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What Happened To Palm?
Ian Lamont writes "Palm's fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It's the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it's clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it's not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM's surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
I bought my Palm T|X, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.
I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, used almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.
Considering that I was so happy with the T|X, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.
Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This T|X was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.
So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem on receipt of the unit) then Palm will refund to my card.
I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced -- this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working T|X... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.
So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely -- I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.
So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...
So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted T|X, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.
On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Between all the division splitting , they lost their focus. The sole idea of scrapping the palm os development and start to focus on windows mobile must tell you something.
Their current devices were fine for five years ago, but not now.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Palm OS was brilliant at running PDA-style apps. However, that's not the direction portable computing was going, and Palm never did much to address the future. When every other platform was moving into media, Palm was proud of its third-party support calendars with more buttons.
And don't get me started about the Graffiti 2 debacle ("Easy to learn, even if you'll never get faster!"). Instead of working out a deal to keep using Jot and its trickier-but-faster strokes, they switched to that two-stroke abomination that instantly cut power users' data entry speed in half. Way to save a penny, Palm!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Their hardware is solid. They just need to release an OS that is more capable than Windows 3.1.
Palm has a massive problem, and that problem is, a Palm Pilot is really only good for one thing, and that's what it was good for in the '90s.
They've got a pretty strict monopoly on stuff for the Palm, and they'll charge you for anything. There's nothing free in the world of the Palm.
The biggest problem with that is, there's nothing particularly good in the world of the Palm either.
If the company wants to gain back the market share it's been consistently losing, they need to truly open their product up, and give open source and independant developers the tools they need to make utilities that will make people like me want to buy their product. I've got a Tungsten E, and I can't use it for anything. The hardware is fine, but there's no software to do what I want to do with it.
Until then, they're going to get raped by the PocketPC, because it has a more open platform, and the Blackberry, because it does the few things anyone cares about better.
It's been a long time.
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years. Leave palm alone. Just leave them alone. Can't you.
Way back, Palm was not the only company making PDAs. They succeed because all the applications that were developed for them. Is anyone writing apps for the palm? Palm does not even know if it's Palm OS or WindowsCE.
Rim was the next palm because they went the next step and integrated the back office into the thing with secure push e-mail and other apps.
The iphone iswhat is next. It's not the touch screens per se. It's the fast processor and great IDE that will lead to the next generation of apps. If you saw the keynote you know I'm not blowing smoke: They showed a full blown medical imaging application ported to the iphone in less than a man week.
The touchscreens main virtues are it's large area on a small device, and it's morhpability to the application. This is the next step. This is why for example Rim will be next to die after Palm. Look to Nokia and Android to actually compete against the I phone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Windows CE
how long until
RIM happened, then Apple happened.
Shipping an obsolete OS is what killed Palm. I stopped caring about them in 2005 when I realized that they were never going to ship any hardware with Palm OS 6. I don't know whether Palm OS 6 would have generated more success than Palm OS 5, but lo and behold, it's 2008, and they're still shipping an OS that lacks multitasking support and dates back to 2002. It's no surprise, then, that they are failing in an industry that is rife with competition from more modern software.
Palm once led the PDA market. Their PalmOS platform was revolutionary in the 90's because it was flexible, fostered good battery life and most importantly was easy to use. When Palm moved into the smartphone market, they did very little to revamp their aging operating system. Rather, Palm tacked on advanced wireless functionality their platform couldn't really handle. They are losing to Apple and RIM because these companies designed their hardware and software from the ground up for rock-solid email and voice communication.
Palm's market share shrank about 75% because they are losing out to other OS's, including Microsoft Mobile which grew quite impressively last year. RIM's market share has been pretty constant. Linux is also growing - at least enough to be more than a line on the pie chart now. Android isn't even a blip at the moment and has nothing to do with Palm's problems.
I have a 700p, using "Good" Exchange-push mail. It is slow, cramped, flaky, clunky, and slow. Did I mention that it's too fucking slow?
Palm needs hardware fast enough so that I'm never waiting for mail to process, apps to switch, or anything like that. When 3-4 days of mail is processing, the damned thing is unusable for way too long.
I don't care whose fault it is, I just hate how slowwwww the damn thing is.
What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Not a thing. Stick a fork in them, they're done.
That is all.
Palm was never wanted to be one of the big guys. I base that on their actions. In their company motto or press releases they might have given the impression that they were going to move in new directions, but after the initial palm pilots it was generally more of the same.
Had they wanted to make an "iphone", before apple ever knew apple could make phones, they they would have. They succeded in a time when gizmos for geeks were cool. Palm, or whatever they are called now, missed the boat thing, and now its time for the chariot to swing low.
The reason I think RIM will linger and then die is that they don't have the economic resources to compete with the iphone. They'll linger because they are damn good at what they do do. Bussinesses like them for the present better than iphones. the iphone killer app has yet to be written. And then there's the exclusive carrier contracts. But over time they won't beable to keep up with the application dev and versatility of the iphone.
Nokia has the cash flow to try and fail four or five times from scratch against the iphone. They have the engineering chops to compete on performance. And if their first few attempts fail, the worst that happens is they lose the high end phone market till they come up with something to rival the iphone.
Android the ability to compete with the iphone on apps and speed of software innovation. It can be backed by the google cloud and that may possibly turnout to be better than the apple cloud (though apple would just switch over if that were the case, but it would erase an apple exclusive advantage).
Android + samsung can produce both awseome hardware and software at affordable prices and with substantial cash flow to back it till it catches on.
But Apple still has a killer advantage: OSX and platform integration. OSX means people can write Hub apps for the apple desktops and then have companion mobile apps for the iphone. You won't have to re-write your code or support two platforms. Or have compatibility libs. Heck you won't even have to have two IDEs: Xcode does it all. So both from the developer and consumer point of view apple is much more fascile and seamless.
Apple recently bought a low power chip maker so the horse power and battery lifr in these is going to keep getting better. Since apple will always be able to more tightly couple the OS and hardware, they are going to get every drop of power out of this thing. It used to be that it was the communication hardware that ate the batteries. Presumably nokia's better at that but with the new generation it's the computing and screen display power. Things like background service will eat your battery. Apple thus may have the better hardware strategy as well as the better software strategy.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Make a phone that is aimed at business users.
remember blackberry? the old one? the one that ONLY did email?
