Palm Before the PalmPilot

Gammu writes "SiliconUser has an in-depth history of the Palm, starting with its humble roots. The Pilot (later PalmPilot and finally just Palm) saved Palm Computing. Before the release of the Pilot, the company was subsisting (barely) on revenue from connectivity packages for HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti for the Newton. This was because its first PDA hardware product had failed under the weight of feature creep and design by committee. The first article in a series follows the early days of this company-reforming product."

Comments

I miss Visor

[falcon5768]

Visor was what Palm should have been (and rightly so since the company was owned by many of the people who hated the committee design of the Pilot. I still think the Visor Edge is the greatest palm based PDA ever made. Its still thinner than my Tungsten E2.

Re:I miss Visor

[cheater512]

I love my Lifedrive.

Mind you its about double the thickness of a TX but its extremely useful with its built in hard drive.
Movies and music galore. :)

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll != I Disagree. Whomever modded this comment troll needs to place the mod points on the ground and walk away slowly. There isn't anything trollish about the parent post at all. Mod Nazis.

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, the possibility of modding it to use a CF card instead of the microdrive gives a huge and relatively inexpensive upgrade in battery life and responsiveness (no more drive spinup lag).

Re:I miss Visor

[karnal]

I used my TX daily for about a month until it developed the dreaded screen squeal. It sounds something similar to a TV flyback transformer @ 15khz or so.

Sent to palm 3 times at my own expense; they claim there's nothing wrong with it.

In addition, there's a lot of noise coming from the amplifier in the unit - using it with 32 ohm headphones (which most consumer headphones are at) is very very noisy.

All in all, I really loved the unit; the web browser worked well and it played divx/xvid movies with ease. But once you've heard the squeal, it can drive you nuts. Wish I could find a solution. There's a software package out there that is 20$ that is an overclocking utility (warpspeed?) that has the ability to eliminate 95% of the screen noise, but I hadn't dug into my wallet to fix it. I shouldn't have to spend more money to enjoy a product my wife got me for my birthday......

Re:I miss Visor

[timeOday]

Palm did have the Palm V. That was perhaps the high point of my PDA experience. Today I have a $500 HP iPaq with Microsoft software which is incredibly sluggish, crashes constantly, and is about twice as thick and heavy as my Palm V. However that is all my company allows me to use, because it does have a fingerprint reader and encryption. Nevermind if it locks up 30% of the time you try to turn it on with those features enabled.

To be fair, the iPaq 1945 series with an earlier version of Windows Mobile was much, much better. I believe today nobody at Microsoft or HP actually uses PocketPCs. Everything has gone over to cellphones, leaving those of us who still need a non-phone PDA for whatever reason (generally, security policies) almost high and dry. I guess they have to follow the market, but I wish they would at least not advertise and ship stuff that doesn't work.

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

Viso Pro. Owned 3 of them. OK, so no color, no multimedia, no phone. So what? Runs for 2 weeks off a pair of AAA batteries, and if they run down, any convenience store adds another fortnight - no need for funny chargers or other tie-me-downs. Carried my contacts, appointment alarms, to-do-lists, memos, general notes on life (e.g. bus schedules &co.), universal IR remote control, shopping list, and a couple of e-books for when I had to wait for doctors or mechanics.

Downsides: Fragile LCD (broke 1) and crummy copper sync contacts that would corrode and interfere with syncing. A tad bulky, but at least it fits a shirt pocket.

Re:I miss Visor

[cheater512]

There are free programs around which also fix it.
It involves changing the touch screen's refresh frequency.
Apparently it works well.

Dont know about the noise from the amplifier. My Lifedrive has great audio.

Re:I miss Visor

[calebt3]

I like how your sig relates to your post.

Re:I miss Visor

[ehrichweiss]

Agreed. I actually just gave my wife my Visor Edge so that we can work out our scheduling, to-do lists, etc. I don't know why they didn't make more Visors(or PDAs in general) with metal cases/covers like the Edge.

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

yea i had a fat palm 3? i forget, it was short on memory and everything. i so desired that thin little palm 5 but the pricing really didn't justify the cripple capability so i went with visor. i've never gone back to palm since, they seemed to act with an arrogance they couldn't justify. their products weren't good enough to justify the prices.

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a minor nitpick, but the company was called Handspring. The product was the Visor.

Re:I miss Visor

[arb phd slp]

I also had a Visor and loved it.

I have a T|X that had the screen whine and a terribly miscalibrated touchscreen. Two trips back to tech support and no improvement. Warpspeed and PowerDigi that fixed both problems. Between having to pay someone else extra to make it work the way it should out of the box and the general flimsiness of the hardware (have to really mash the hardware buttons to get them to register) I'm pretty sure this will be my last Palm device.

The only reason I haven't replaced it with an iTouch is that the T|X does spreadsheets and has a full scientific calculator. With the iPhone SDK coming soon, that may change (just call it the Newton2 already and be done with it). Palm is going to need to do something pretty drastic to keep from losing me as a repeat customer.

Re:I miss Visor

[thethibs]

Indeed. To my mind, the Tungsten is a giant step backward. It's particularly stupid that Graffiti is what made the pilot in the first place but in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2, which is slow, unreliable and hyper-sensitive to small timing variations. I really hope they fired the idiot who thought that was a good idea.

With the Visor and Graffiti, I could take notes continuously without looking at the screen (great for meetings). With the Tungsten and Graffiti 2, I have to keep checking that it read what I wrote or that it hasn't interpreted an "i" as "l." or vice versa. I've never figured out how to get it to consistently read an "r" or an "h". The original Graffiti was fast and sure. Graffiti 2 is so bad that I'll probably be looking for something with one of those moronic little keyboards as my next PDA. I know that is really slumming in technological backwaters, but I don't see much choice.

Re:I miss Visor

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.

I had a Visor Platinum which lasted close to 6 years before throwing in the towel (the sync port actually detached itself from the daughterboard that held it!!), incredible considering I dragged it out every single day, rain or shine.

Replaced that with a Treo 680, which, despite the well-documented flaws, picks up right where the Plat left off.

Re:I miss Visor

[PrescriptionWarning]

Assuming they learn some lessons from these iTouch and iPhones, perhaps they'll come out with something less closed off as Apples offerings are.

Re:I miss Visor

[karnal]

Oh yea, speaking of hard-to-push buttons, my TX eventually got to the point that the power button no longer worked. At first it was just getting to where I had to push it harder, but finally it stopped working.

See this note regarding Palm and the screen noise:

http://kb.palm.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,kb=PalmSupportKB,CASE=obj(31651),ts=Palm_External2001

So they know about it, claim it's a non-issue and won't fix for free. Or for any amount of money.

Defective from the manufacturer.

I have tinnitus in my left ear, and the device drives me up the wall.

Re:I miss Visor

[a_nonamiss]

in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2 IIRC, that wasn't Palm's decision. It was the result of a lawsuit (Xerox maybe?) and they were forced to change Graffiti "just enough" so that it wasn't interfering on IP rights. About 30 seconds of Googling could clear this up more definitely, but my I am out of brain for the day...

Re:I miss Visor

[epp_b]

I used my TX daily for about a month until it developed the dreaded screen squeal. It sounds something similar to a TV flyback transformer @ 15khz or so. Sent to palm 3 times at my own expense; they claim there's nothing wrong with it.

Well, if "nothing wrong with it" means "this is normal behaviour", then they're right. I've been in Palm stores were every Palm PDA with a TFT screen buzzes and drives me to insanity (it seems that only Palms with TFT screens will emit this squeal; their STN-screened models do not). I don't understand how this is even acceptable.

Maybe they only want to sell these things to people over 40 (who apparently can't hear high-pitched sounds like this)

Re:I miss Visor

[karnal]

I stopped carrying my tx around - but was in staples one day and showed my wife the squeal that EVERY palm was emitting.

See, she was pissed that I wasn't using the 300$ pda she had bought me. However, now she's in agreement with me that I have a valid reason for not using it. That will teach me to buy new untested technology. The big bummer is that it's a really neat device.... collecting dust in my basement.

Re:I miss Visor

[bearfx]

Does yours randomly reset itself, losing all data, to? I like the idea of Windows CE (or whatever it is called these days), but I have yet to have a CE device that works well. Crashes, Freezes, Resets...Windows CE, they name is CRAP. Their is some very useful and cool software available, but if a device cannot perform its core functions well, then it is a failure... I to have a 500$ HP IPaq that is a failure. My Palm V never crashed, never locked, never reset itself, never lost data... it just worked, and worked well. My Treo 650 (personal cell) has functioned 100% since I got it (when it was first released by verizon). It has never crashed, reset, etc etc. When I am on call at work, I am assigned an HP Ipaq 510 (AT&T). Sometimes it will freeze for no reason... and it takes over a minute to reboot to the point I can make phone calls. I have never seen it lose data, but I don't store anything in it.

Re:I miss Visor

[rsmith-mac]

I have never seen it lose data, but I don't store anything in it.

