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Palm Responds to the iPhone
Several people noted a NYT piece about Palm's response to the iPhone. Essentially, their response appears to be to hire a former Apple engineer and a couple other folks -- while also pursuing plans to perhaps sell the company. Nothing like a dual approach to the problem.
All in ones exist today. Palm has seen it come and done nothing.
Apple is attempting to make a sexy all in one taht doesn't rely on windoze mobile and market the hell out of it. Palm has done nothing.
Someone needs to come up with a serious contender to iTunes. Until that happens, no one will touch Apple in the new 'convergence' world.
Then why aren't people buying my all-in-one microwave/refrigerator/toilet?
I've been searching for a digital music service, and while i'm only going for ones that offer MP3s, so my choices are limited, I've found that a lot of music services are really bad. They don't have the level of quality that iTunes has, in terms of things actually working the way they are supposed to. They make it a real hassle to just buy/download your music. iTunes makes things really easy. I've ended up going with eMusic, and I find their service very good, but iTunes just seems a little more seamless.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Somehow I get the impression that the iPhone's future... destiny, if you will... is already determined, and anything Apple's competitors might do at this point is more or less irrelevant. Nothing is going to steal the iPhone's thunder if it turns out there actually is a market for it. And if there isn't... it'll sink without a trace, as will any rivals.
As cool as I think the iPhone is, I'm currently leaning toward the second option. Too expensive, too little demand.
Palm has been out of the game for too long. They've been delivering high priced phones with less features (still no wifi in their treo lineup!). Windows mobile, which is an inferior OS to palms, has a greater market share due to Palms ignorance.
Whether you like or dislike Apple or their products, Apple is a catalyst for change. Personally I applaud Apple's entry as it may encourage all phone makers to reevaluate their UI. The UI on my phone sucks but they all equally suck.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The problem with all in ones is they implement each feature shoddly or make ridiculous compromises.
Camera? Sure 0.3MP. Memory? Sure 1MB. etc...
Sure some phones now come with mini-sd slots and what not. But still, if I want a camera my 5MP Canon will do much better. If I want an MP3 player my iPod will do much better. If I want a processor in a box, my laptop will do much better. There is a difference between "doing a lot of things" and "doing a lot of things well."
Combine that with lack of choice [in most markets] and people are easy prey for the doo-dahs and whatnots.
For me, when I bought a phone I looked at some key factors.
1. quadband so I can use it anywhere
2. relatively small
3. decent standby life
Anything else is frivolous and hardly gets used.
Unless you see phones with a 4MP camera, 128MB of ram, 500 MHz ARM, etc... it's hard to say they're really "replacing" anything.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Palm was there first. Or at least Handspring was, and Palm bought them. Haven't you heard of the Treo? The iPhone might be more sleek and stylish but it is definatly not the first all-in-one product in the market.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Not only is it too expensive and not all *that* much better than some other smartphones out there, but the decision to lock in to one mobile provider is probably the one thing that will doom it to failure. Looks like a great toy, but far too expensive but as for me personally there is no way I'd switch to Cingular. Bad, bad experiences with them in the past. I doubt many people will rush to change providers just for a high priced toy. There will be a limited market within Cingular's existing customer base, and some Apple fans who will switch just because it's from Apple, and that is it.
It'll only be destiny if they make it right, nobody but business clients are going to pay 500 dollars for a phone, UNLESS it has mp3 capabilities and big storage like the ipod does, but it's gonna be hard to cram a phone and decent sized hard drive into a small unit, and make all of this a quality product(apple has been falling behind on quality on the ipods). On top of that, only Cingular carries it? They're going up a hill, but I'm not going to damn them before the product even comes out. We will see.
Yeah, after dabbling with a PocketPC (bleh) I'm back to seperate cell phone (Katana), palm (just bought a cheapie Z22), camera (canon sd630)...
it's kind of a lot to pocket, but each device is pretty compact by itself.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Palm seems to be very proud of the fact that they hired an ex-Apple engineer, which seems rather silly considering that Apple has thousands of them. It gets better when you consider that ex-Apple in this case means that he last worked for the company about ten years ago. No story here, unless the subtext is that Palm OS is going to start looking like System 7
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
All in ones are not the future. All in ones are good for a few things. Playing music, showing photos, making phone calls. Would you want to do photo editing or management on an iPhone? Would you want to do video editing or web browsing or email only on an iPhone? Of course not. You want a nice big screen and a real keyboard and mouse to do those things.