That little device with its tiny niche' market rocketed RIM to the company that they currently are. Unfortunately RIM has completely lost sight of what used to make them so incredible. The market needs a new paradigm for business phones. there used to be nextel, and the blackberry 7520 (which i said they could have when they pried it from my cold, dead fingers) but sprint is basically flusing nextel down the toilets. they're hoping to phase out the network and poach the users onto sprint.
This is all another story...
The point is that there is definetely a group of consumers out there who don't WANT a phone with an MP3 player, a camera, lots and lots of bright, shiny surfaces, tiny buttons, etc. etc. we don't want phones that we designed for the 15-20 female market. We don't.
Lets look at something like the blackberry 7520 (the phone that i had up until yesterday) to the blackberry curve (which i have now had for about 24 hours).
The 7520 (which was an astounding success, btw) was big. really big. But we LIKED that about it. It was rugged, I would routinely chuck it across the office to demonstrate to the non-believers why it was so amazing. Its size also allowed it to have BIG keys...ones that you could type on. The screen was recessed, it NEVER got scratched, ever.
This is the type of thing that business users want....functionality.
Now lets look at the curve:
the buttons are f*cking tiny. You can't type with your thumbs, you have to use your fingernails. I can only assume that this is because the phone was designed for 8 year old girls. The dropped the scroll wheel on the side that made the old blackberries have such a (in my mind) LEGENDARY interface. Honestly that was one of the best interfaces i have EVER used. They dropped it for a stupid trackball that, while pretty, is all but useless unless you use two hands to operate the phone.
Okay...rant rant rant rant...i hate the new blackberry, but this is my point:
A market (that used to be dominated by RIM) has been abandoned. there is a sizable gap that needs to be filled, and this is Palm's opportunity to start turning a profit again.
If you dont' belive me about the 7520, ask anybody that owned one. Most of the people that did still keep it (with the service turned off if they have to) as an organizer. It was just THAT good, and there currently is nothing on the market that offers the same level of functionality.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Palm suffers from the same fatal illness that has killed so many once-promising companies - totally inept management.
From their board minutes: "Let's make a Linux OS! No, wait, let's buy BeOS and use that! Great, it works, now let's not ship any products that run it! Now let's announce another Linux OS! Now let's announce an UMPC with a different, incompatible Linux OS than the first one - I mean, second one. Now on shipping day, let's cancel the UMPC and "commit" to the first Linux OS! Let's write an emulator that runs on another company's tablet, and give it away for free - but not ship a product of our own that runs it! And in the meantime, to keep our customers entertained, let's keep selling the Palm name to ourselves over and over again!"
Didn't these guys used to run Atari?
I use overpriced phones for work, I used to love my PalmOS devices (ohhh, how shiny my Visor Prism was..) but then other PDA devices came along that actually supported multitasking and I never looked back.
This may seem excessive to some, but I will routinely handle trouble tickets on my phone (currently a company supplied Blackberry Curve). This involves 'tabbing' between e-mail, a web browser (for customer information), and an ssh client (to resolve their issue). On Palm devices applications in the background are suspended and the ssh session drops. It's really not a problem for most applications, but in a web enabled world dropping all your TCP connections every time you tab to another app is silly.
Palm seems to have decided that they were going to drop PalmOS and make hardware for Windows Mobile, but it turns out they suck at making hardware that really stands out (my last Palm branded device, a Treo 700w, sucked for how heavy, bulky, and poorly built it was.. two exchanges for various hardware issues and it was finally retired when the speaker failed).
Before anyone says 'lol, use a laptop', my blackberry handles this just fine, and it's difficult to lug around a laptop while you're playing an 18 hole disc golf course. Mobility++
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
Palm is the new Amiga. They both had great devices that were ahead or the best of their era, but then decided to sit on their butts and stop innovating.
That's what happened.
What happened is they started with a good product and nonexistent customer support, and they just rested on their laurels instead of building their customer loyalty through good service. Now better products have come out, and products with actual customer service have entred the market. What happens after that is only natural.
If you have a problem with your palm pilot, your only hope is to find a forum where some other unfortunate soul has ran into the same thing and managed to figure out how to fix it, and was generous enough to share their experience. Either that or you'll find 35 threads of others having the same issue and nobody has figured out how to fix it.
Yes I own a palm pilot. Right now my screen refuses to re-calibrate the stylus (no it's not a "screen wedgie") so I have to press 1/8" below wherever I want to click, and there's evidently no way to fix it short of replacing it. Lucky me.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
In the fall of 2002, I decided that I needed some form of a PDA to allow me to take a few notes and manage a calendar. I obtained one of the inexpensive Palms. (Its name began with a Z, although I can't remember the exact name.)
The Palm was very basic, and it did what I needed it to do. It even charged from the USB port, so I put the power brick away and forgot about it. I was happy!
After 4-5 months, it stopped working. I was tired of carrying two devices. Ultimately, I replaced the Palm and my cell phone with a very basic cell phone that had the same features as the Palm.
Needless to say, my experience with Palm is that their devices are unreliable and easily duplicated by inexpensive phones. Today, the iPhone does everything that I wanted a basic Palm for, is more reliable, and takes up less space in my pockets!
No, I will not work for your startup
They refused to innovate where they needed to. Palm OS was interesting when I first saw it, what? 10 or more years ago? Sure, the phones got more and more advanced, but it's roughly akin to Apple's refusal to leave OS8 and OS9 behind and advance to a modern OS. All the legacy users will drag you down when you can't pull any more new users in because your phones' software was written when Java was considered new. Innovate or die happened to Palm. If they can come out with a new OS they might stand a chance. I for one will never touch one of their phones again until they do.
In 2004, Palm planned to convert PalmOS into nothing but a GUI and backwards compatibility API layer, replacing the OS with Linux. Lots of Palm software assets and licenses were transferred among Palm, China MobileSoft, and the Japanese "Access" mobile SW company over the next year or two.
By now, we should be able to get smartphones with easy Web access, the thousands of little PalmOS apps, and all the Linux apps, all upgradable at a "tap" over the air or USB from the Internet. But it never happened. Instead, Palm put out a couple of different models of Treo, which were excellent phones when released, but rapidly eclipsed by more frequent updated releases of Symbian and Windows phones.