Starting with Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft finally wizened up and fixed the data loss problem. Now everything is handled more like a PC: data and applications are on flash memory, and RAM is just RAM (and not a place to store things). You'd have to work at it to lose data now.

Re:I miss Visor

[adolf]

I used to suffer from this same problem with my Zire 71. I found myself using it less and less as the noise became more and more bothersome. And then, one day, the display went all wonky and intermittent in an unrelated case of a bad internal connection.

Palm fixed the connection under warranty, apparently by replacing the entire front half of the unit.

Ever since then (it's been about 3 years), it has been totally silent. So, clearly, not -every- unit has this problem, and it can be fixed.

Re:I miss Visor

[lintux]

Ah yeah, from the Graffiti 2 Wikipedia page:

"The primary reason for the change was the fact that in April 1997 Xerox had sued PalmSource, Inc. over its use of Graffiti. After a legal fight lasting a number of years, and despite the dismissal of the case by a federal judge, Xerox won a reversal late in 2001 in the U.S. Court of Appeals."

However, Googling for "graffiti 2 xerox" also gives you this El Reg article where it looks like Xerox didn't really own Graffiti 1 at all...

Interesting to know this. I (and many more, I suppose) always thought Graffiti 2 was there to attract more people who don't understand steep learning curves can have advantages in the long term. It keeps annoying me how typing TT in Jot gets converted to " all the time if I don't want for at least a second before writing the next T (IIRC).

Re:I miss Visor

[sortius_nod]

I just stuck some paper between the touchscreen and the chassis... problem fixed.

Re:I miss Visor

[hyades1]

I'm afraid I've managed to get addicted to the Tungsten E2. My work involves graphics, so I need a screen with decent definition. The 2G SD card I added provides quite a bit of storage. The keyboard/bluetooth gives me a wee, tiny little notebook with internet access when I need it. I also have to take verbatim notes sometimes. I can do that easily with the keyboard. Recording and transcribing later would be a huge pain in the ass. I like to listen to music and play the odd video file. It plugs very nicely into just about any audio/video system you can think of with the right patch cord, which has gotten me major brownie points for being able to provide emergency music a couple of times. And a lot of people I deal with have compatible PDA's, so we can swap data around quickly and easily.

In short, it's like somebody designed the damned thing for me personally, and I can't imagine getting along without it anymore. Oh, and I get to spend time cooling my heels at City Hall from time to time, so I've got a few novels on there, too. The only thing missing is a built-in microphone.

I don't know the Visor. Would it have suited my needs better?

Re:I miss Visor

[PetoskeyGuy]

To be fair, the iPaq 1945 series with an earlier version of Windows Mobile was much, much better. I believe today nobody at Microsoft or HP actually uses PocketPCs. Everything has gone over to cellphones, leaving those of us who still need a non-phone PDA for whatever reason (generally, security policies) almost high and dry. I guess they have to follow the market, but I wish they would at least not advertise and ship stuff that doesn't work.

The iPaq 1945 used the PocketPC 2003 OS / Windows Mobile 2003 OS. This was the last version of PocketPC / Windows Mobile made that I would consider useful for instant on applications.

Starting with Windows Mobile 2005 and later Microsoft made a decision to protect users from losing their data if batteries fail at the expense of losing the "instant on" behavior I used to love. They did that by implementing something like hibernation mode on a laptop. Your data and running programs are always saved in slower NV ram and has to be loaded into the real ram every time you turn the PDA on. It's a bit more complicated then that but it's close enough.

Here's a post about it. As someone there stated if you knew how to keep the battery charged WM05/06 is a step backwards in terms of performance for increased battery life and risk of data loss.
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2005/07/14/438991.aspx

Re:I miss Visor

[Dr_Barnowl]

Agreed. Graffiti 1 was good, I can tell Graffiti 2 would annoy me immensely just by looking at the glyph chart.

I still have my old Palm III, upgraded to PalmOS 4, for this very reason. Although I have been quite impressed by the Fitaly keyboard, which is freeware for Palm devices. Since you can get it for other devices, it might be a good input device to learn.

Fitaly Keyboard for Palm

Re:I miss Visor

[TheRaven64]

Interesting design decision. The Psion Series 3 I owned a decade or so ago stored everything in RAM. In the entire lifespan of the device, I only did a full reboot (they called it a hard reset) twice. When the batteries went flat, there was a secondary battery that protected the contents of RAM. The entire OS and application stack was written in 8086 assembly (code size was important on a device with 256KB of RAM which was also used for data storage and ran a spreadsheet, word processor, address book, and compiler at the same time) and yet it still managed to be stable.

I've also not found a PDA as developer-friendly as the S3. It had an OPL editor, interpreter, and compiler. I wrote a couple of full-featured apps on it and a huge number of little single-task ones.

Re:I miss Visor

[scottme]

New model Palm devices have Graffiti 2 in ROM. If you install the original Graffiti modules, from an older model Palm, into RAM, the device uses them instead, so you *can* use original Graffiti on a new Palm.

Google around for a how-to guide.

Re:I miss Visor

[ChameleonDave]

Ah yes, I remember them well. I had a Siena, then a Series 3, then a Series 5. My dad had one of those old Psion Organisers. Them were the days!

Re:I miss Visor

[hey!]

The m500 series was pretty good, although for a PDA I prefer having the option of installable batteries. I felt the change in connectors was a bit gratuitous.

But getting back to the Palm V, the reason things aren't as good as in the good old days is because of margins. If you sold a $300 PDA and made a 5% margin, you made $15. Maybe the same PDA today at the same margin, who knows what it would cost -- maybe $40, and you'd pocket $2? I believe the low end Zires are deliberately priced higher than they could be sold; and for the price they really should be able to dial your phone by bluetooth -- a logical capability for a stand alone PDA. The product line is driven by the need to exploit multiple market niches without having one product offering undermine another. It's economically foreordained feature creep.

Convergence has killed the PDA market, but only because PDAs are overpriced. Once you put down two or three hundred dollars for a PDA that is more clumsy than it ought to be, you might as ell go for the phone

Re:I miss Visor

[Henry_Doors]

I love my Lifedrive.

I used to but, now crashes on me regularly - something about trying to turn on the infra red in the background.

It had great promise but didn't quite deliver - never worked for me as a music player - sound quality is awful & hissy. But th 4GB of space, synchronization with Outlook plus wi-fi are great. A Lifedrive 2 with the bugs ironed out would have been perfect.

I have had about 4 different Palms plus one Handspring over the years, while all had their flaws, they were much better than the one iPaq I tried (3715? - I can't understand how these can me sold as multimedia devices with so little storage? Same applies to the TX.

Not sure where I will go next though for a PDA - I don't want a bulky 'smartphone' - not really interested in a blackberry, iPHone or Treo. But the TX looks underspecified. Perhaps I'll have to try an iPAQ again.

Shame - Palm produced some great products but no longer seem to meet my needs.

Re:I miss Visor

[kl76]

in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2

AFAIK, the Tungsten T was the last model to have Grafitti 1.

Re:I miss Visor

[kisrael]

the terrible thing about that is how lame Unistrokes are...
look at the image 1/3 of the way down http://www.cs.uta.fi/~scott/text/Unistroke.html --
the cool thing about Graffiti is that most every stroke has some physical similarity to the letter it represents.

I don't know the details but it feels like an abuse of the patent system to me.

Re:I miss Visor

[pqdave]

My Palm had the same power button issue. I removed the screws from the back with a small jeweler's screwdriver (worked despite them being torx) pried the case open a tiny bit, blew some canned air into the slot, and wiggled the button around. Vast improvement upon reassembly.

Re:I miss Visor

[timeOday]

That's an interesting angle. It might be nice if there were a resurgence of the PDA from the likes of Sharp and Casio selling something for $60. In fact I had recently been considering something like that in a wristwatch. It does have Outlook connectivity, which is a hard requirement for me. I'm afraid it's too big for a wristwatch and too small for a PDA, but I haven't seen one in person so who knows.

Re:I miss Visor

[Arterion]

You sent it to Palm three times at your own expense, yet haven't dug into your wallet for a software solution because you shouldn't have to spend more money to enjoy a product.

Hm. Sounds like you've already spent plenty of money shipping it to Palm. What's $20 more?

Re:I miss Visor

[Kazymyr]

Some PocketPC devices are built and work better than others... I have experienced crashes/freezes with various devices (Ipaq 1940, 4150 etc) however I eventuallty found one that works well - the Ipaq 2215. I'm on my second one (first one was run over by a car - don't ask) and I'm equally satisfied. It seems to be a class above all other PPC/WM devices. No crashes or freezes, battery life is actually long enough, can adjust screen brightness very finely etc.

Re:I miss Visor

[cheater512]

The crashing is always because of a program on it. Remove the program and it'll work fine again.

The trick is figuring out which program is causing it.