What Apple gets, and what I think is the future, is making all of these things work together. The iPhone syncs to your desktop at home. The Apple TV gets its content from your desktop at home. It's not about replacing your computer, it's about extending it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I'd be happy with phone that just has a decent 2MP camera with image stabiliser, an MP3 player with buttons outside the phone and most importantly a USB connection to load/unload pictures and music. As simple as it seems, you can find this yet.
Portable combo gadgets like this will not replace dedicated devices for another 10-15 years. The reason: too much greed in the business. When IP phones start to give Cell phones companies a run for their money, you start seeing decent All-in-one phones.
Heck, All-in-one Printers are just now starting to be on-par with their dedicated brethren.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Good points. Should point out that many phones TODAY are capable of sharing files via bluetooth/usb. It's mostly the telco's that lock the phones down so you have to use airtime to transmit files (or worse, only buy content from their services).
So you'd need to see BOTH the telco's and hardware designers lose their greed.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What Microsoft gets, and what I think is the future, is making all of these things work together. Windows Mobile syncs to your desktop at home. The Xbox 360 gets its content from your desktop at home. It's not about replacing your computer, it's about extending it.
Apple's very late to the game. Their implementation may be better, but they're stealing the paradigms, not innovating them.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
1.2MP low end camera. The print outs are good enough.
2G card
Plays MP3s & MPEG videos. Anything else is frivolous and hardly gets used. You maybe, I took pictures of my daughters first few days alive on my phone camera. Watch the odd movie in the bath. Terminal Service'd into work to do a roll out.
but all you can hear on their end is "can you hear me now...?" "good"
The original generic sig.
Palm is dead. Over 2 years ago Palm sold its OS to the Japanese "Access" corp that makes so many Japanese phones and their most popular web browser. So Access could finish their long heralded "Cobalt" OS, and switch to a new OS which was Linux, under Cobalt (retained as just GUI and compatibility layer). They were supposed to release Linux (+ Cobalt GUI) phones last Fall, before anyone had heard about the (real) iPhone.
But they didn't. Just as Palm let the Blackberry come from behind and eat the market Palm created, Access has let PalmOS keep it from even reaching the market before Apple is eating it, without even a released product.
It's all too bad. The PalmOS approach, focused simplicity on tasks, designed as a tough peripheral, with the most natural interface, writing on the screen, was the right paradigm. Handled properly, it should have forced all computing, whether workstation, mobile, phone or mediaplayer, to "just work", adopting many of its friendliest innovations. Now that job, as usual, is up to Apple.
--
make install -not war
I must be the only one who doesn't want a cellphone combined with my PDA / mp3 player. You have to choose between a nice big and wide screen (a la the Palm TX) or a small sleek phone. I don't want to choose. I don't even have a cell phone, but I guess that makes me the only person on the planet in this group. In fact, maybe I'll be the only person left on the planet in the literal sense... when all you phone addicts die of brain cancer... mwa hahahaaa. :)
1.2MP is low end for a camera. While I agree that MP do not make a photographer, you still need at least 4 or 5MP for decent quality in ideal circumstances.
:-) [in realtime, unlike most phones which have craptacular CPU power).
2G for music? My ipod can store 60G. And I have about 23G of stuff on it (and it's only a small subset of my collection).
As for videos, i dunno how useful that is given the size of the screens [nature of the beast]. I don't even use the video part of the ipod [mostly because it drains the batteries]. Only small screen I like watching is my GBA (or DS) but at least then I'm playing high quality NES games
I dunno, yeah sure, good phones exist. They're just not common place or cheap.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I went into a big box computer store recently, to buy a cable for a PDA I'm developing for. I was shocked; a few months earlier thre had been about twenty feet of counter space devoted to PDAs. Now there was zero -- just two shelves under the counter, maybe two feet wide, half for Palm, half for HP iPaqs. In its place was now twice the retailspace, devoted to iPod accessories.