I bet what happened was that just announcing a PalmOS/Linux smartphone earned its execs and directors a lot of money, money changed hands in the endless spinoffs/acquisitions/mergers, but no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
Another good question is why I can't just install Linux on any of the new phones with HW compatible with it, and keep my telephone service contract. That should be easy by now, and shouldn't require Palm to do it.
--
make install -not war
This thread is peculiar timing for me, as i just spent the last few days resurrecting my Visor Prism for a Head-to-Head with my Dell Axim x51v and my AT&T Tilt...
The long and short of the comparsion? Palm never confronted Wince and its Descendants...
My early Palm's, the III's and the V's, were SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE EARLY WINCE PDA'S...
Good screens, GREAT battery life, and once you got the hang of Graffiti...you could fly on
entry. The Wince recognizer STILL isn't quite as good as the early Palm.
The Palms were soooo much better that Palm had the market essentially all to itself. For the FIRST FEW YEARS.
But then, Palm failed to grow, Palm failed to innovate (How old is Garnet?)... ....and each generation of Windows PDA got slowly and slightly better.
So, i remember attending the MS PDC in Denver ('97) and spending over 8 (F******) hours, working on my Compaq Companion (rebranded Casio Cassiopeia), getting the modem and Pocket Outlook and Pocket Explorer working over a 9600 baud connection. If the "windows" in my 16th story hotel room had opened, the Companion would have taken a Unscheduled Flight.
OTOH, my x51v (with a Stowaway BT Folding KB) has around 90% the ESSENTIAL functionality of my current laptops, and the x51v is a 3-year old PDA.
YES, the battery life on the Axim sucks, Yes, the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket apps are still a little underpowered and slightly flaky.
However, in raw functionality, my TX has less power than my x51v, Garnet is flakier than WM5, and i have to go to a bunch of 3rd party apps to get equivalent functionality with the Axim.
The TX's battery life is not all that much better, and the display screen isn't half as good.
ON THE BLACKBERRY SIDE; email on the Treo 700, though way better then my Treo 180, is still a relative PIA, compared to the Idiot Simple usage of a Blackberry.
And though i vastly prefer my Curve2 to my old Pearl, both of them had equivalent basic functionality to the Treo 700 in line-of-business apps, such as contacts and appointments.
Internet access on the BB is just a little behind the best of the 3G/4G phones. Display is also slightly-to-moderately behind, but has been catching up.
So, Palm got beat by cellphones on voice and Internet connectivity. Palm got beat by Wince on applications deployment and display. Palm got slaughtered by RIM on email functionality. Palm (along with everyone else) GOT MASS MURDERED BY Apple on multimedia delivery, which will only get worse with the 3G iPhone.
And both LG and Samsung, gigantic industrial conglomerates with HUGE MONEY, are lining up to play whack-a-mole with the iPhone. They may not succeed, but they WILL deliver many more powerful cellular devices to further eclipse the Palm line.
I STILL LOVE MY PRISM, but it's SOOO Olde Skul...
Palm SHOULD HAVE become the "iPhone", but they got fat and lazy with a dedicated user base.
Then once they fell behing they didn't have the: talent, vision or resources to catch up.
Palm -- "The PDA That Time Forgot"
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Palm's demise was common wisdom when it was still dominant in the marketplace, and I never understood why. Even today, the several-year-old OS is better than Blackberry at everything but e-mail, and better than Windows Mobile at everything (I switched from Palm to Windows for a few years and just switched back; what a relief and pleasure to not be fighting my phone all the time).
I understand the OS can't multitask, but they've had plenty of time to correct that. I suspect it's too complicated for most consumers, and does not provided features needed by corporate IT for management, support and integration. But they've had plenty of time to correct that, too.
I'm sorry to see it die off. I love my Treo 755p. It's incredibly efficient, very reliable and, for my needs, highly functional.
It sounds like there were spending too much time fantasizing about their profits, 'cause it sounds like things are getting pretty hairy over there...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
What happened is they lost their best people to Handspring. From that point on it's been all downhill.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I've been a PalmOS user since 2000, when I procured my IIIc. I loved all my Palms except the 650. The 650 was nice, but crashed way too much for my likings. I now have a 680 that works much better and is a lot more stable.
There are two reasons I haven't bought an iPhone yet: PocketQuicken (by Landware) and PalmFuelLog (search google for the sourceforge.net page). Once those apps are available for the iPhone, I'll drop my Treo like a hot potato. WinCE and Blackberry are right out - don't like the interface, don't like most of the hardware (especially in Blackberry's case).
Yes, you heard it here first. The only reason Palm is still around is because people have become attached to their applications and there ain't any replacements just quite yet.
*whine* To the good folks at Landware: Get crackin'!! I want an iPhone dammit. Your app is preventing this from happening. */whine*
...I tried to find a Palm that didn't suck, since I needed one for certain medical software. (Emulators for Nokia or other devices are just far too slow, and can't turn on and off instantly.) I used my old Sony SJ33 until I finally came to the conclusion that all of the new Palm devices are garbage. Anything built since they moved to NVFS is a buggy unstable timebomb. My solution was to buy a refurbished Tungsten C from these guys, which was much faster than my T|X and perfectly stable. It's worthless for the internet, but as a PDA I like it (and the price) so much that I bought an extra one, just in case I drop it or something.
What happened to Palm is arrogance and greed.
They should have switched to Linux as their primary platform around 2000, putting a PalmOS emulator on top of it and working with the open source community. This is no 20/20 hindsight, I was saying the same thing back then.
But they wanted to own it all and develop it all themselves.
What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Join Android or Limo. Even if the market were still receptive to another platform, Palm doesn't have the buzz or developers to pull it off.
1) Spinning off the Palm software division. One of the reasons Palm worked so well was that it's hardware and software were tightly integrated. Removing that integration turned them into just another PDA/Smartphone manufacturer with nothing different to offer. Add to that a hardware third party (the only reason they split in the first place) that basically imploded and a buyout of the software division, and you got a disaster on your hands.
2) Axing off Hotsync Server. I had more execs wanting this function than I could count just so their secretaries could update their calendars on the fly. So when they couldn't get it because Palm decided it wasn't important enough, they switched to Outlook, since Exchange could share calendars over the network. Add to that the frustration of getting a Palm to sync with Outlook without duplicating something and you got a recipe to can your palm with something that syncs right, like Windows mobile or RIM.