Re:I miss Visor

[GPL Apostate]

That's really weird, because my PalmOS device never looses any data at all, and it's all shared in RAM. And I have been using a PalmOS device continuously since about 1998.

It sounds like Windows CE just isn't 'there' and hasn't ever really been 'there' at all. I guess they're just not capable of writing solid code, and had to change their hardware scheme to make up for it.

Re:I miss Visor

[GPL Apostate]

It doesn't have to be a metal case to be damned solid. The Palm III is in a hard plastic case that is very, very solid. I'm a holdout who refuses to upgrade. In fact, I have 'hunkered down' by buying a bunch of backup Palm III devices on eBay. They go for generally under $10 these days, and I've still never worn one out. I expect to be using the Palm III twenty years from now.

Re:I miss Visor

[GPL Apostate]

How did you upgrade a Palm III to PalmOS 4? Mine are all up to 3.5 but I had to do some finagling to get them all 'current' there, now that Palm offers the 3.3 upgrade but has completely removed the availability of the 3.5 upgrade.

I had lost my paid-for 3.5 upgrade executable, and had only one Palm III running the 3.5 OS. I found that a developer's 'Palm Emulator' would allow me to download the ROM image off the Palm III running 3.5, which I then finagled the 3.3 upgrade program into putting on the Palms.

I'd be interested in knowing how to get 4.0 on my fleet of III's. And details of what the advantages of 4.0 would be, of course...

Re:I miss Visor

[thethibs]

Am I allowed a "YEE HAW!"?

I installed Tealscript on my Tungsten E2 and, after fiddling with the options for a few minutes, I had Graffiti working the way it should. I have my old Pilot back!

Many thanks to Steve for the tip.

Next PC a casio?

[SmallFurryCreature]

According to David Pogue, in his book Piloting Palm, Casio was a particularly difficult partner to work with. Their relative inexperience with software and hardware development (the company's major portable products were digital wristwatches, calculators and inexpensive pocket organizers) made them irrationally intolerant of any bugs, no matter how minor or how unlikely to affect the user.

Can you imagine what IT would be like if Casio had created the PC? Why, it might actually work.

Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.

Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see your point although anyone waiting for a version with absolutely no bugs is going to be waiting for a very very long time. In the case of PCs, never. There will always be bugs, a company that spends 10 years straight ironing out the kinks is going to be many years behind and out of luck by the time they release.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[gEvil (beta)]

I've heard it said before that there have been zero hardware bugs ever found in the original design for the Apple II. Of course, now that I've mentioned that, I'm sure you'll all give me a laundry list of Apple II bugs (note, the original Apple II, not the IIc, IIe, IIgs, etc)

Re:Next PC a casio?

[mh1997]

Amazing that IT has managed to train us so well to the existence of bugs in final products that we laugh at a company that seems to think bugs are unacceptable.

Truly amazing how we come to accept that the software we use is not functioning correctly

Which is why, in my next life, I will write code instead of designing hardware. I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

Can you imagine what IT would be like if Casio had created the PC? Why, it might actually work. I can, it would either be a wrist watch, or one of their incarnations of a PDA. I owned a Casio PDA, it ran Windows CE, and it worked pretty well, but obviously Casio changed their tune as they dove into more complex markets. I think the article is right in noting that to make something as complex as a "computer" is going to allow for a set of bugs to exist, or to spend inordinate amounts of money making sure the entire project is perfect. It's possible, look at the Space program, but its not cheap. You can't have cheap and perfect unless you want something so simple that your product is more than likely useless anyways. (Not to discredit calculators or wristwatches)

Re:Next PC a casio?

[cpt kangarooski]

There was a hardware bug involving the keyboard of the II which was tracked down and corrected shortly before the II was introduced at the Faire. It might have been the result of a bug in the "original design" as opposed to, say, manufacturing error, but I don't know. Perhaps someone would like to ask Woz about it? I did notice that you avoided mention of software bugs, of which there were a few.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[MadnessASAP]

Even now hardware bugs are pretty rare thing, at least any major ones are, and the ones that do exist are usually require a very specific sequence of steps to recreate. I'd be more impressed if there were no software bugs in the Apples IIs OS and any software that came with it.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us know the next time you implement an entire web browser in hardware.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[jandrese]

If you ever get into driver development you would be shocked at how many bugs there are in just about every piece of hardware on a modern PC. Even simple things like SATA chipsets can have errata sheets that are several pages long, and the idea of a modern graphics card without hardware bugs is laughable. One of the major jobs of drivers is to work around these bugs to make them invisible to the user. Luckily almost all of the bugs are minor, but occasionally you'll get real nasty ones that prevent you from running the chip efficiently without corrupting data.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Space program? You must be kidding right? Check this out: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/ ...and that's just the mission log for Mars. They have multiple redundancy for critical systems and yet that doesn't make them immune from failures. No software is ever bug free. The more complex, the more the likelihood of bugs. Once you have reduced the bugs to an acceptable level, the market will demand a new version with more functionality and so more bugs.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[lindseyp]

I had a Japanese model casio 'organiser' way back in 1993.

The damned thing is to this day the most reliable and *sensible function* packed device I ever owned. One quick example... the ability to update "holidays" so that repeating appointments could be moved to the following day if they fell on a holiday, and not just on a weekend.

It's a shame it was ahead of it's time. I'm not aware of any English-language version of this thing, and my Japanese was barely good enough to use it back then.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why, in my next life, I will write code instead of designing hardware. I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.

I'm impressed. Most of the hardware engineers I've worked with end up doing around five board respins before they get it right :-)

Re:Next PC a casio?

[GPL Apostate]

I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.

Naw, you wouldn't be 'fired' for delivering hardware with flaws in it. They'd just issue a software patch to work around the problem. Like they do, regularly, all the time, right now.

But carry on exclusively blaming the 'software' for all the updates and bugfixes. . .

Re:Next PC a casio?

[NateTech]

Amen, bro. Software "engineers", aren't.

Until they can deliver without a plan for anything other than feature updates (imagine a world where it would be difficult to release a patch because no one had needed to release one in a very long time), most are just code monkeys. And the ones that deserve the "engineer" title because their code always works, are rarely, if ever, commended for it.

Software engineering management culture is broken. Find a way to motivate people to not release bugs, and bugs will drop. Starting with bonuses that aren't tied to releases, but to how many customer complaints/problems are reported, would be an excellent start.

Re:Next PC a casio?

[mh1997]

But carry on exclusively blaming the 'software' for all the updates and bugfixes. . .

I never said there are no hardware problems that require work-arounds, I said that in my case, if I delivered something that was not correct (required a software work-around), I'd be fired (maybe not the first time, but after two or three times for sure).

This is because my customers expect the hardware to work. For some reason my customers do not expect the software to work (maybe their experience with every software product that they use), so when we deliver a product, the hardware is set, but we are required by the customer to provide a plan for updates and bugfixes in the software.

Great thingies

[El Lobo]

I still own and actively use a Palm Pilot from 1996. No color screen, no wireless communication, no nothing. Works like a charm even today and I don't need more. Of course you CAN remove and change the battery yourself, which cannot be said of some other iGadgets.

Re:Great thingies

[freedomlinux]

Wow... /. must be reading my mind.
This afternoon I disassembled, resurrected, and reassembled my Palm IIIc with no problems at all, after it sat in a drawer for three years.
Excellent design that the product can be opened and closed, including battery replacement, with no problem at all and using standard screws. Glad to have my IIIc back, and must admit that I should have never dropped in 2meters onto concrete.

Re:Great thingies

[bigjarom]

I own and use three Palms, a Palm III from 1998, a Palm T|T3 from 2003, and a Palm Treo 755p from 2007. The Palm III is by far the most stable of the three. The batteries (2xAAA) last for about a month without use of the backlight. It has crashed maybe 5 times in more than 8 years I've had it. There are still thousands of very useful apps that run great on it. I upped the built-in RAM from 2MB to 8MB+2MB flash in 2000. The T|T3 is and probably always will be the pinnacle of Palm's product design. The OS is not as stable. There are issues with the screen noise. The hotsync software is primitive at best. But you can't beat the combination of bluetooth, aluminum body, 320x480 resolution, support for on-board application development (BASIC, Pascal, C etc), SDIO slot (only supports 1 GB), voice recorder, vibrating alarm, 400MHz processor, 64 MB RAM, compatibility with various keyboards and other accessories, [unofficial] support for graffiti 1, compact sliding design, networking capabilities, etc etc etc. I wish I'd bought two. The Treo 755p is a barely-functioning mess compared to what the earlier product were. I got it just because I already have so much Palm software that I use and like, but both of my previous phones (Blackberry 7290, Blackberry 8700) were far more stable and didn't lag for 5 to 60 seconds whenever I tried to switch applications like the Treo does. Palm needs to either focus heavily on the user experience like they did a decade ago, or get out of the business before their legacy becomes one of eye rolling and snickering.

Re:Great thingies

[ozmanjusri]

I still own and actively use a Palm Pilot from 1996.