While the industry had been busy competing to offer "updated" PDAs, Apple has kicked the entire lot into retail obscurity. They can't even, as entire industry, hold their own against fashion cases for the iPod Nano. Apple is a company that has carved out a niche by not only ignoring, but flagrantly defying industry "wisdom", which comes from a group of people far too focused on what each other is doing.
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series. Palm has the customers and retail channel (for now); the sentiments quoted above say that they should use them to innovate within the bounds of the PDA or smart phone paradigm. But we have reached the point where the value of the next "PDA innovation" is not enough to get you on base -- not in a game where a base hit consists of a $200 retail purchase by a consumer.
The true destiny of the PDA is not to accrete laptop like capabilities. It is to become a cheap commodity. The world needs a Palm m505 for $19.99; not a Life Drive (just discontinued last month) for $399. That is the true meaning of convergence: PDAs have become marginal appendages to phones; their job is to sell phones.
The idea that PalmOS should become more like PocketPC and accrete new features only makes the situation worse. As the sales of PDAs plummet, both Palm and PocketPC will suffer, but PocketPC is destined to drop even faster.
The problem for a company like Palm is not that money cannot be made with a product whose fundametal retail value is destined to plummet. The problem is that money cannot be made with a conventional tech company culture, which is biased towards on stuffing as much features and functionality into a product as will fit. The best thing would be for Apple to buy a nearly moribund Palm for a song.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why can't you just plug your monitor and keyboard into your all-in-one?
Think outside the box! The zeitgeist is shifting to a new paradigm!
So, the iphone with USB, 2MP, 8GB storage, and what appears to be an SD card slot, and the MP3 player would be ideal?
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I don't dispute that. However, I'm not sure how well implementations are going to work when you've got, say, a Wii hooked to your TV, a Palm Treo as your phone, and a Windows box as your desktop. We need standardization to make sure that the information is able to be seamlessly integrated, and no company seems to want to open up.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
My Treo syncs to my desktop now. My XBox 360 plays music and video from my PC, as well as my regular XBoxes.
Looks like everybody else "got it" years ago.
Apple sells jewelry.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't really expect the iphone to become a big thing, and if it does it would just make iPod market drop... So I don't really think it would be great news for apple, I am no psychic so don't blame me if I am wrong.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Apple is attempting to make a sexy all in one taht doesn't rely on windoze mobile and market the hell out of it. Palm has done nothing. Palm saw it coming, and they created the Treo. Then they sat around rotting, selling off their software business, and experimenting with Windows Mobile. Palm really has been doomed since they screwed up the 68k-ARM transition. (And the other issues of the time, like Xerox)
While I covet the iPhone for its beautiful hardware and interface design, as a phone it has some quite major shortcomings compared to the current top of the line devices. While it's true that this may not be important in the US mobile phone market, to succeed in Asia and Europe the iPhone will need to become a more capable device. Steve Ballmer had it exactly right: Apple's share of the phone market is currently zero and will remain that way for at least another three months. For all the hype around the iPhone, there's still the real possibility it could fail internationally if not at home. In contrast there are millions of Windows and Palm phones out there so I don't think Palm needs to panic just yet. Improve yes, panic no.
They did. As far as I can tell, my Treo - while occasionally clunky - does everything the iPhone does with the exception of always on wi-fi. (Although this is available as a hardware add-on.)
And it is open to 3rd party developers, so it can be adapted to do more. This is usually a big plus in the Slashdot arena, even if it is not open source.
how many people get mugged for a cellphone?
If mugged, you could have the serial# (asin?) of the phone hotlisted and it would not be possible to reactivate it.. what's the point of mugging for a cellphone?
(now, in GSM europe- with sims and unlocking so possible, maybe)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I'm not sure Palm has any reason to be worried. They have a proper operating system on which you can install third party applications and tweak things just about all you want. That puts Jobs' BS about locking you in for the "safety of the network" to shame.
Palm really kills me. The 650, 680, and 700 are really top end devices that are the equal or better of pretty much any phone on the market. They may not be the thinnest or have the best cameras, but the PalmOS versions have higher res screens with vibrant colors, decent native and 3rd party apps, and useful interfaces.
