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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."
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.
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.
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.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
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
The usage of an apostrophe to indicate plurality is actually correct in this context (i.e. following a word/acronym in all caps).
Omnes stulti sunt.
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.
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.
Does this