Yep, just dug out my Palm Pilot 1000/8M Superpilot and chucked a couple of new AAAs in it. It still works fine, in spite of a full length crack in the case. It's impressive how well it works compared to modern PDAs - just the necessities, fast, stable.

Wish I could have said the same of my WinCE machines, though the Symbian smartphone (Sony Ericsson M600i) I have now seems stable enough, if a little sluggish.

I for one...

[calebt3]

...welcome back our old hand-held robotic overlords.

Re:I for one...

[Jrabbit05]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I have an image in my head of a beowulf cluster of Newtons, you insensitive clod!

If Palm isn't careful

[maryjanecapri]

they are going to die a slow painful death. they have a chance to re-invent themselves by bringing the Linux-based OS out (as they've been promising). until then we palm users are all faced with using a very out-of-date OS (with sketchy blue tooth on treos i might add) and no hope for any much-needed updates.

in the meantime the iphone is looking to totally overtake that market (if they start working on bringing out third-party apps). if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps palm may as well throw in the towel.

i would like to keep using my palm-based treo. but i am getting so tired of the crashes and horrific blue tooth that it's getting to the point where i might just jump that shark and go the iphone route.

well - i will when a linux app like jpilot can sync with the iphone. if that never happens i'll wait for the open moko. if that doesn't happen i'll just scrap the pda and get a regular ol' phone.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[larry bagina]

in the meantime the iphone is looking to totally overtake that market (if they start working on bringing out third-party apps). if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps palm may as well throw in the towel.

The iPhone/iPod Touch SDK is being released in 3-4 months.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[MMC Monster]

Palm doesn't have a choice in the matter anymore. Once Apple releases a reasonable SDK, it's game over for the entire handheld computer market.

It's unfortunate. I've owned at least 4 Palm-based handheld, and they've all been incredibly useful. A little fragile (hence my owning so many of them), but I also paid more for each one than the iTouch, anyway.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[DDLKermit007]

I really wish Palm would get their head out of their asses, and stop being careful. I finally jumped from my Treeo 650 to a Nokia N95 when it came out because they don't seem to care anymore about improving their phones in meaningful ways. Price doesn't matter so much, just improve the damn phone lines.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[HartDev]

The thing I do not understand is that if I had money to experiment I WOULD! I mean good golly, Apple has done it's hits and miss and their iPhone rocks! I am loving everything about it. I am a planning nut, and am very forgetful, so I need a device to remind me for everything. Palm is like Blackberry, everyone uses it regardless, and I will be the first to admit that the iPhone is not enterprise ready, but give it time and blackberry and Palm are gonna have some heat!

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[znu]

Palm bought BeOS in 2001. They could have turned around and shipped a slimmed down version of that (and it was already pretty slim), and had the most advanced mobile operating system on the market at the time. Instead, they've made minor improvements to an archaic OS (crippled by being initially designed for extremely limited hardware) for far too long. In many respects they're in the same position Apple was in in the mid-90s, except there's no NeXTSTEP for them to buy, and there's no Steve Jobs to come back and save the day.

It's sad. I've owned three Palms. Though I have to admit I bought the last one mostly because I couldn't bring myself to buy into a Microsoft platform on principle, rather than because it was clearly better than the Microsoft devices.

But the day Apple ships that SDK (i.e. sometime in February), it's game over for Palm. The smartphone market has already largely undermined the PDA market, and while Palm has a horse in that race, it was already losing to the BlackBerry. Well, the iPhone is even stiffer competition there. And once that SDK is out, the iPod Touch officially becomes a PDA, and will almost certainly outsell every other non-phone PDA on the market combined, possibly several times over. (The non-phone PDA market is only about 4M units a year.)

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Quarters]

A third party SDK for the iPhone won't be "game over for the entire handheld computer market". For corporations that issue portable computing devices to their employees no IT department in their right mind is going to make a wholesale switch from Windows Mobile based smart phones and PDAs that run on the corporate voice/data network of choice to iPhones with the only choice of voice/data service being AT&T and a necessary reliance on hobbiest software to supply necessary applications.

It might mean a sharp downturn in the number of non Apple PDAs purchased for personal use. That's a far cry different than the wholesale revolution you are claiming it will be, though.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Planesdragon]

Once Apple releases a reasonable SDK, it's game over for the entire handheld computer market. If all Apple does is release an SDK, they're going to wind up giving Palm the biggest PR coup ever.

The iPhone/iPod lacks basic features that are standard in Palm -- copy & paste, an IR-device port, bluetooth, expandable memory, integrated search, being able to schedule a calendar event, etc.

If Palm suddenly knows what they're doing, they'll launch a new Linux-based Palm OS PDA within 3 months of the iPhone SDK, and aim their PR campaign as "don't hack your iPhone -- buy the device that does what you want already." Unfortunately, it seems like they don't. :(

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[DeadChobi]

Except that it's a huge pain in the ass to take notes on a keyboard where you can't insert basic punctuation and can't feel the keys. I'm sure someone will release a 3rd party application to fix the lack of tactile response in the home row. Oh, wait, the entire screen is flat. Do they at least have a stylus and decent handwriting recognition software for the iPhone that doesn't require me to hack it and risk bricking it?

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[dricci]

I think Apple is just now starting to realize the potential of their existing technology. It's been proven that the iPod Touch and iPhone are nearly identical software-wise. And because the software is based on OS X, all the features you've described could be (and probably currently are being) developed within months.

Apple's recent trend has been to test the market by releasing a product, claiming it can't do x, then once hackers make working proof of concepts of x, cave in and offer an official solution (Intel Macs, no native Windows boot! Now: boot camp and ads based on the feature. iPhone/iPod Touch, no 3rd party apps. Now: SDK coming soon!)

While they don't always get it right (Apple TV.. wtf? and where's my low-cost headless iMac, damnit?) it appears that they are listening, and they know they have the technology right now to introduce major competition to the "mobile OS" market if they want to. All it takes is a way to make money off of it and an "open letter" from Steve...

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[rbanffy]

"For corporations that issue portable computing devices to their employees no IT department in their right mind is going to make a wholesale switch from Windows Mobile based smart phones and PDAs that run on the corporate voice/data network of choice to iPhones"

That's why Windows wins. Inertia trumps competence. Nobody who already made an investment on Windows Mobile software will be able to run its business on anything else, iPhone, Palm or Linux, and will either have to pay to port the software or enjoy life as a Windows Mobile vict^H^H^H^Huser for a very long time.

I see, however, many IT managers having to explain people higher on the org-chart why the hell they can't have the trendy and hip phones their children are using that make their Windows things look even more clunky than they already are.

And remember - iPhones won't be locked everywhere.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[GarfBond]

Who says that all the software produced for the iPhone under an SDK has to be hobbyist? Nothing stopping any other B2B software provider from putting out an iPhone client.

This quote is particularly telling I think:

Adding salt to Palm's wounds, Apple proclaimed last week it sold a million iPhones in its first 74 days in the smart phone market. Palm has yet to sell that many Treos in a quarter.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2007-09-21-palm-future_N.htm

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[dfghjk]

You are assuming terms for Apple releasing this SDK. All they've said is that they'll be doing one. They haven't said who they'll make it available to and what will be required for developers to actually deliver apps using it. It may remain the case that 3rd parties will have to go through Apple for approval and distribution. In that case, it won't be 3rd party at all and it certainly won't be "game over".

Frankly, there's large portions of the smartphone market that won't be satisfied with the iPhone regardless of the existence of an SDK. I'd be amused to see the reactions of some large employers to the need to install iTunes.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Quarters]

Just because Palm can't sell 7 figures worth of Treo's in 3 months doesn't mean that there aren't that many Windows Mobile devices being sold. The number of units sold is only a good barometer for market penetration when you can only get the device from one manufacturer.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[amsr]

I thought palm bought Be? Now they are doing a Linux OS? Sheesh I'm confused

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[IHateEverybody]

Palm bought BeOS in 2001. They could have turned around and shipped a slimmed down version of that (and it was already pretty slim), and had the most advanced mobile operating system on the market at the time. Instead, they've made minor improvements to an archaic OS (crippled by being initially designed for extremely limited hardware) for far too long. In many respects they're in the same position Apple was in in the mid-90s, except there's no NeXTSTEP for them to buy, and there's no Steve Jobs to come back and save the day.

PalmSource bought BeOS, not Palm. Palm split into two companies before the BeOS purchase. PalmSource is a company which was spun off in order to develop and sell the next generation PalmOS. PalmOne was the hardware company which continued to license the PalmOS from PalmSource. While PalmSource did produce a new PalmOS, called Cobalt, none of its licensees -- including PalmOne -- used it to make new devices (supposedly Cobalt's resource requirements and driver problems were the reasons why the OS was rejected). Palm has been making its minor improvements mainly because PalmSource failed to produce a useable OS. While it has hurting them, I have a Palm Treo (I just upgraded from a 600 to a 680) and a LifeDrive and still feel comfortable with the platform. You are right that Palm is in the mid-90s Apple position but we've seen how that turned out. Palm is working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS but we're unlikely to see any devices with it until the end of 2008. Maybe they won't survive long enough to make it but I like Palm's devices and hope they make it.