But you'd never know it if you don't already know what a treo is. I've go a 650 from sprint, my boss has as blackjack. Other than fit in a smaller pocket, the blackjack doesn't do anything the treo can't despite the nearly 2-year difference in release dates. And I'll trade the pocket aspect for the runtime as my Treo can go 2-3 days between charges despite frequent web access and heavy usage unlike the Blackjack's ~1 day heavy usage.
Have you ever seen a treo commercial? I haven't but I'll see fifty bajillion "Helo Moto/Razr/Red" commercials this week. C'mon, run something on CNN during the financial hour, for cris'sakes.
People crank about the lack of updates to the PalmOS. When was the last time you actually updated your Symbian phone? Heck, what percentage of users know what os their phone uses? PalmOS is not the easiest to code for? Fine. How does it compare to symbian? Or the motorola in-house OS? Oh wait, there's not many apps for Symbian because of network carriers locking phones and motorola will tell you to sod off if you don't want to jump through their hoops. Obviously it isn't impossible to code for given the sheer number of programs out there and the big draw items are as pretty as anything on Windows Mobile. (Documents to Go, for instance, is both pretty and a solid mobile Office app)
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.
Palm REALLY needs to go back and unmake some really stupid decisions. I don't see how they can dig themselves out of the hole they're in now, except by playing up the Palm name and reselling other people's kit under it.
They did way better than I expected on the original ARM transition, but they totally dropped the ball on Cobalt (or whatever their next-gen PalmOS is going to be), and they've already tossed their original product in the wastebin - these days even Microsoft delivers better Graffiti emulation.
It's distressing.
What Apple gets, and what I think is the future, is making all these things together. The Newton syncs to your desktop at home. The Pippin can play content from your Mac at home. It's not about replacing your computer, it's about extending it.
:-P
Microsoft is very late to the game. Also, their implementation is crap, and they're stealing the paradigms, not innovating them.
Being first doesn't mean that you actually did get what you were doing
The iPhone isn't going to stay on one carrier forever. Its just a start. Just like the iPod started out on the Macintosh and then later moved to Windows. On the other hand I disagree vehemently with your assertion that people won't switch to Cingular for the iPhone. They'll probably get at LEAST 5 million new users because of the iPhone.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I guess you haven't tried Amarok recently then... it blows away iTunes in so many ways I could never have imagined. Things are dramatically more intuitive, it supports at least 30 features that iTunes does not (and will not support), and most of all, it works on my platforms, with all of my media players (not just iPods).
More features, more support, more functionality, more platforms, and the GUI that is just useful and intuitive? Using iTunes is like using rocks and sticks to manage my music. No thanks.
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series.
Palm's own hardware has been going downhill since the end of the Palm III series. The Tungsten line were bulkier than the Palm V, cost more, and didn't really do more for most punters. For the folks who need more, the Handspring Visor would have been a whole new product *family*... and it was for a couple of years until Hawkins killed it with the Visor Edge and the Treo.
They should have keep the 68000-based family going in lower and lower priced hardware (ane I think you'd agree on that) and done whatever it took to keep Sony happy making high-end units and keeping the hard-core geeks out of their hair, while providing something like the Visor as a bridge: a basic unit that's consistent from generation to generation (like the iPod) to build an accessory market around.
The springboard module isn't that critical, long term... they could have transitioned to CF-Ie or a mini USB host connector (which would let them use everything from flash drives to iPods as preipherals, without making the base more expensive). But the add-on ecosystem that's grown around it is one of the things that's made the iPod such a success... it's a more certain lock-in than the iTunes store or Fairplay.
As for your requirements, it's quad band, a little larger than a Sony Ericsson T610, can go uncharged for about 3 or 4 days (while suffering "average" usage), has a 3.2 MP camera and 1 Gb of memory. I don't know what processor it uses, but I know that I don't use it to render 3D scenes or run photoshop on it, so I'm sure its' fine.
what I think is the future, is making all of these things work together.