3) Switching from Dragonball to Xscale. My Kyocera 6035 smartphone is over 6 years old. Personally, I usually get 7 days use out of my phone before I have to recharge it, and thats with a 6 year old battery. New it used to go for 2-3 weeks with moderate usage. Show me a Palm phone that could get 3-5 days without a charge out of the box. The Dragonball processors were not the fastest chips out there, but were unbeatable in the energy usage department. When Palm switched, the devices got fatter, bigger, and sucked battery life like water, All without offering a big benefit vs older Palms. I guess you now got more memory and more functionality available but what difference does it make to the exec that just using it for his calendar and contacts? All he knows is that his palm's battery lasts 1/4 of the amount of time of his old m515 and is twice as thick. So he tosses the palm to his secretary and goes out and gets that blackberry that everyone is talking about.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I currently own a Palm Tungsten T3(my previous PDA was a Palm m550) and until a year 1/2 ago was genuinely useful.
It did everything I wanted; play music, read pdfs, various programming options and browse the Internet with my mobile phone. There are/were many useful applications for it, Office software, font anti-aliasing software(way before Pocket PCs could do it) and even a Java VM (no longer downloadable because Palm discontinued it - this could have made it much more useful - mind you the implementation is extremely dated).
These days it's just a pain in the backside. I had to buy a new mobile phone and I cannot get my Palm T3 linked to my mobile - considering they both support Bluetooth my T3 just generates an Exception and crashes (I've looked for ways round it and none of them work).
My problem is that the OS is severely limited now. The memory structure is segmented (limited to 64k blocks?), you can't even task switch applications let alone multi-task - when you start an application the previous has to exit first.
The most *important* limitation my T3 has is that it is limited to 1GB sd cards!
On the other hand it fully backward compatible with old Palm-based software via it's emulator.
If Palm continued to update the OS (even for the TX) I would still use it but unfortunately this is yet another bad management decision by Palm.
Most Palm systems are based round an ARM processor and more than capable CPU, for just look at the Nokia n800 series or the Zaurus line of PDAs.
As far as I am concerned Palm just don't exist as a credible PDA company their management seem to lack any common-sense , business acumen or any experience.
There is still hope via the linux4palm project - but support is still immature, if they can complete support for the T3 then I will switch, beyond that my T3 days are coming to an end.
It's sad - Palm had a golden opportunity to really lead the PDA industry and in the early years were innovators but unfortunately the company will disappear.
My next PDA is going to be an open-source one. Whether it's Symbian or a Linux derivative that way I can stay in control of the technology.
I've been a Palm user for many years (Palm II) and I can tell you they haven't done anything for a long time. My Treo600 was pretty nice for its day. The 650 became nice plus bluetooth. The new Centro became nice plus bluetooth minus weight at the expense of screen size at that has to be the meat of it.
How much has the palm device has changed over the past few years. I haven't seen much of anything new since the treo600. How many years has that been without any significant innovation. The Centro is a sad testament to Palm moving backwards. Sure, it's smaller and lighter but so is the screen. Look at the iphone. The screen is huge but it is smaller and lighter than the treos too.
What happened to Palm? Whoever was in charge of innovation died! If not physically, then surely spiritually.
Come to think of it, wasn't the treo from another company (Handspring)? Didn't Palm absorb them to create the coolest stuff they have had to offer over the last few years anyway?
When is the last time Palm did anything cool?
I bought a Sony Clie, which was a "Palm device". However, when Apple introduced a new rev of OS X, the Palm Desktop which was compatible with the Clie was incompatible with the newest rev of OS X. So I updated Palm Desktop to a newer version, which was sort of compatible with OS X, but which destroyed much of my data on my Clie when I attempted to sync the Clie with my laptop, and the Clie was 100% incompatible with this new rev of Palm Desktop. If it hadn't caused me so much trouble, it would all have been rather hilarious.
And then, Sony withdrew from the US Palm market and withdrew
all support. Nice move, Sony. It was no surprise to me when I learned about the rootkit fiasco which came later; in fact I expect more such behavior from Sony, who have assumed a high position in my personal pantheon of "worst companies ever".
I will never buy anything from Palm or from Sony, and I advise many different clients to avoid these two companies at all costs.
Oh, and like the first poster said, Palm's support was among the worst I have ever experienced in dealing with ANY company.
It's all enough to make me wish a special corner of hell exists for companies which behave in such reprehensible ways ( there should of course be room for Billy Gates in that corner ).
First PDA was an M130, amazing piece of hardware with an amazing price point for the mobile market. I was sorely disappointed when it went tits up. Bought another, died again for unspecified reasons. But I was hooked at that point and got a Tungsten E. Far more durable, in part I attribute this to the optional clamshell protective case. Pretty screen, interesting software options, but doomed due to Palm's lackluster embrace of the wireless world. The whole Palm/PalmOne branding fiasco, lack of focus on product lines that actually fit market needs, and other douchebaggery ceded too much market share to other smartphones. Palm should have beaten Apple to the iPhone years ago, PDA's are supposed to be their fucking core competency! Blackberry beat them to it even earlier.
I got a Berry 7250 with my last job and the PDA became sorely neglected. The office integration was slick and I did all of my contact management/scheduling/note crap in there, plus email, etc. For casual entertainment, the internet was more than sufficient for browsing news sites, message boards, etc. The PDA was relegated to ebook reader. I like the idea of carrying reading material with me for whenever there's unanticipated downtime.
Lost the Berry when I switched jobs. Don't really feel the lack of the berry since the new position has different responsibilities, less mobile tech support and stuff, more desk-bound. PDA is back doing service as primary downtime reading device. The iPhone has a certain lure, especially with the big price break/performance increase, but I'm trying to avoid picking one up just on gee-whiz factor alone.
What I really liked about Palm and PalmOS is that there was a real PC mentality. "Hey, it's your hardware, do whatever the hell you want with it." Early palm adopters were very hacking-oriented and they came up with uses for the device the designers never anticipated. I loved the docs2go program with the ability to sync down a copy of a word doc and edit it on the palm. The IR keyboard turned it into a proper cheap-ass laptop and was pretty much in a class of its own until the ultra-lowend laptops started coming out recently. The thing that pissed me off about all the other portable devices, even the berry, is that they're less hacker-friendly. I've yet to see a berry ebook reader or even a means of uploading a text file to it. Emails truncate anything too large, same goes for putting large amounts of text in outlook notes. Adobe never wrote an acrobat reader for it like they did with palm.