But the day Apple ships that SDK (i.e. sometime in February), it's game over for Palm. The smartphone market has already largely undermined the PDA market, and while Palm has a horse in that race, it was already losing to the BlackBerry. Well, the iPhone is even stiffer competition there. And once that SDK is out, the iPod Touch officially becomes a PDA, and will almost certainly outsell every other non-phone PDA on the market combined, possibly several times over. (The non-phone PDA market is only about 4M units a year.)

At this point, smartphones make up 80% of Palm's revenue and they've been putting out four smartphones per year for the last two years. I don't really see that the Blackberry is better than a Palm outside of its core compentency of being the best e-mail device ever made. I'm personally suspicious of Apple's PDA intentions. When the iPod Touch came out, you couldn't even add appointments to its calendar. And when the Apple SDK comes out, I expect its PDA apps to be yet more stuff that Apple wants to sell you at the iTunes music store. That will be great for people who already eat sleep and breathe Apple but I don't think that it will foster a large and varied ecosystem of developers as quickly as you expect.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[IHateEverybody]

Here's the Cliff Notes version:

The original Pilot (and later the Palm Pilot) was made by US Robotics and was eventually spun-off into an independent company. Jeff Hawkins and the original Palm team left to start Handspring where they eventually produced the Treo -- the first PalmOS smartphone. Meanwhile a "Palm ecosystem" of companies which licensed the PalmOS had blossomed and Palm split into two companies: PalmOne which continued to make PDAs and PalmSource which was tasked with creating and selling the next generation PalmOS. PalmSource failed. Their next generation OS code-named Cobalt was rejected by all of its licensees including PalmOne. The Palm ecosystem dried up and PalmOne and PalmSource started drifting apart. Both companies looked to Linux in hopes of using it to create the next generation PalmOS. This was supposed to solve the problems which had doomed Cobalt -- high resource requirements and lack of hardware drivers.

At some point during this whole mess -- before Cobalt was released but apparently too late to make a difference -- PalmSource bought the Be software team for its talent and did absolutely nothing with the software. As far as anyone knows, the Be team was put to work on PalmSource's Linux project. Whether or not any of BeOS code has made it into PalmSource's Linux project is anyone's guess. My guess is no. Eventually, the BeOS code appears to have been sold to yet another company which has done nothing with it other than sue projects designed to create a BeOS successor. If you want an argument for the importance of Open Source software, the fate of the brilliant but proprietary BeOS is it.

Since then, PalmSource has bought by Access, a Japanese mobile software company and their Linux project has been named the Access Linux Platform (ALP) and is supposed to be an smartphone OS which is backwards compatible with the vast catalog of existing PalmOS apps. While ALP appears to be coming along nicely, don't expect to see an ALP smartphone outside of the far east as Access has set its sights firmly on the burgeoning Chinese market. After PalmSource was bought by Access, PalmOne bought back the rights to the Palm name and a perpetual license to the current PalmOS and is now just Palm again. Palm is unlikely to use ALP as it has been quietly working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS for some time.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[lmpeters]

The iPhone DOES have Bluetooth. Unfortunately, it currently only works with headsets. Hopefully the SDK will change that.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Anonymous Coward]

You're completely wrong. It is Access the one who owns rights to the BeOS source, and instead of suing opensource projects it actually encourages them! Check out Haiku's homepage.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[TheRaven64]

The iPhone/iPod lacks basic features that are standard in Palm -- copy & paste The Apple Newton had the nicest implementation of this for a pen-based device I've seen (I was particularly irritated after inventing it independently to discover that they thought of it over a decade earlier). You simply drag things to the edge of the screen, where they stay until you switch app and drag them back. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Apple remembers this and reimplements it for the iPhone.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[RMH101]

Yes, because we all know Palm are great at keeping ahead of the curve and regularly release innovative hardware that adds extra functionality to their older product lines. They don't, for example, keep trotting out the same tired hardware in a new case and refuse to add features people might actually want, like memory protection and wifi..

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[RMH101]

"they've been putting out four smartphones per year for the last two years"

Come on. I'm a Palm fan, but they've not exactly been innovating in that time. Treo 650 added bluetooth and a better screen to the 600. Treo 680 removed the aerial and added a little memory. They got HTC to put out some WinMo phones based on the Treo hardware: god knows why as there's a load of more capable WinMo phones on the market, most of which are also made by HTC.
They've just brought out the Centro, which is, well, a 680 in drag.
What they haven't done is bring out a new OS, with memory management that's crash resistant, or added Wifi, or brought out a sexy form factor.

By any measurement, they've been treading water the last few weeks whilst their geek cred is slowly but surely eroded by other platforms getting better, faster and sexier.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Fred_A]

they are going to die a slow painful death. What, again ?
Hasn't this happened once (at least) already ?
Palm should just die, pull the electrodes out of the corpse and let it rest.

I have a Pilot 500 upgraded to Palm Pro (with the US Robotics brand even), a IIIx and a T|X and I'm considering just dropping the platform. I'm sick of them changing stuff in between models so that some will sync and some not, of their weird OS, etc.

It started the right way with a clean interface. Something went very wrong along the way...

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[IHateEverybody]

The Treo 650 also improved the camera, keyboard, added dedicated send and hang up buttons, and it modified the memory architecture so that its information is not erased when the battery runs dry. The Treo 680 didn't add a little memory, it more than doubled it from about 24MB to about 64MB while cutting the price by about $200. It also added a revamped phone application which is arguably slicker than the older phone application (which still runs on CDMA Treos). Note that none of these features are what you'd call "innovations" but they do make the device easier and more pleasant to use. The Centro has similarly incremental improvements. It's considerably smaller, lighter, and cheaper than the 680 which all by themselves open the Centro up to a market which otherwise would never consider buying a Treo 600, 650, or 680. Personally, I think the Centro looks better than any Treo I've ever used.

The truth is that Palm has rarely ever been truly "innovative." The Pilot wasn't the first PDA and the Treo wasn't the first smartphone. The geeks whose cred you think is so important scoffed at the Pilot's humble specs until they actually tried the damn thing after Apple killed the Newton. What Palm has always done well is to get the little things right, getting it small enough to be pocketable, maintaining a long battery life, running their devices with simple, easy to use software.

This is why the delays in putting out a new OS is both good and bad for Palm. On the one hand, geeks will continue to bitch until they get something that satisfies their demand for "innovation." On the other hand, the drones who make up the vast majority of the gadget buying public want something that just works. As Palm has continues to hack the Garnet OS to keep it viable, the crashes you mention keep increasing. But bringing out a new OS isn't just a matter of reskinning the old one, it's a long and difficult process. This is especially true when you don't actually own the OS and have to pay the real owner for permission to hack it in the first place. This is exactly the situation that Palm has found itself in during the past few years.

Personally, I think that Palm's current problems are exaggerated. I've seen predictions that Palm is six months away from bankruptcy for the past ten years and they're still around. I don't know the future but don't expect them to disappear anytime soon.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[RMH101]

I take your point, and as I said, I'm a Palm fan - but to take one example: the development resource that went into the Foleo. Spend that on a new OS (we're going to be based on ALPS now, right? I'm losing track of all the byzantine changes they had at Palm) and a manufacturing contract for a slightly thinner Treo with Wifi for HTC and you'd have had a winner.

As it is, WinMo's got entrenched, Nokia's got the alternative and Mac market, and Apple's got the sexy new multitouch. Palm seems stuck in a bit of an evolutionary dead end and needs to produce something a bit more impressive if it wants to continue to exist as otherwise market forces are goign to kill them.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[IHateEverybody]

ALPS is being developed by PalmSource which is now owned by Access, a Japanese mobile software company. Palm has bought back the Palm name and a perpetual license for PalmOS 5.x (AKA Garnet). Palm's new OS will be Linux-based, just like ALPS but it will not be based on ALPS. (Palm and PalmSource's relationship has soured a bit since they split and Access's buyout of PalmSource appears to have killed it for good.) The Foleo's OS was also Linux-based btw.

As for the resources that were "wasted" on the Foleo, Palm claims it took a loss of $10,000,000 on that device (which they claim they will bring back someday, only time will tell if that's true). They also paid $40,000,000 to Access to buy back the Palm name and perpetual license to Garnet. Now perhaps they could have taken that money and paid HTC to develop a kickass Treo with wi-fi (assuming the U.S. phone carriers didn't force them to cripple it the way they do with other handset makers not named Apple). But they'd still be tied to PalmSource, a company which has let them down before and which is now owned by a company that is more interested in the Chinese market than the U.S. market and HTC, a company which now competes directly against them in the handset market. This is on top of being forced to follow the whims of cellular carriers (IMHO, they're the real reason why Treos don't have wi-fi). I can see why a company like Palm would rather stick to the mid-range and low-end if it gets them out from under the thumb of other companies.