I couldn't agree with you more!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I've got a Treo 680 (probably the last ever PalmOS PDA) with an 8GB SD card in it. It plays music (and will stream from the net) and video. It also has full featured GPS navigation SW (TomTom - external GPS required) and the mobile version of Google Maps. It does SSH, FTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, and more. It can work natively with popular document and spreadsheet formats and -- oh yeah, it's a phone too. I've got my entire company locator database (almost 10K records) at my fingertips.
I wish that M$ had not been successful in their endevor to destroy the Palm computing platform.
Where are Windows and OS X versions??? I'd love to try it out as I'm always looking for a new music, podcast, and video management tools.
does it warm my buns and keep my can cold?
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
> The Newton syncs to your desktop at home. The Pippin can play content from your Mac at home.
...
The "Most Inappropriate Use of the Present Tense" award goes to
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
...if they call it the "Willy Waller 2007", we'll know it's going to be something everyone will want to drop like a hot potato. :-)
That is an "interesting" comment these days? WTF?
I think that GP refers to iTunes Music Store, not iTunes the application
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Yes, but I don't have my camera on me every moment of the day, whereas I have my phone in my pocket every waking moment. I find that I have a lot of use for a camera on a daily basis, and it doesn't matter that the pictures aren't the best quality. It's the same story with other non-phone features of my smartphone - I use them extensively. Just because these features aren't useful for YOU, doesn't mean there's no market for them. This point gets made on Slashdot literally every time a phone article is published, so I'm surprised we're still having to have this discussion.
Which is exactly why no one IS saying they're "replacing" anything. The claim is that they "complement" your other devices by being always available in a pinch.
Way to go on selling that one, I was interested then I found out I needed Linux. Well done.
Jonathanjk.com
I love catching fanboys in a lie. First of all Apple doesn't break down iPod sales by model so you don't actually know what the most popular model is. Secondly, the nano doesn't cost $500.
The iPhone is going to fall on it's face and only people like you will buy one. Only you'll return it after a few days because you can't see the screen since it's covered in chocolate and cheeto fingerprints.
The fact that it required KDE didn't clue you in? The good news is, you can run KDE on OS X and Windows already, though not as your main Windowing environment. This will change in KDE 4 though.
KDE has (by far) the most robust UI of any desktop (I'm not saying you have to like it). I wonder if the fact that it will be able to easily be used on Windows in the future will help or hurt OSS UNIX systems. I think it will hurt them at first, but if people actually take up using KDE (like they did Firefox over IE), then switching to Linux or Solaris wouldn't be nearly as difficult for them in the future.
As someone who has stuck with Palm devices for about eight years now, I don't like that that's what the choices are, but I really think that's the way it is. Every time Versamail crashes my phone, (or even just tells me I have new mail, when I don't), every time Blazer crashes my phone, every time Keyguard causes my phone to stay on instead of off, every time I wish I had Python handy, or that my phone could deal with Japanese text, it's a clear reminder that Windows Mobile is the better system for this class of hardware. And then there's the prospect of actually writing apps for the device - I'm OK with going back to PilRC and compiling to M68K for simple things - but the process you have to go through to run ARM code on the thing is obscene. As a developer I find it to be an extremely distasteful platform now.
It's entirely possible for a system to embrace the classic PalmOS philosophies of simplicity and optimization for common tasks, and still be modern and well-fitted to the hardware it's running on. Little things like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking aren't too much to ask for, right? WinCE in its various incarnations didn't exactly do that, though with each new release they got a tiny bit closer to that - adopting Palm UI ideas here and there, streamlining the process - hell, they've even got a "block character recognizer" that works just like Graffiti - you can get Graffiti on WinCE but not Palm - what a joke.
If Palm's response to the iPhone is to take PalmOS 5 and make it pretty, or add a little better multimedia support - well fuck them. I'm sick of them fixing the bugs on the front end of things (or not) and leaving the underpinnings to rot.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
While you can't play modern games on a Pippin, you probably can play movies on it (not sure), and the Newton definitely still syncs with Mac OS X.
And by the way, most people don't care about installing third party apps, and you only need to tweek setting if they were wrong to begin with.
