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The Palm OS Ends With a Whimper
PetManimal writes "Computerworld reviews the Palm Treo 755p, the last Palm device with the Palm OS, and concludes that the OS is going out not with a bang but with a whimper. The article says there are some useful improvements (better integration with Exchange and IM, limited speech recognition, etc.) but 'nothing that will make you sit back and say "wow."' Palm already has at least one device with Windows Mobile (the 700w) and soon will make a big push to Linux devices, maybe by the end of the year. But the Palm OS, which was top dog for a while back in the 1990s, and is still used by many people who own Palm Pilots or Treos, is going to quickly fade, it seems."
The Palm Linux OS is going to be "compatible" with Palm Garnet (current OS); thus, it should look and feel like a present day Palm with a compatibility mode for current apps. In this sense, the Palm OS is not going away. In fact, it's being supercharged for multitasking so we can do handy things such as, for example, run both wifi and cell phone at the same time on a future Treo.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Yes. Windows had a Transcriber, Letter Recognizer, and Block Recognizer. You can get it to behave just like Palm Grafiti if you would like it to...the transcriber is very customizable...it will recognize words and phrases, but you can set it to reconize single letters if you would like. There is also a great 3rd party app called Caligrapher you could try too.
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Had a nice bit of face time with a Palm product rep not long ago, got stuck at a table with him for six hours of a trade show. Bits of handy info:
-The new Linux based system will be promoted as the next generation of Palm OS, as opposed to something completely different
-Full backward compatibility will be retained for legacy palm apps, which accounts for 90% of Palm's loyal userbase
-Multithreaded preemptive multitasking will fix the stability issues that arose from cramming phone and email push functionality into a single task 68k-based OS
One could suggest that this is similar to the Mac OS X upgrade from 9.x.
They are talking Intel for the platform, same as the latest generation of, well, everything. Processor should be in the 400mhz neighborhood.
The direct goal is to maintain classic Palm "look and feel" plus compatibility, but with... well, stability. And Power.
Once this platform rolls, Windows Mobile will, by my reckoning, be the only remaining platform NOT based on some flavor of *nix, unless you actually count Symbian and Blackberry as platforms...
(yes, at least in a distant, hypothetical, degrees of separation NT derived sorta way, even Vista has *nix roots)
"How, exactly, does software go out with a bang? Doesn't "bang" imply success, and therefore, not going out?"
I think the editors may have been a bit too literary this time. It's from a T. S. Elliot poem called "The Hollow Men." The last two lines are:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The meaning of the poem is subject to interpretation, but it's clear that the bang/whimper comparison very much refers to an end to the world.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I have found that many people do not share my point-of-view with regards to Palm OS, but I must personally say that I hated it. The interface was easy enough to deal with as a user, but as a developer, it was a nightmare. I am so glad to see Palm OS go and be replaced with Linux.
There were so many problems with the OS design. I could not understand why you would build an OS that lacked any sort of filesystem. Instead, they had a very crappy database-esque system from which you could retrieve data. You couldn't simply load a file onto the system, it had to be loaded into the database and accessed using their bass-akwards method of database access. Be aware, we're not talking SQL here.
Another thing that was horrible was their lack of long-jumps. I had previously never had to specifically arrange the order of my object files in a link statement to avoid jumps further than 64k. There were times where I actually had to create functions that did nothing but call a later function so that I could make code jumps to functions further than 64k away. That made using the STL basically impossible (some would not consider this a loss, I do).
Then you add in the ridiculousness of having to define UUIDs for programs. So, anytime you wanted to write any sort of small application, you had to register a 32-bit number (less actually) with Palm. There are better ways to do this. We don't live in the 70s anymore.
Ugh! There are so many other problems. I just had to get this off my chest. Once they do this, maybe I'll go get a new Palm. I was never able to bring myself to buy a Windows CE device, but I have longed to have another PDA. Hopefully, these new Linux systems will be what I am looking for.
Of course, it has been years since I programmed anything on Palm OS (version 5, I believe). So, for all I know, they fixed all of these problems and I will be the recipient of a massive amount of flame.
The PalmOS kernel was actually licensed from a company that makes embedded systems. In order to get cheap licensing terms, they had to agree to never release the source code, and never implement multitasking. It's the last part that means they have to move to an entirely new kernel.
They tried rewriting it (PalmOS 6), but it was an utter failure. Now they're trying to move to a Linux-based kernel.
dom
It is open, i.e. it has a standard, public SDK. Hence it is a "platform" (as opposed to mobile Linux phones whose SDK are usually neither public nor standard).
So if you were talking specifically about mobile platforms, I could say that, once this platform rolls, by my reckoning, the new PalmOS will be the only major open platform based on some flavor of *nix, unless you count Linux feature-phones as platforms... (-:
-Smiley
mod parent up.
_ Hundred_Million_S60s.php
r y_other_smartphone_sold_ac.php
symbian has recently announced the sale of 100 million series 60 devices.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/5198_One
that does not count series 40 or series 80 devices which make up a huge market in them selves.
last year 2006, 80 million smart phones were sold. symbian had 38 million of those. they are the market.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/4969_Eve
now if i could only learn python on my nokia e61.