I'm still not sure how much of a walled garden the iPhone is going to be. From the sounds of it, it'll be more open than typical American cell phones but less open than the pc's we've all come to know and love. I'm interested in seeing how it develops. I'm just very sad that Palm so thoroughly suicided itself. We'd probably be five years ahead of where we are know if they had their shit together.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Hmm?
What would you write your apps for? Someone who does ship those kinds of numbers on a routine basis or... Sorry, no, it's a no-brainer.
Deleted
You know, the sad part about that comment is that the Amiga was actually multi-tasking...
1) They haven't bothered to significantly upgrade their technology in years. Their development cycles are too slow and they've been milking their platforms as cash cows for too long with too little improvement.
2) PalmOS was clearly a dead end years ago and their Windows based systems basically outsource the crown jewels (the software) to Microsoft.
3) Treos were nifty at first but they've stagnated compared to the competition. Palm missed the idea that email is a killer app and never developed the backend infrastructure RIM did.
4) They don't have the financial resources or scale to compete long term with Nokia, RIM or Apple. And they have no defensible or must-have products to compensate.
5) Their "strategy" has been insane. There is no focus to the company. No vision. They buy technology and never use it. They break the company up for no clear reason and then put it back together.
Nothin' has been alright since.. Newton, and Pilot... Way before Blackberry there was Palm III and CE... And stylus-controlled LCD Our own kids in high school They tell us that we're uncool. Because we're still preoccupied with 1995
To be honest, I would recommend to the Board of Palm that they sell the whole company to Apple. Apple would make the most of whatever is valuable in Palm (employees, technology etc), and the Palm people can become involved in the most exciting developments in mobile devices (again). I'm sure that's what the people at Palm would love.
To the best of my knowledge, there are only two current phones that don't support Java : the iPhone and the Centro.
I'm not suggesting that Java is the most important feature of the phone, but that Java is so common that not including it on your phone is kinda flipping a finger at developers and users.
Apple can get away with anything and people will find ways to still love it, but Palm?
The platform is not completely open, and the software hasn't changed much since the company began.
Every mistake that the pundits wanted Apple to make, Palm tried.
They licensed out their OS. Then, because the licensees were complaining about Palm's unfair advantage, they split into separate hardware and software companies. They even bought Be, which everyone said Apple should have done instead of buying NeXT.
So what happened?
Well, the software side (PalmSource) came out with a fancy new OS based on the BeOS stuff they bought. And...the licensees all said "We'll get to it."
So PalmSource said, "Oh, and the 6.1 version will be even better!" So the licensees (including PalmOne, the hardware side) said, "Great! Tell us when it's ready."
So PalmSource panicked and said, "...um, great! Um...hey...we'll make our next OS based on Linux!" And the licensees said, "Oh, okay, we'll wait for that one then."
And so, without planning to, they committed the one fatal error when you're up against Microsoft - they stood still. Microsoft can't catch a moving target, but stand still and they'll run you over. The PDA market dried up and all the licensees bailed. PalmSource got sold off to a Linux company. PalmOne decided to make a Linux OS of their own, and it'll be ready Real Soon Now.
was in assuming that ordering direct from Palm was better from their point of view. It isn't. Manufacturers don't specialize in logistics, distribution or warehousing, all of which are complex problem spaces that require significant skill to execute correctly. In fact, many manufacturers are so inefficient in these areas that it actually costs them more to sell you a unit than for you to buy it through distribution, margins and all. It also costs them far more to attempt to diagnose and support a problem than to accept a large batch of returns from a major distributor.
Just buy the thing locally from a retailer with a no-questions-asked return policy, and if there's anything wrong with it that you think might be a hardware defect, return it and try another one. This would have saved you $100 in phone calls (though why the hell are you paying over a dollar a minute for long distance?) and would have saved Palm several hundred dollars in support costs.
-Graham
Personally, I don't care about multitasking. What I care about is that both their OS and hardware went from rock-solid stable to flaky and bug-ridden. I bought a refurbished Tungsten C that was built 5 years ago because it's much more reliable than anything they make now. It's also faster. This is something that was made in 2003, and it's better than what they make now.
The problem with Palm is they can't adapt. They're always behind and the market is moving too fast for them to catch up.
Palm need to stop doing whatever it is that they are regularly losing $40m doing. This may seem obvious, but their management don't seem to have realised it.
Accept that your OS (or microsoft's) will not be better than OS X on iPhone, and even if it was, you would not get 1/4m people to dl at your sdk and/or have costs below that of open source options.
Accept that you cannot make an iPhone/blackberry killer, because the goalposts move faster than you can. Accept that you are no longer a profitable player in the massmarket smartphone market, and get out of the massmarket and into niches. Now.
Palm could have easily made an N-Gage killer, let's face it, it practically killed itself, and it's basic idea is sound, just the execution sucked. What about NOT chasing after ever smaller phones, and targetting people willing to have a phone the same size as they had 5 years back but with unique features? Palm could be the only company (afaik) shipping a specialist 10-12 megapixel cameraphone today if they had spotted the niche. They could have 160Gb hard-drive MP3 player phone, they could have a phone that records decent quality video to a tiny hard drive, they could have got into bed with the open moko people, or gone to Sony and rescued the PSP with phone capabilities, or made a book-sized PDA with a big enough qwerty keyboard for older folks (or just big fingered) people to use, that last one would have cost nearly nothing to make, just house the exisiting internals in a bigger box with the same cheap screens the OLPC people use.
The other option is to stop, sack everyone, and split the remaining cash between the shareholders. If I had Palm shares, I'd be asking why they didn't do that 4 quarters ago.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
'Palm Computing filed lawsuits in Germany and Italy against Microsoft on Thursday, stating that the "Palm PC" designation will cause too much confusion among consumers .. a Microsoft spokesperson said.
.. :)
"We don't see how the name Palm PC conflicts with the name PalmPilot."'