"Most people". Bleh. I use a Palm Tx, and have come to depend on 3rd party apps like Datebk6 and Bonzai. I know that I'm in a niche market, but surely *someone* can figure out how to make money off of us. There are other people out there buying and using tech other than iPod-wielding teenagers. And yes, I have an iPod too. But when the battery runs out, I don't have to worry about not being able to do actual work or make a phone call.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
and Palm is hesitating to fix them. The following thread, which is being monitored by Palm execs to gauge if 'customers really are having problems with their Treo 700p phones' is over 20 pages long now and details the MAJOR problems with the 700p:r d=general&action=display&thread=1169731124
http://sjmcloughlin.proboards37.com/index.cgi?boa
The 700p is immensely frustrating to own. If you can, please mod up this thread to give the Treo 700p problems the publicity they deserve.
But does it stabilize the image?
Most/all camera-phones take smeared pictures unless it's sittin' on a table or something.
Also, the SD slot, is it standard or MicroSD?
If it's MicroSD then you are begging to break it everytime to touch it.
No thanks.
I'd also like REAL buttons.
Not a membrane that will break when used alot or cold.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
i read in their web site about the porting to OS X and windows but can you explain this: "The good news is, you can run KDE on OS X and Windows already, though not as your main Windowing environment." How?
I'm assuming you can run KDE *slowly* through an X11 server (Apple's for OS X) or the various ones available for Windows (eXceed, cygwin, etc).
I was happy to find that my wife's Motorola RAZR v3m on Sprint is "unlocked". Moto's "phone tools" let you copy music/pictures/video freely to/from the phone and sync calendar. The music player supports AAC, so all those imported iTunes tracks play. The phone has a microSD slot, which last I checked one can get in 2GB capacity for ~$60. Sprint also allows apps to be installed on the phone and the Google Mail & Maps are quite nice. Moto has also done away with their propreitary interface cables, this one connects/charges via USB. The only missing feature is a flash for the camera. All in all a pretty solid product for $50. I'm still waiting for iPhone, if it doesn't please I'll just get a RAZR like my wife's. On the other side of the coin, a friend of mine and his wife both recently purchased the same phone but with T-Mobile. I was going to show him the google apps only to find they're not allowed.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
What? Palm didn't create the Treo, Handspring did. If you don't know who/what Handspring is, then you need a history lesson.
Handspring was started in the late 90's by a few ex-Palm employees. The Handspring Treo took off and started beating Palm at their own game, so Palm bought them out a few years later and has basically trashed the name Treo since then.
I hear the Katana sucks. I was at a bachelor party this weekend and a friend of mine who recently got one was complaining that it dials random phone numbers while closed in his pocket. Me? I'm interested in the Nokia N95. That phone looks awesome.
;)
"Brown University? We have one of those in Providence!" -- Outside Providence
Palm imploded, got rid of their talented engineers, stopped product development, and went into milk-whatever-revenue-stream-we've-got mode.
They've now painted themselves into a corner where the best thing PalmOS has got going for it is the vast array of Palm apps, and the worst thing going for them is their ancient patched up, buggy, impossible to develop for OS.
Palm has pissed off developers - lots of my favorite apps are no longer being developed or supported - many don't even have an official webpage). No good development environment for you.
Palm has pissed off users - no bugfixes for you, well okay... maybe *ONE fix*. No upgrades for you. No new non-treo products for you. No decent browser for you. No multitasking for you. No 802.11g wireless for you. Want a new feature? You'll need to buy a fractionally different product to get it.
I sincerely hope Apple eats Palm's lunch. I even hope that Microsoft copies apple's phone UI and makes Windows Mobile a decent OS. But, palm... you've let me down on so many levels for so many years... I don't need your redesigned icons or redesigned splash screen on the Palm desktop software. I don't need a new point version of versamail. I don't need Palm OS 5.4999999999. I don't need a new color on a treo. I don't need a battery with less battery life.
I'm glad you hired an ex-Apple developer. I'm sure that your ex-Be developers are hungry and will eat him up.
See that icon at the top of the page?
It's a Palm V/m500/m505 style palm. It's less than a centimeter thick. It weighs nothing. It's got a great, crisp LCD screen - the kind that doesn't emit a piercing shriek like the Tungsten models do. The kind that runs forever. But it's not color! Oh no!