You keep talking about "sexy" hardware and software. But Palm has never really done sexy. The only Palm device which could have ever been called "sexy" was the Palm V and it basically consisted of paying a third party design firm (Ideo, IIRC) to put slightly updated Palm III hardware into a very tiny case and jacking up the price up to $500. Every other device Palm has made has been much more utalitarian in design.

Re:If Palm isn't careful

[Planesdragon]

1: I know Palm is ran by a bunch of Q#$s. Consider that a testament to how well they did it -- Apple and MS, working with actual programmers, still haven't matched Palm.

2:

They don't, for example, keep trotting out the same tired hardware in a new case and refuse to add features people might actually want, like memory protection and wifi. I'm too lazy to look, but the only palms without "memory protection" might be the bargain-basement ones. The PDAs have WiFi, and the Phones don't, because Palm doesn't have the corporate weight to make it worthwhile to include and convince teh carriers not to disable it.

The Zoomer and Pam Vx....mmmmmm.

[jbarr]

I still think the Palm V (and Vx) series was Palm's greatest achievement. Combined with its hard case, they had a true, front-pocketable PDA that performed well. Unfortunately, Palm PDAs have become so bloated and energy-graining that they simply aren't innovative anymore. I REALLY liked measuring battery life in weeks, not hours. And the Zoomer was a killer device at the time. It was PC-compatible that would run DOS apps, had full GUI interface thanks to Geoworks' GEOS, and it had a great implementation of an early version of Graffiti that, at the time, provided real "heads-up" stylus entry (where you could actually look at the person you were talking to while still taking notes. And what was important was that because the Zoomer and early Pilots promoted Graffiti as an input/navigation method, not handwriting recognition, it took of very effectively. The big difference with other HWR implementations was that with Graffiti, the user had to adapt their strokes to what Graffiti expected instead of the HWR engine adapting to the individual user. If you got past all that and just wrote how Graffiti wanted, it was surprisingly fast and accurate. Unfortunately, the Zoomer was overshadowed by the Apple Newton, so it never really grabbed any market share. Fortunately for Palm, (US Robotics at the time) its launch of the Pilot was successful beyond expectations, and the rest was history.

Re:The Zoomer and Pam Vx....mmmmmm.

[pushing-robot]

I completely agree re: the Palm V. I got one when it was first released and it felt absolutely perfect at the time. It and the iPod Nano are my only two gadgets of the last decade that I actually loved carrying around.

And speaking of the Newton, I certainly hope that Apple's iPhone SDK lives up to the hype. An iPhone with full PDA capabilities (and yes, someone's already made a stylus for it) might just be my third.

Every hacker should use a palm

[TavoX]

As seen in Die Hard 4, this devices can be plugged in high tech suitcases and process in parallel to crack passwords and that kind of stuff.

Bottom line:

[Mopatop]

When any company makes an OS that has text messages, calendaring, contacts and todo lists as easy and *fkin fast* to use as Palm, I'll switch.

Period.

Until then, it's Garnet all the way, troubles or otherwise.

Almost like Woz pining for early days...

[PhotoGuy]

I bought one of the first palms, and remember disassembling the ROM, and looking through it. It was lean, elegant, and straight forward enough that one could do that. Try that with Windows Mobile, or probably even the newer palms (oh wait, they are windows mobile now, aren't they?)

Now, I do appreciate the greater flexibility of Windows mobile devices, and prefer it over the palm, but the speed, elegance, battery life, and so on, just aren't there. Too bad we can't have the best of both of these worlds...

Re:Almost like Woz pining for early days...

[Nightspirit]

If you have an HTC windows mobile device, check out xda developers. They have tools so that you can either download or build your own custom windows mobile ROMS.

Awful Article

[captainboogerhead]

Man, for once I read TFA and what do I get? A barely coherent, unedited swamp of words. Did anyone else find this article a slog to read?

Palm's buyer (and a secure feature for the Touchdown) was secured in a surprising way. During product development, Donna, Jeff and Ed were traveling the country promoting the Touchdown as the platform of choice for hardware and sofware developers.

It's never explained what Touchdown is. It's never explained what the "secure feature" is. I'm assuming Touchdown is the orginal name for what was to become the Pilot. But I don't really know. The word is just used suddenlty out without preamble, as if it had been previously introduced.

How about the following:

A simple benchmark of the efficiency or inefficiency of was to count the number of taps to create an appointment or add an entry to the adress book. This required that all of the most used features be easily accessible, not buried behind menus or in dialog boxes. This concept of ease of use had eluded many of the early PDA's.

Perhaps it's just me, but the whole article read like the above excerpt.

Another reviewer, in Macworld, found that his 'typing' speed on the Newton was "up to 20 words per minute at 0 to 95 percent accuracy."

Really? Zero to 95% accuracy? That's pretty, uh, fucking awful. Somehow I doubt that's what Macword published.

It took ten to fifteen seconds to boot up and to switch between applications, seriosuly hampering its usefulness as a serious business tool.

Wow, spelling mistake and redundancy in the same sentence.

A paper planner was much smaller and allowed the user to see his or her entire day. Little quirks like this also turned off business users.

See how the second sentence here should not follow the first? It should have followed the sentence preceeded the excerpt. This kind of construction left me rereading the same few lines several times over.

A few major candidates were considered (Motorola, Compaq and Nokia), but none of the comapnies were willing to give Palm control...

Guess that woulda bin bad fer bidness.

Hey Silicon User, hire a fucking editor!

Your Men Are Already Dead ...

[SteveM]

if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps ...

And what exactly can Palm do to prevent this?

Palm has been dead for awhile. All that's left is for someone to unplug the life support system.

SteveM

Re:Your Men Are Already Dead ...

[Kevin Stevens]

Are you kidding? Maybe its just here in NY, but the Treo is one of the more popular phones around. Nowhere near the Razor, but I have seen 10x as many Treos as I have iPhones.

That being said, I have a Treo 650, and am sorely disappointed with it. I thought it would be awesome to have expandable memory to play MP3's from... until I realized it has one of those mini jacks, for which you have to pay an extra $12 to get an adapter to use with your normal set of headphones (which falls out easily, and is even more easily lost). This was all well and good since by expandable memory, they meant expandable up to 2 gigs- since for some inexplicable reason larger ones are not recognized.

Then there is all that great third party software I heard so much about- I found one decent ebook reader, and thats about it, and an emulator that works well enough except for the fact that it only recognizes the top "system" type buttons as mappable keys. So much crappy payware exists for this phone, but how about an app that will download some RSS feeds and update them for me in the morning so I can catch up on the way to work? (I did start writing something to do this, but just don't have the free time these days). And all of these programs tend to treat the memory card as some sort of strange foreign device whereas in my opinion I just assumed it would seamlessly integrate with the phone's internal storage.

The third party software being shoddy wouldn't even be so bad if the phone application didn't freeze up all the time. And this is one of those cases where you really wish the whole phone froze up so you didn't have to realize that its not that your family and friends don't love you and no one has called you all day, its just that your phone appears to be functioning in every way except... the whole making and receiving calls part.

But most of all... I have had the thing for about a year, and its just falling apart- screws are falling out, some keys are not working, making texting a real pain in the ass, and that was the original huge draw in the first place. I actually went to a Cingular store just to make sure I didn't get a really good Chinese knockoff or something- they said it was legit though.

Luckily the battery life is excellent- this thing can still go a week without a charge... if only the damn thing could work for a week straight! A kind of amusing thing is that when I first got it, I was only worried about the touch screen going bad on me. Thats the only thing that works pretty much flawlessly on the thing.

Lookout!

[evilviper]

HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti

An apostrophe mean's, "Lookout! Here come's an S!"

Re:Lookout!

[sinclair44]

The usage of an apostrophe to indicate plurality is actually correct in this context (i.e. following a word/acronym in all caps).

Re:Lookout!

[Max Littlemore]

An apostrophe mean's, "Lookout! Here come's an S!"

'So? What i's your point?

Re:Lookout!

[evilviper]

Very, very few authorities on the subject agree with you. It's only in the case of lower-case words, that the S could be confused as being part of the acronym, that the apostrophe should be used. You do have a point though, it certainly isn't the worst use of an apostrophe I've seen today...

Re:Lookout!

[passion]

Which brings us to Bob the Angry Flower's griping about apostrophe abuse: http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Re:Lookout!

[onosson]

Didn't you mean: apo'strophe?

Re:Lookout!

[$hecky]

No, it isn't.

I know it's common practice to write "CDs" as "CD's," and even that some imbecile handbook writers allow it. That doesn't make the practice grammatically correct. Apostrophes are used only to indicate omitted letters. That's it. That's all. Possessives are a case of this: Ben Jonson's play title, Sejanus His Fall would now likely be written Sejanus's Fall for the same basic reasons I would write "that's" instead of "that is." Plurals in this case omit no letters and warrant no apostrophe.