Yea, who would confuse Lindows with Windows
davecb5620@gmail.com
Back in November 2006 when a reporter asked Palm CEO Ed Colligan what he thought of the threat of a phone from Apple he famously said: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
At the time I assumed it was a Ballmer-like move to try and stop the press from focusing on a competitor. Unfortunately for Palm, it looks like he actually believed it. Both with the original PDAs and with the Treos, Palm seemed to think they could get away with incremental upgrades forever.
Palm had a stand, it was THE brand for handhelds, they where also licensed by ibm and some else.
..
But then Palm made two big misstakes,
a.) betting on handhelds when smartphones were the trend
They remained manufacturing the tungsten etc.. pure handhelds which
in case of the Handspring Visor by a GSM springboard extension,
this is a way to gain money on the gadget market.
But as it turned out few people where willing to buy this gadget,
so Palm s stand was weakend missing a major devellopment.
b.) PalmSource, Palm, Handspring,
This was the second big misstake they made, starting a by-company and relicensing
the OS/Software back, and getting into a license mess
Palm needs to be perceived as one brand, with clear intention and a devellopment target
with this deal they wrecked their coorporate identity.
It dragged buisness users to other directions, buisness users fears uncertainity.
This action in such a situation when they just realized the crisis was there,
is questionable.
Palms decline isnt about application quality, the apps on the plattform are excellent,
they are such easy to use that even my mom is able to use my old treo270 and likes it.
Those apps do the things they are intended for, one thing I cannot tell about
Outlook2007, or the hole Office2k7 series apps.
At the moment I use a treo650 shot on ebay some time ago for a few bucks, and I am a totally
sattisfied Palm Customers.
But Palm has to get back on track, as a corrporate with an identity.
This was a letter from Engadget to Palm back in 2007, it left an impression on me after I read it. I think most of it still applies today.
Dear Palm,
Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven't really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven't given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great -- you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks.
The problem is that lately we haven't seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you've let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we've thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we're not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.
So yeah, it was probably a smart move to recognize that you needed to offer a Windows Mobile version of the Treo to appeal to enterprise users, but there are literally millions and millions of consumers who want a high-end, powerful mobile computer that isn't built around Exchange server support. What they're looking for is a great user experience. Apple has done a good job tapping into that market, but there's still a huge opportunity out there for Palm to offer a smartphone that's just as engaging as the iPhone, but that's also open, rather than closed, and more geared towards productivity.
Frankly, you've taken a turn from being the respected underdog and innovator to repeat offender in stale gear. Every press release you issue or "leaked" photo we see these days is another dent in your already banged up armor, and really, we're not sure how much more we can take -- our loyalty has practically become an embarrassment among peers. The New York Times totally nailed it when they said "Palm is about to release a new model in its Treo line and photos leak out to silence." That said, we humbly submit a few (mainly practical) suggestions for how you can turn things around, organized by hardware, software, and other.
Hardware
Get thin - Three words: FIGURE IT OUT. If HTC, Apple, and Motorola can offer thin (and we mean friggin' thin) smartphones, you can too. We know you think the Treo is perfectly proportioned, but it's not. It's chubby. No excuses any more, ok? It doesn't have to be as thin as the iPhone, but you've gotta trim some of the fat.
Bigger, higher resolution displays - Make the screen bigger and up the resolution and you'll go a long way towards winning us back. There's no reason the 750 shouldn't have 320 x 320 (or higher) -- Windows Mobile 6 supports that, or didn't you hear? But for new devices you might want to have the keyboard slide out, like with the HTC Hermes or the Samsung i730. It's a really smart move. The long and short of it is this: if you can find some way to marry the expanse of something like the iPhone's or G900's massive, high res screens and still retain the spirit of the Palm keyboard, people will be very interested.
Speaking of the keyboard, don't mess too much with it - Apple may or not add a physical keyboard to the iPhone (our money says it won't happen), but the one the Treo has now is pretty good and it's pretty much the one thing that's keeping a lot of Treo owners from jumping ship. And from what we hear, the Centro is going to have a keyboard that's "impossible to type on" -- not
The Treo 600 was amazing at the time (2003). A little buggy (I used one for a whole service contract), but for its time a tremendous touchscreen device. I "upgraded" to a Treo 700p, which is a 600 with curved keys, a little more screen res, and more memory. Same size, weight and thickness as a 600, though. (This is bad; compare the ipod over the same years). Also a buggy piece of crap, plagued with freezes, sync difficulties, and outright failures. After Palm tried to fix these problems with a firmware update, they trashed their data connectivity for four months in 2007. And when you called them for service they lied about it, saying there was "no known issue." This was demonstrably not true; every Palm message board was howling about it. Fortunately for me Verizon has good customer service; after they sent me 5 700ps they sent me a working 650 until Palm fixed the non-problem firmware. Even now they can do no better than the centro, which is a slightly smaller 5 year old tech phone. Don't even get me started on the software. The best palm os device I ever had was a Sony Clie, 6 or 7 years ago, and it had the same software, without the kludged and buggy phone added on. The browser "blazer" is horrible. The problem? It has to be management. No improvements in the hardware or software since 2002. The only thing they tried to innovate with was the silly "fooleo," (in their only wise move of the last 5 years) which they canceled. Their inaction is truly inexplicable. They owned the PDA market and had a huge head start on the smartphone business and they BLEW it.
He's trying to say she would suck your dick, so pay heed for next time. Jeez, Palm?..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
like many tech companies Palm has succumb to NBTS ... Next Big Thing Syndrome. Instead of maintaining its succesful product Palm put all its effort into the NBT trying to be the smartphone leaders while abandoning its lead in PDAs. Palm hasn't made a new PDA in years and its software is languishing. Now imagine if palm had an ounce of smarts and had continued to work on the life drive. Giving it a 30+ hard drive or an 16Gb flash mmmmmm would look a lot like an ipod touch wouldn't it.
I like the Treo phones; they are capable and the ones with the Palm OS are pretty good. Nice screens, etc.
But, every time I go to shop for a new phone, the Palm PDA-type phones are always so damned expensive. When I can get a Windows Mobile phone for free (or $99 for a delux one) with my plan, paying $600 for a Treo doesn't seem to make much sense.
They've marketed for a fairly small segment it seems, so I don't know why it's a surprise that they're struggling.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Handspring was bought again by Palm, at the time Handspring presented the very first Treo 600. Jeff Hawkins, and Donna Dubinksy were again rehired in the main management. So you can say Palm rehired Handspring's folks back, but it seems that was pretty irrelevant in determining the current state of Palm. Blame poor management for that, in particular the current (Ed Colligan) and past CEOs, for total lack of ideas.
