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

Lying with numbers

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Lying with numbers

[Monkelectric]

Um yes. This is utter bullshit :) I have owned *EVERY* major palm since the original Pilot 1000, and I am a software engineer and I work at a company that develops software for CE. Let me give you a little insight into palm programming.

The original palm was made possible by the Motorola Dragonball processor which IIRC was a 16mhz 68k variant with and LCD driver and memory controller, it was one of the first SOC's (System on a Chip) that I can recall. Programming these things was hideous. It was all C/C++ and the API sucked hardcore.

Flash forward 10 years, Palms now have 300 - 400 mhz ARM processors, WHICH THEY USE TO EMULATE THAT ORIGINAL DRAGONBALL PROCESSOR! If you want access to the ARM processor you can write an "applet" which runs directly on the real hardware. These are *VERY* difficult to get right and stable. This programming model is simply wrong.

Compare this to WinCE 5 which gives you a stripped down CLR, or CE6 which gives you almost a full CLR. You can write code that works on both a PC and CE with a few #defines here and there. The CE OS is that modern.

Compare that to BlackBerry which has J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) which is also a very decent programming model.

So long story short -- Palm sucks because their dev tools suck. They have been talking about this Palm OS 6 for a few years now that is supposed to correct all this stuff, but it never seems to come out, and frankly I don't think Palm has the engineers to pull it off. They've shown only the ability to produce sub-standard buggy software. My Treo is definitely the last palm I care to own.

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

Palm OS is the better OS honestly.

[falcon5768]

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.