So please, please, please, please, please do not contaminate the English-speaking world with some greater illiteracy.

Re:Lookout!

[sinclair44]

I wasn't aware of looking at the possessive in this way. Regarding the original statement, I had always heard that you should use the apostrophe as I stated... do you have a reference for why you shouldn't? (I certainly don't have a reference for the other side, either, and what you're saying makes sense and is far more consistent. So I'd be interested on any authority saying either way.)

Uhm, what is new here?

[bonsai8]

"Piloting Palm" was published in 2002 and pretty much covered all of this. Nothing to see here. Move along.

LOL!

[SteveM]

... and a necessary reliance on hobbiest software to supply necessary applications.

That's funny.

SteveM

Try It, You'll Like It

[SteveM]

You should try one.

I have not had any problem taking notes, writing emails, entering URLS, and even entering punctuation.

I much prefer this to any other phone keyboard I've used.

SteveM

Someone missed the point of tagging

[jcorno]

It's in the Hardware section of Slashdot. It's right there in the address: hardware.slashdot.org. Why would you tag it hardware?

Ah, the Vx

[rickb928]

I owned a Palm Pilot 1000 (I think, the one with extra memory) that promptly became one of the first to be repaired. Broken screen. They did not survive a 3-foot drop onto tile.

I wore it out. It worked, and Grafitti was just wonderful.

Then I got a Palm III. And a modem. Having HandMail was a blessing. I was much more self-sufficient.

Finally, I got a Vx to replace my tired III... Sleek and wonderful, another modem of course, slick apps, and yes shirtpocket capable.

But I always had a Day-Timer, and used both. Having a Palm saved me from weekly (or more frequent) printings of a dynamic phonebook in Filemaker Pro. And cutting pages to fit...

I'm hoping things at Palm get back to the lean and mean days of old, where the product seemed to be king, and where good decisions were made.

Until then, Windows Mobile. Ugh.

Palm is still around?

[WoTG]

I can't even tell you what operating system the most recent Palm's run. There must have been half a dozen attempts to modernize the platform...

I used my Handspring Deluxe for 6 years, it was good for it's time, and the interface is still pretty good, but it just doesn't have the features I want in a PDA today. When it came time to find a replacement, I didn't even consider Palm. I didn't have confidence that I'd be able to find modern apps to run on a new Palm device.

Fact checking, anyone?

[LoTonah]

Since when did GEOS come out in 1985? Yes, the Commodore 64 version came out then, but I seriously doubt that any of the code created for that was used in any of the designs discussed in the article. Try 1990, for the IBM version...so how old was that code again?

Oh, and the editor for this piece should be flogged for drinking on the job. What a steamer for readability!

Re:Fact checking, anyone?

[Richard Steiner]

Not only that, but anyone who ever used PC/GEOS knows that it was a lightweight multithreade and preemptively multitasking OS even in its 1.x incarnations.

Long in the tooth? PC/GEOS was a LOT more sophisticated both in terms of process/memory management and in terms of object orientation than *any* of the PalmOS releases!

I knew it....

[Xenna]

In the old days, when I had a HP 100LX PDA, I once beta tested a synchronization tool for a company named Palm. I always wondered if they went on to produce the palmpilots (which were known for their excellent synching).

I owned a Palm V briefly, but I never could get used to the stylus text input, so I went with the Nokia Communicator line. I now have a Nokia E90.

X.

Weeks? I have a Rex6000 it lasts months/years

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Rex6000 and the battery life is 6-12 months depending on usage, holds all my contacts and telephone numbers and password protects them.

I'd like something more modern, sleeker, longer battery life, but such a device does not exist.

Sad.

Buy a T3 :-)

[KlaymenDK]

The T|T3 is and probably always will be the pinnacle of Palm's product design. [...] I wish I'd bought two. Why don't you? Just because they're "obsolete" does not make them obsolete, or impossible to get hold of. May I direct your attention to http://tinyurl.com/2nzewo
That's what I did. Then I sent them both to Chris Short, and now I have peace of mind knowing that my 'plastic brains' are trustworthy.

Palm needs to either focus heavily on the user experience like they did a decade ago, or get out of the business before their legacy becomes one of eye rolling and snickering. Oh, you mean like what happened to Psion? That was so sad. I mean, their devices (5mx, Revo) were better than ewen T3's.

Palm desktop PIM

[Britz]

For normal PIM the Palm desktop software is pretty good. It also used to race on slower PCs. It is still free for download:

http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/windesk414.html

And, if you feel like it you can get a cheap Pilot off of Ebay and sync it so you can carry all the data that you entered into your PIM with you at any time. Or even sometimes try and enter data on the road (I am kidding).

Re:Palm desktop PIM

[He Who Waits]

Actually, here is the latest version: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/windesk414e.html

US Robotics?

[Magnifique]

If I am not completely mistaken, the company was back then known as US Robotics and of which Palm was a division (that eventually split into a seperate company). Is that correct?

If so - Palm was by no means a weak player. US Robotics had strong dominance in the modem market (I still remember how I dreamt of getting a flashy new 33.6Kb US Robotics modem instead of the crappy Taiwanese 9600baud modem I had at home).

palm pilot software must have

[Icegryphon]

http://padict.sourceforge.net/

Re:I miss Visor (Mod Parent Up)

[Jasin Natael]

This is a very important thing, that keeps me sane. I have used Graffiti since it was a Newton program. Even though the Newton OS v2.0 had really great handwriting recognition (no joke!), Graffiti has always been much faster. I can remember taking notes using Graffiti on a Newton MessagePad 100 that I bought on clearance for $150.00 when I was in High School. It has lower CPU utilization, faster input, accurate punctuation, bullets and accented characters, and less strain on the hands -- what's not to like, other than a short training period?

Graffiti 2 destroys Palm's advantage of having sane, consistent input, and puts it back on a level playing field with every other generic PDA. Reverting to the old Graffiti is a highly recommended upgrade. I've used it on my Zire 72 since the day I bought it in 2004 without any problems; I've even used it with third-party IME's for languages the system wasn't designed to display (Chinese, Japanese).

Ican imagine it

[wiredog]

It would be the mainframe industry.

Since the Palm III

[MrCrassic]

I have been a loyal customer of Palm since they released their Palm III under U.S. Robotics. The one favorite feature that I think is still overlooked by many of today's PDA competitors (including Palm themselves) is the utter simplicity of it. All of the programs were dead simple to use. You entered your agenda in the Calendar. You synced and checked your e-mail. It had a (relatively) powerful calculator. It came with the bare essentials, and that's it.

I think it was these concepts that made the Treo 650 such a great and revolutionary mobile PDA device. The form factor was ingenious like their classic Palms, but the interface was simple, yet extremely robust. Anyone could learn how to use it, and anyone could make it as complex as they wanted (without pushing the software's limits, of course). Now thinking back on it, it's rather sad that their management went down the tubes like it did.

Now that Palm's out of the game, we have PDA operating systems that focus on bringing the PC to the mobile device, which I think was never the point of the PDA. That's why Windows Mobile has been able to get away with bringing out its mobile platform, which is, for all intents and purposes, a mobile version of their Windows operating system, but with more fluff for a mobile. Then there's Apple with their mini OS X, which is a whole different ballgame.

When Palm updates their OS, I hope that they keep their original model of simplicity intact. This concept is quickly becoming an afterthought.

Re:Since the Palm III

[Zelos]

The one thing I miss from the Treo is the way it displayed text messages as threaded conversations, a feature that the iPhone has borrowed I think.

Bah. SiliconUser is on drugs...

[RiffRafff]

...or at the very least, never used any Newton past first gen.

I still use my Newton 2100 daily. The screen real estate is large enough to actually work with, I can use the English alphabet (instead of, for instance, an inverted V when I mean A), and ooooo! I can do "inking" just like the article attributes to exclusively to PalmPrint. WTF?

The article states, "Even after complaints about the complexity of Newton Intelligence, Apple added more features with the 2.0 release of the software which did little to improve the user experience. Instead, the Newton gained a slight speed bump and new communications tool. It was still painfully slow to search for a contact or to add a new appointment."

WHAT? Users LOVED the new OS! Newton OS 2.0 is still, even today, one of the most intuitive interfaces ever created. "Painfully slow to add a new appointment?" How so, when all it takes is writing (or printing) this: "Lunch w/ John tomorrow." Voilà. Done. Suddenly a new appointment has appeared, with John's address and phone (if he was in your address book) set for 12 noon the next day. 1.5 seconds. Too slow? Did the author ever even USE a Newton? Or did he see Gary Trudeau's cartoon and figure Trudeau was the end-all be-all reviewer? (BTW, Trudeau's famous "Egg Freckles" cartoon was incorporated into later versions of the OS as an Easter egg, and a later model Newton was given to him, where he soon pronounced it as very nice.) This article seems based more on popular misconceptions of the time, rather than on any hands-on familiarity.