Palm needs to release a modern update to that device. Something apple-nano thin. Something fast, with a nice big screen, and some Palm OS'y goodness. Or Linux. Or BSD. Who cares - just make it open and programmable. And Useful! I got rid of my T3 and went back to using a m500 I picked up on ebay for $30. Why? It's better tech. The new battery I installed lasts for weeks on a charge. It's light enough to carry around, and cheap enough I don't need to worry about a huge-ass carry case.
Instead, palm makes shitty devices that nobody wants now and do nothing well. I owned the original USR Palm. It kicked ass because it was thin, and light, and did what it did very well.
Palm, in it's current incarnation, deserves to die a firey market-driven death.
Make a thin device that's a modern PDA. NOBODY HAS DONE THIS YET. Yes, it's HARD to make things that thin. That's where you're going to make your money. On the form factor.
You don't need a multi million dollar marketing team to tell you that. They tell you the type of crapola that results in the current "lifedrive" garbage.
I watched HP die - they made great devices that knew who used them - like the HP48 and HP200LX - and they turned their back on the engineers, when the people at the top no longer used the products. I think the same thing has happened to Palm, and I'm very sorry to see it happen.
..don't panic
No, really, I'm sure this is just thrilling news. I mean, beyond the whole look and feel thing, who knows, maybe there's someone out there who thinks that Palm will, y'know, finally sync properly with the Macintosh, but I'm not holding my breath. I've given Palm plenty of chances, but it's extremely unlikely that they'll ever see another dime of mine.
I was a relatively early adopter of Palm (1996). I even bough US Robotics stock. All the while, though, I was always amazed how they managed to fuck Mac users over left, right, and center. Everything from not being able to use half of the programs on the installation CD, to having to buy a serial cable adapter, to never being able to sync well (unless one paid for third-party software that took over 2 years to get OS X versions going).
A few years ago I gave up on Palm and started using an iPod as a PDA. No, I can't do input on the fly, but it's good enough for looking up contacts and appointments. And once the iPhone lets you once save input, I'll have the PDA that Palm should have been back in 2002.
The funny thing about the IPhone is that if any other company were making it, Slashdot would be all over them. You would see quotes like: I got my cell phone to make phone calls, not to listen to music, take pictures, or play games. Just make my cell phone work well at what it is supposed to do: make phone calls.
They want how much for a &^(&ing cell phone???
On top of that, it is only going to be under one wireless carrier. How is that good for the consumer?
Please, Slashdot, pull your head out of wherever it is stuck and despise the IPhone as much as it deserves. Don't let the word "Apple" blind you.
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Put VOIP on your laptop and you're there today. :-)
The sad thing about Palm is that time and time again they've created a brilliant product, and then squandered their technological lead in a quest for profits and mindless bickering. When I bought my first Palm (a IIIx) the company had a virtual monopoly on the handheld market; now, they're just a bit player.
There are like five or six of you.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Cobalt failed because Palm hired a well known functional psychotic, one David N. Schlesinger, as the engineering manager for the project. Schlesinger spends nearly 24/7 engaging in puerile and putrid, vicious flame wars with other mentally ill bloggers and usenet relics ; so its no surprise he was not able to get a product launched on time. Add to that the fact Schlesinger considers himself some kind of magicallly mysterious real life 'Harry Potter' (he maintains several blogs and websites devoted the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley) and you have a real recipe for disaster. And disaster it was. ACCESS has Schlesinger globe trotting now, giving product demos. He does less damage that way. At least they had the sense to wake up and skim one turd out of their development cesspool!
What I want is a nice big monitor etc, and when I sit down at my desk my "phone" automatically wirelessly connects to it, and becomes the computer I'm using. This device will be powerful enough to run all the stuff I need.
You mean, it will be powerful enough to connect to GooYahMicrosoft's servers, from which you will access your documents and all your favorite Web 3.0 ® applications.
Palm's real response is they are waiting for a new version of windows mobile before they do anything.
When Palm started favoring windows mobile over its own palm OS it was over.
Sure they would make some sales to the corporate sector that need to see everything stamped with windows on it, and as a result cut into blackberry teritory, which is what they wanted anyway. But now they are in no where land. Not as dominant as blackberry and not as inovative as they once were. Just another phone company.