I loved my Palm Zaire. I used it for several years daily until it died. I went back to the local Fries, I hadn't been following PDAs since I already had one I liked, and was shocked to find they didn't have a model that would do half what my two year old Zaire could do. I would have been fairly happy if they had kept making that model. Increase the quality of the camera and add some better software and I would have been extremely happy. I used to load in video files and movie trailers and I had thousands of photos and I never used anywhere near the capacity, I had a 1 gig card. I didn't use it for music which would have eaten up a lot of space. I never did it but at the time I even considered loading in movies on on 1 gig cards to have them with me when I traveled. The point is that was four years ago. You still can't take movies with an iPhone and the camera is only twice the resolution. I have big fingers so I still found data entry easier on Palm devices. I really wish iPhone would add a stylus so you could have drawing programs and hopeful some kind of script reading software. The old PDA had a lot going for them but they seem to get old and tired before their time. The technology moved on and they didn't.
3Com... They destroyed two good brands in one buyout. US Robotics was the other disaster they left behind. We'd probably be enjoying both of their innovative tech to this day if not for that horrible decision so many years ago. Only thing good that came of it was I was able to finally pick up some more of the high-end USR 56k modems for $50 each when they liquidated the stock. They originally were about $250 even with the sysop discount.
One thing that certainly isnt going to save Palm is stealing away Apple engineers.
Palm had it's chance to be successful... but the world decided not to wait for them. All the VC money in the world isnt going to flog that dead horse back to life. They mismanaged their way into their current condition, and they obviously can't mismanage their way out of it.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never go up against Microsoft on their own ground.
Microsoft sucked them in to attacking Microsoft on their own ground, trying to turn the Palm organizer into a laptop replacement comparable in capabilities to the Pocket PC, instead of gradually expanding the Palm's capabilities as Moore's Law let it get cheaper and cheaper and sell to more and more people. The Zire should have been followed by more cheaper Dragonball-based devices pushing down to pocket-calculator prices, instead of sinking resources into a new operating system.
That's the tactic that HAD kept Microsoft's market share under 20% well after the "Pocket PC" was supposedly sweeping them aside. Abandoning PalmOS 4, getting sucked into the Second Coming of the BeOS Disaster, and bringing Hawkins and his corporate ADHD back in, completely blew any hope they had. They simply had no strategy and no hope of creating a new one.
If they'd stayed with PalmOS 4 they could have had Palms on an endcap in every supermarket in the country, with an effective monopoly in that market giving them decent margins even at calculator prices. That's a market that Microsoft has no hope of getting into... they have no OS that will run on hardware that cheap. Even if they only cleared 20% of the profit they got from each "T" they'd be selling 20 TIMES as many units.
But Microsoft sucked them in, they hitched a ride on a burned-out star, and they're done.
2) Dump PDA line, close down any idiotic Folio-like R&D until profitable.
3) Fundamentally redesign the appearance hardware, and boost its features. Palm needs smartphones that combine the business-edge of RIM with the glitz of the iPhone.
4) Throw out smartphone that is innovative and a noticeable improvement over its predecessor at least twice a year. You need volume, turnover, and upgrade incentives.
5) Get a new OS, now. If you have to, buy or rent another OS, and slap a Palm emulation layer on top.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
The problem with Palm was simple. They were a hardware company with a software arm. They spun off the software side so they could offer devices with different OSs, mainly so they no longer had to compete with Microsoft. The software side created a mobile OS that was technically superior to most out there, but cheap hardware couldn't run the microthreaded OS real effectively.
Enter Linux. Palm has been working on a Linux kernel based OS for the past couple years now. When I was down there awhile back, they were hiring Linux guys in a major way. They're at least as far along as Android, and maybe further. The main reason you don't hear about Palm's Linux distro is because they keep tight lipped about things, unlike Android, which has been more about marketing than about actual development now for a long, long time. The thing is, Palm takes longer because they tend to do wild things like...make developer tools available before the thing is released...stuff that Apple could never be bothered with doing properly.
. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.)
Over a dollar a minute for toll rates? Find a new provider - seriously, you're getting ripped off. VOIP is great if you're in area that has it; otherwise various other long distance carriers have 'unlimited usage' packages. Hell, even paying for skype-to-landline would've b een a whole lot cheaper than that.
(You mention AT&T so I assume you're living in the USA; if not, disregard... ;) )
iPhone.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Palm based mobile phones did really really well before the iPhone was released and cut into the Palm Phone market. Basically Apple stole all of the PalmOS mobile phone features for the iPhone and found a way to market the iPhone better than the Palm phone. Palm should sue Apple over Apple stealing their IP for a touch based mobile phone with PDA and media player abilities to create the iPhone.
Palm has to make an iPhone killer with a lower price than the iPhone, with the same features, but able to work on any network.
Palm also could try making a TV set top device using PalmOS to play MP3s, Videos, DVDs, CDs, and even play some video games as a combo Game Console slash TV-Media device.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
What happened is they lost focus - they made (make?) great PDA's. The Treo sucks - everyone I know who has one hates it - you all know the reasons so I'm not going to belabor them here.
I have a Tungsten C right now - love it except that they don't make it any more, and no one has a WPA client for it (anyone know of one? Free preferably). Works great - I have a bunch of databases in it, use it every day.
The full keyboard is nice too - I can thumb it pretty quickly.
So tell me - why'd they stop making it? Oh yeah, because it worked! Same F'in reason that Apple stopped making the Newton - it worked...
Anything that works isn't good for business so they need to move on...
3 Reasons I refuse to buy another palm!!! 1) Their customer service support for their products sucks worse then almost anything out there 2) Software is BUGGY and and hardware is prone to break down (Locking up of a default base Treo on or during or when a important business call comes in is not a good way to attract customers) Each model of their treo has something buggy about it. 3) They don't give a crap about their customer base. Blackberry/Iphone 3g all da the way BABY!!!!!
