmSource stockholders. Meanwhile, PalmOne/Palm is free to develop hardware that is not based on an OS that is quickly losing ground to Windows.
Also, you're wrong when you say all hardware is a commodity. PC hardware (or more precisely, PC motherboards) are a commodity, because they're produced on a huge scale by lots of different manufacturers who fight each other to sell them cheaply to big PC companies. But PalmOS-based PDAs have a tiny market with very little competition. Palm does not face the problems of commodity manufacturers (fierce competition to sell virtually identical products), it faces the problems of a specialized manufacturer that has gotten a little too specialized. If Palm survives at all, it will be as yet another manufacturer of smartphones, where competition is based as much on features as on price.