Slashdot Mirror
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."
I take it your development team never went on a 7-day cocaine/hooker orgy and deleted all the source code?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The whole point of palm OS was that it delivered what was needed with simplicity, and no bloat, like it's rival at the time Windows CE.
A simple to do list, contacts, calendar, a memo pad was the core of the experience, and allthat you needed a PDA to do.
vi.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
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)
Windows CE/Windows Mobile was running at a huge loss, but has now broken even. Tactics like that do tend to allow you to destroy traditional competition in the long run. Linux-kerneled devices are growing faster than ever and MS does not have a recipe to destroy them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Forget handwriting recognition. Fitaly, a tap-optimized virtual keyboard, is much faster -- in my experience, at least twice the speed of pen and paper. And while it's neither as fast nor as accurate as touch-typing, it's plenty good enough to make it unnecessary to carry around one of those folding keyboards.
I've used Fitaly on a Tungsten T3 to take voluminous notes at multi-hour seminars. It's that good. I wouldn't even think of going back to Graffiti.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
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.