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Palm to go Linux
jetkins writes "The Melbourne Age reports that company officials announced Tuesday that Palm will move to a new Linux-based platform 'to help the company compete better.' The move was announced 'during a meeting with analysts in New York, where they also discussed the company's business strategy and refused to talk about recent rumors of a possible buyout.'"
My Treo 650 does some real weird things sometimes.
My 650 will freeze for up to 20 seconds, at least once a day.
I have friends who own the Palm version of the 700 and these do some very weird things. They reboot themselves constantly, email is very flaky, syncing to Mac computers is so-so at best. Basically syncing is a crapshoot.
I find this to be a good thing and I hope the linux version will be a more stable OS than Palm.
Any cell phone that doesn't have me wishing to toss it through a window after 1 month of initial use, someone tell me, I'd gladly buy it.
I'd love to get a symbian phone but Verizon doesn't have it. I loathe Verizon. I was a t-mobile customer and I really miss the GSM phones. I think once my contract ends with Verizon I will go back to t-mobile or cingular.
TFA it somewhat ambiguous. It is hard to tell whether Palm, inc. announced that they are going to release a pda based on the Access Linux platform, or if they have gotten back into the software business and developed their own platform.
For those who don't know, several years ago Palm split into PalmOne, the hardware side, and PalmSource, the OS developers. Since then, PalmSource has been bought by Access Ltd, and PalmOne has renamed themselves Palm, Inc. PalmSource's PalmOS 6, aka "Cobalt", was never used in a production PDA. After PalmSource was bought by Access, it was announced that future PalmOS releases would be based on Linux, with binary compatibility for previous PalmOS apps.
Unfortunately, Palm, Inc.'s website doesn't mention anything about Linux in either the press release section or the Developer section. And Access released the Access Linux Platform 1.0 two months ago. TFA does say that Palm, Inc. will once again have control over their own OS. This seems to indicate that they have spurned the ALP. If that is the case, one has to wonder how they will offer backwards compatibility, given that the PalmOS IP is owned by Access. Perhaps the permanent license they acquired gives Palm the right to do this kind of thing.
On the other hand, I don't see how they would have any less control if they just used ALP, given that most of it is GPL, and the rest is the same backwards compatibility code that they will need anyways.
Well, there's PalmPDF, which I've had reasonable success with on my Treo 650. PDFs contain their own fonts so that's not an issue, really. My Treo doesn't have a case and seems to be holding up pretty well, even after I've dropped it a few times (and my kids have dropped it a few more times). Works pretty well, though with only a 320x320 screen, there's only so much you can see at a time. You'd probably want one with a bigger screen (e.g. 320x480 ones exist), and as much RAM and as fast a processor as possible.
I make too many phone calls with it, but I use its PDA and viewing functions quite a bit every day, and battery life is fine. Don't think I've ever gone below 75% charge (I plug it in every night).
I can't say that I've worked with 200MB PDFs, though. I think ~10MB is the biggest I've messed with. And someone else will have to tackle Windows or Linux-based platforms. However, I've heard generally good things about the Nokia 770 - it's basically a small Linux box with an 800x480 screen...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Why does everyone keep repeating this? Cobalt was released as Palm OS 6.x and was available for licensing. The problem was that no Palm manufacturers licensed Cobalt for use in their devices. The lack of devices pretty much killed Palm OS 6 before consumers ever had a chance to evaluate it.
For those of you unaware, the reason for this dichotomy is because Palm Inc got tired of funding Palm OS and thus spun off PalmSource as a separate company. PalmSource created and released Cobalt, but they were not in a position to create any hardware for it. Palm Inc's failure to produce any hardware for Cobalt resulted in the other Palm manufacturers sticking with the classic Palm OS 5. (aka Garnet) PalmSource eventually went under and was acquired by ACCESS, a Japanese embedded software company.
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