How much longer before they sell the name and what little tech along with it.
If I was anyone looking for a total gadget/cool phone in the next few months I would be waiting for an iphone.
If buissness needs make me carry a device then I probably have a blackberry and dont see changing except for a newer blackberry in the near future.
What a shame.
Palm and other handheld makers had to know Apple was coming, but I guess they didn't expect them to be bringing the Unix.
... iterated on, but in a very responsible fashion the way you take care of the water reservoir.
... they just have to do the UI. The browser for the PlayStation3 doesn't even have JavaScript, although its CSS support is better than Explorer. Apple's WebKit is full spec, including all of CSS 2.1 and the very best JavaScript/AJAX/DOM stuff and all the security.
If you are a hardware maker, you have to do the lowest level of the software also. It is the least you can do when all the low-level software is free. When Unix itself is designed for portability. When you can pay $0 to get a core OS and Web browser and Web server going on almost anything that you build. When you can build on top of that in so many ways without locking yourself into a particular hardware path such as antique CPU or strange memory architecture. It is for your benefit and the user's benefit. Firefox isn't just free to download on your MS Windows, it's free to include it on the hardware you build, ready to run. Even calendaring, which was Palm's "killer app" in their heyday, is now a network application. Palm doesn't need an API they just need to be the best handheld Web browser on the market first and foremost.
The cheaper it gets to make chips the more that hardware is like software used to be, coming and going all the time. The more expensive it gets to make software, the more sophisticated it gets, the more it is like hardware used to be, solid and unchanging
The most important bits in the iPhone aren't in the CPU, they are in the 500 MB of OS X that is on there. The CPU could change next year but it will still be OS X on future iPhones. The things that make the iPhone have iPhoneness are applications of OS X. If the state of the art in handheld CPU's 10 years from now is quantum and impossible to see with the naked eye, it is likely Apple can build an iPhone out of that in a few months because all they have to do is recompile all the software on whatever new hardware they make. The new device may have nothing in common at all with today's iPhone hardware, but it will still be an iPhone just like today's iMac appears to be the same as the one from two years ago however inside you have a difference CPU architecture, different firmware, different low-level disk partition format. None of Apple's customers even noticed the Intel transition. How can a hardware vendor give up that freedom when technology moves so fast? Who would have predicted a few years ago that Intel would release a line of 2 GHz CPU's with 128-bit vector processing and low power and heat requirements, matching all the things Apple liked about PowerPC and adding x64 compatibility also? Because of OS X Apple was able to jump on Core instead of watching it happen. The Core spec reads like "PowerPC G6" it is exactly what Apple the hardware vendor wanted but they could only get it because they maintained their own core OS.
AppleTV also runs OS X. They can do a Web browser on there anytime that will be 10x the browser of anything else in the living room. The core software is all already on there
If I were a hardware vendor of any kind of computing device, I would have my own Linux distribution at the very least.
I would prefer a greyscale (even if it only gave 20% better battery). The PalmOS doesn't lend itself to highly functional devices since it isn't really a multi-process OS: you flip from one application to another, you don't actually get inter-program communication as you now need in an OS. But that works DAMN well on a reduced hardware device.
If Palm brought out the Zire with wireless and possibly bluetooth I would have bought that instead of a TX that I know I'm using less than 10% of its power with.
If the TX had perl built in as the OS scripting language (similar to AppleScript) then I may be able to use more of the power. If I could port GNUPlot too, that would increase how much of the system I could use. As it is, I would prefer a 16MB device working on a 100MHz processor but with good battery given PalmOS is running on it.
Its $500-600, in addition to cingular's voice/data plans. Have you SEEN cingulars unlimited data plans recently? Like $30-40 month! On top of a $30-40 month minimum voice plan! So an iPhone REALLY costs half a thousand dollars, and almost a hundred a month after that, to just use all features as intended. Compare that to say, a palm 700p/wx on sprint sero. A $250 smartphone, with unlimited data, 500 minutes, for $30/mo. Jeez. So not worth it for.. what, a fancy touchscreen? Its nice, but its not feasible.
do the math we're talking (mandatory 2 year contract!) THREE GRAND for an iphone and service.