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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.'"
Were they not going to do this a few years ago as well and then shelved the whole thing.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Given that PDAs are falling behind in the face of smart phones, going to Linux might just entice the linux haXX0r community to produce some fun applications that help Palm in the marketplace.
I don't know if there is already an unofficial palm Linux, but having it officially sanctioned would be a good thing.
Hell, I'm tempted to get one now just to have some coding fun, seriously.
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.
I've owned a Treo 300, 600 and 700. I've read PDF's on all of them.
HOWEVER: It is not easy. The best is the 700. The high-res screen (320x320) makes a big difference. But even then, you're talking about using a device that has a screen that's 2 inches x 2 inches to try to read a document formatted for 8.5 x 11. The whole idea of a PDF is to preserve precise paper-based formatting. Working with that on a handheld is awkward at best.
Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF, using some sort of eReader (Plucker or ,A HREF="http://www.isilo.com/">iSilo come to mind). I read lots of PG material that way, as well as IBM Redbooks that I've converted to text.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
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!
I loved the classic Palm applications. No boot-up time, no waiting, no graphics-heavy Windows-like desktop compressed to the size of an index card ...
There seemed to be a lot of hobbyist development, too. People found ways to make the Palm keep track of what they wanted. As I recall, the Palm database format encouraged a lot of interchangeability and standardization. Mind-mapping and outlines were easy as pie and quick to bring up, so I rarely lost any ideas.
When they moved with Windows CE (or whatever they called the mobile variant that week), I threw up my hands. The hardware wasn't suited to it, and there were few -- if any -- replacements for the apps I cared to use. As far as I know, all the good stuff went the way of the dodo.
So I guess my question is: how does the move to Linux bode for developers? Will there be compatibility with any of the classic Palm OS or Windows CE apps, or will we once again have to build from scratch?
Speaking as a mobile developer, while a RAD system would have its uses, the problem with making a RAD for mobile development is that mobile applications (like web applications) require different paradigms and attention to different details than desktop apps.
The closest thing to a mobile RAD right now is Visual Studio targeting the compact framework.
The problem with mobile apps is not laying out screens. In fact, I think sound UI designs don't fit into the VB form model at all, and not just because they conflate business and presentation logic, a philosophy I agree with but am not doctrinaire over. It's just too easy to paint a form which works very well on a desktop or laptop that is awkward on the PDA; the natural tedency in such cases is to blame the PDA form factor, not inappropriate design.
But the biggest problem of all is how the mobile app fits into the entire information "ecosystem". What does the app really need to accomplish, and what information does it need to do it. While this is true of any app, mobile applications are different, and in my experience much more easy to make errors of judgment in.
Remember the days of horrible flash abuse on the web? Now imagine a world where most people had never seen a better model than that.
No, what the mobile app field needs is an influx of ingenuity. There have been some impressive efforts at enabling less skilled developers to field mobile applications, this is not a viable growth strategy until those developers have well worn application models that they are copying.
WRT to Linux, while I don't believe in one size fits all, I think its clear we aren't talking about anything like any of the common distros. We're talking about a different user interface on top of the Linux kernel. I doubt we'll see X for example. The user will have no idea he is using Linux. A properly configured Linux kernel should be a very good choice for a modern PDA, given the computing power and resources available, and the requirements. It might not be the best choice for a real time embedded system with much greater resource constraints.
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