Now, one thing my Newton cannot do...is translate this sentence from the article for me:

"Palm eaked out an existance selling connectivity software to existing Zoomer customers and (after a rewrite) to users of the popular HP palmtops that rand MS-DOS."

I assume the author meant "eked" and "existence," but what is "rand?"

Looks like they went back in and fixed the "0 to 95 percent" thing since last night, yet still couldn't figure out how to run a spell checker on that "article." Maybe I should tell them about the Newton's spell checker...

Or maybe they'll discover them if they ever take a high school English course.

Z22

[kisrael]

before I accidentally (I swear) drowned and decided to hop on the iPhone bandwagon, the Z22 was a very great machine... cheap cheerful and effective., even at the lower screen rez I liked it better than the higher end Sony Clie it replaced, in part because of the great feel form factor (too often in hardware, Palm designers aimed for slim without sacrificing screen width, leading to uncomfortably "sharp" devices.

But enjoying my iPhone - despite the current lack of TODOs, and my bad feelings about Outlook meaning I'm not actually synching my data to my PC - it makes me sad at how blatantly Palm dropped the ball.

Wait, these things are still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, they were all hot 5-6 years ago. Handspring was coming out with cool, affordable products, then, bam! WTF happened? Did the market collapse? I don't see anyone using them or talking about them.

Nice replaceable batteries in the Treos

[Dr. Manhattan]

The Treo line have user-replaceable batteries; you don't even need to remove a screw, the cover just slides off. I've been pretty pleased with my Treo 650. I started with a IIIxe, moved to a Handera 330 (CF and SD slots...), and finally got the 650. It works very well, and because it's my phone, my wife can't complain that I take my PDA everywhere. It's not quite as stable as I'd like, but I haven't lost any information and I can do all kinds of things that even the Handera couldn't do - like voice navigation with a Bluetooth GPS.

(Even the stability issue isn't a big deal - I let the kids watch movies on it, and something they do makes the thing reboot when I leave TCPMP. Ah, well, I can deal with that.)

They didn't

[pavon]

Slashcode itself inserts tags for all the categories that a story is filled in before it goes live. I presume this is so they can merge the tag search and category search sometime in the future.

I never really felt the need for one

[OutSourcingIsTreason]

God is my PalmPilot.

Re:I miss Visor (Mod Parent Up)

[Steve001]

Jasin Natael wrote:

This is a very important thing, that keeps me sane. I have used Graffiti since it was a Newton program. Even though the Newton OS v2.0 had really great handwriting recognition (no joke!), Graffiti has always been much faster. I can remember taking notes using Graffiti on a Newton MessagePad 100 that I bought on clearance for $150.00 when I was in High School. It has lower CPU utilization, faster input, accurate punctuation, bullets and accented characters, and less strain on the hands -- what's not to like, other than a short training period?

Graffiti 2 destroys Palm's advantage of having sane, consistent input, and puts it back on a level playing field with every other generic PDA. Reverting to the old Graffiti is a highly recommended upgrade. I've used it on my Zire 72 since the day I bought it in 2004 without any problems; I've even used it with third-party IME's for languages the system wasn't designed to display (Chinese, Japanese).

I think that the move to Graffiti 2 was more than a step backward. I compare it to changing the arrangement of keys on a keyboard. That the Querty keyboard arrangement still remains the standard is an indication of just how difficult a change is.

I disagree that Graffiti 1 was difficult to learn, I managed to pick it up in less than a day without formal training. Eventually, I got good enough at it that I could accurately take notes at meetings without having to look at the screen and rarely made an error. One of the reasons that Graffiti worked so well (and other handwriting systems didn't) is that Graffiti didn't rely on the PDA learning how to understand how you write, you learned to write in a way that it understands.

When I purchased a Palm T/X, I disliked Graffiti 2 so much that I bought a program called Tealscript which allows you to design your own penstrokes. I used it work with the Graffiti 1 penstrokes and I've had little problem with accuracy.

As far as PalmOS PDAs, my two favorites are the Palm Vx and the Handspring Visor. Both had great battery life, a very sharp screen, and a massive amount of third-party software. I haven't enjoyed used my later PalmOS PDAs as much as those two.

Zombie Phone

[SteveM]

Are you kidding?

I think your post pretty much confirms it.

Crappy hardware, crappy software, ...

Who's kidding who?

SteveM

PalmOS 4.1 upgrade kit.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I bought a PalmOS upgrade pack (about 6 years ago, I think). I'm reasonably sure this produced an upgrade to v 4.0 or 4.1; I remember thinking that I was fortunate to escape Graffiti 2 (which came in 4.1.2). I also remember a very scary flashing process that utilised screen memory, producing the same kind of snow dump as loading large 8-bit games.

After a quick shufty at Wikipedia, I'm now sure - the bitmap drawing program Notepad was first released on PalmOS 4.0 and I definitely have that now.

ZDNET confirms it was once available

Palm.com KB points out that they no longer sell it (probably due to one of their legal wrangles - maybe even because this was the last time they shipped Graffiti 1 before Xerox sued them.)

I've not noticed any problems. There are various improvements in usability, and overall the applications feel slicker and more useful than the older ones - things like a merged display of the todo list with the calendar. Some of the OS improvements are a little pointless on a Palm III, particularly the ones regarding networking because the only way to use them on an unexpanded device is to park it in the cradle. And colour support, obviously. And some things are just daft on a device with only 2MB of storage.

I confess that I don't use it often anymore because my job changed from being highly mobile and roaming around hospitals, for which I needed a good task list and phonebook application, to sitting behind a desk with a PIM application open on the second monitor all the time. I'm starting to feel the need for it again though, just to manage my at-home life. Maybe I'll hunt out a good belt holster for it.

It still functions properly after multiple drops to hard surfaces, and it's nearly 10 years old. The low power consumption and use of AAA batteries is a design combination I'd love to see in a modern PDA device. The Palm III is a classic to me ; sure, it's a bit chunky in todays world, but it's a wonderful example of form fitting function - it doesn't have any more resources than it needs to be a decent PIM, and the OS is trim and lean enough to provide for that, quirks aside. Robust case, hard top flip cover as standard, instant on, weeks of useful battery life from standard cells. For a while I considered writing a bunch of software for doctors to run on wi-fi enabled variants that the likes of Symbol cranked out.

At the time it was an expensive purchase ; the present entry level Z22 is a much more powerful machine, and costs less than a third of what I paid for it, but it lacks many of the desirable features, Graffiti 1 being one of them. There are various articles on backgrading the Graffiti 1 library from older machines, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to shell out and risk it not working.

What I would LOVE to see would be a port of PalmOS for the DS, or even just a Palm emulator. Shouldn't be too hard - DS is ARM, PalmOS 5 is ARM, and it includes a Dragonball emulator that runs faster than the original native processor on modern ARM hardware. There is DS organizer software, but it just isn't nearly as slick as Palm. And think of the possibilities for that second screen.

A DS is a little bulky, but no more so than a paper organiser, and just imagine the kudos gained from whipping out a slick, piano-black organizer and proceeding to note your next business meeting before playing Zelda.

Heck, I'm sold. I'm off to hunt out some homebrew kit.

Re:Great thingies (Mine is a Tungsten C)

[sct100]

I've had a variety of PDAs since the original Visor, including a Clie. However, my Palm of choice ---- and the unit I still use everyday -- is the Tungsten C, which came out in 2003.

I had a TX after my original unit went dead but it just didn't perform like my TC. The TC has Wifi (rather than bluetooth; why didn't & doesn't Palm put WIFI in all its units, including the Treo?), it is blazingly fast (400 mghz, faster than the TX and today's Treo),a great screen, and it has a thumb board, which is what makes it so great for me. I never liked Graffiti; I do A LOT of work on my PDA on documents and email and I would be dead without the TC thumb board.

So, I dumped my TX, bought broken TCs on eBay and have two units that work. The TC is fragile & I've learned from experience not to carry it in my pocket. I now have a holster for it and it has worked flawlessly since I hobbled my primary unit together about a year ago.

Note to Palm: There are a lot of us out here who want a standalone PDA and not a smartphone. While we aren't as numerous as the smartphone pool of customers, you would have us almost to yourself, without a competitor. ("Almost," because HP still makes NEW standalone PDAs.) Why neglect a solid niche market with fans who have been loyal to Palm but whose loyalty is beginning to wane because of your neglect. Keep us in your fold and jump back into the PDA market with two feet and bring to market innovative, great Palm PDA products. If you wait too long, those of us who were loyal to Palm will not be so loyal when we eventually are forced into the smartphone market. After all, why be loyal to someone who turned its back on us and left us in the cold to hobble PDAs together from used parts?

Scott in Philadelphia

Re:I miss Visor (Mod Parent Up)

[thethibs]

I just bought Tealscript. I hope you're right.