When Palm started they had these piddly little 68000 CPUs and less than a meg of RAM. They did the right thing - they followed the Zen of OS design and produced a minimal OS that performed amazingly on such a machine. But recent Palm machines are way more powerful than the workstations I used to have on my desktop. You can't control a beast like that with a toy OS. The MS strategy was correct after all - write a slow bloated OS because one day, in the not too distant future, it will cease to seem slow and bloated on fast new devices without anyone having to change a line of code. Maybe there's a message there: take into account what's available today, but make sure you're writing code in such a way that it'll last as long as you expect your business to last.
And after countless years, did Palm *ever* write a tool that allowed you to find out what was actually stored on your Palm? None of the Palms I ever owned had such a feature.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Apple didn't make the iPhone SDK available before the release of iPhone 2.0? Really? Or are you just referring to the fact that the iPhone launched without any sort of platform for third party app development (in which case, fair enough).
I agree. I bought a couple of Palm IIIxe devices because they are reliable and use rechargeable, non-proprietary batteries. As someone else noted, there are many great apps available for this device, and even with just the stock Calendar, To Do list and Note attachments, I keep myself organized nicely.
Palm dumped its PDA customers to go after "smart phones", didn't win the latter market, and didn't cultivate the former market. Now they are fooked.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Firstly, I want to say that for the entire 2-year period I owned a Treo, I desperately wanted it to be the perfect device. It was so close.
But, what happened to Palm is simple: their flagship device was simply not something you could rely on.
Because "franken" garnet (palmos 5) had no form of memory protection or scheduling, a million little hacks were needed to make it seem like a modern, functional OS. Users were demanding advanced functionality (like background processing for MP3 players), and instead of introducing a modern OS core (ie. cobalt or palm's UI on linux), they chose to hack in feature after feature to the ancient palmos 5. It was cheaper (in the short-term).
The treo 650 was somewhat stable if you didn't do anything with it. If you simply used it as a phone, never installed any software, and rebooted it regularly, you could usually count on it to function when you needed it.
If, however, you installed any software (particularly that which runs in the background), within a month or two the phone would start crashing randomly. It didn't matter which software you installed; eventually, one or two apps would cause device instability, and you could spend days and days trying to figure out what was wrong. I'm saying this a 24/7 debian user, sysadmin, with 10 years C/perl/java experience (and having even written several palmos apps); I truly can't imagine trying to debug a treo as a business user.
In the end, a phone/PDA must be reliable. It cannot drop calls, forget to notify you of an appointment, or lose data. The treo failed on all three fronts.
Compounding this fundamental flaw was the fact that Palm (the company) was so arrogantly silent on the issue, slow to release patches (most of which didn't work anyway), and often in denial that the problem even existed. When confronted, often their line was "it's your 3rd party applications." Wrong answer. This is a modern computing device. If the OS crashes, it is not the fault of the applications. What is this, 1992?
This was the major problem, but not the only. Lack of automated background sync, simple over-the-network sync, true multitasking (or even context-saving task switching), sufficient workspace memory, and wifi made it even less attractive. The sudden rush towards Windows Mobile alienated the remaining Palm supporters, who were hoping for Cobalt (palmos 6), not WM5.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Hell, that was long ago. Those things have almost nothing to do with their current problems. Graffiti 2 finally took off, and third parties developed some quite excellent media players and other modern applications, which worked quite well... at least as well as the competitors.
All the clever people vested, stopped caring, and left.
When Palm became a market leader, normal market forces took over. Things like backwards compatibility. Along with too much input from marketing and legal, which stifled what few clever people came in to replace the first generation.
Happens all the time.
They are dead. Silicon Valley landfill.
Maybe some people will learn a lesson from it. Most won't.
They failed to capitalize on their strengths.
.jpg, etc.) play .wav, .mp3, and other audio formats with a very capable mp3-player application, display videos from many video formats (after a brief but easy conversion process).
It is not that their OS could not keep up... it could. My Palm Tungsten (not even the newer version) runs some excellent third-party applications that can read/write documents compatible with Word and other word processors, read / write spreadsheets from Excel and other brands, display PDFs quite well, swap screen orientation, display picture files (.gif,
It was great. Bluetooth, wifi, etc. The touchscreen was great and the handwriting recognition was very good. Often better than trying to type it all it.
In short, the Palm had almost all the little pieces that go into the iPhone today, 3 or 4 years ago! So... what went wrong?
They did not take all those pieces and put them all together into a single, smooth package or set of features. The completely failed to capitalize on those strengths, and instead threw them away.
Example: the Treo phone. Now, among the STRENGTHS of the Palm were: nice high-resolution touch screen, and good writing recognition OR a pop-up on-screen keyboard. So, what did Palm do on the Treo? They made the screen SMALLER, scratched default Graffiti support, and put in a shitty little blackberry-style keyboard! I.e., they adopted a competitor's solution and at the same time gave up two of the advantages they had over that competitor (Blackerry).
They followed that pattern in a number of other ways... compromising their own strengths in order to cater to the perceived desires of their competitors' customers.
That is simply not a way to get ahead.
Palm could have BEEN the iPhone, 2 years before the iPhone. But they dropped the ball. Again and again and again, they "compromised" by giving up their better features in order to emulate others.
Treos are notorious for being buggy, unstable, and spontaneously rebooting or requiring frequent reboots.
I had a Treo 600 from Cingular and I can speak for that firsthand. During the course of the day, it must have rebooted at least 5 times -- many times in the middle of a call.
I won't speak for others, but I won't tolerate a smartphone that behaves like Windows 2.0. A smartphone must be stable -- like an alarm clock, TV, etc.
I sent it back to Palm and went to a Blackberry. No stability problems and it just flat out worked.
Years ago Palm split into a hardware and a software company. They've had problems for more than 8 years and they don't seem capable of learning. They screwed up. PalmOS is still not a truly multitasking OS. The Palm Centro (Sprint) phone, was, as everyone saw, the last gasp of a dying company. The Treos and Palm phones are pretty much crap in terms how people actually want to use their phones now - as partner clients to their desktops or to web apps, as browsers and as multimedia players.
Are you calling from the ISS? What's your fucking problem?
They loved their handwriting recognition software more than themselves.
As I've been complaining, Palm took the best idea they had and locked it away, waiting for the big cash payoff. It never ocurred to them to license the process, keeping the rights from beginning to end, being a part of every launch in the industry, making a little money here and there if they never made another product.
But now...cash, now: much more important.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Back in the days when Palm was doing well, they spun off their OS to it's own company, figuring that a separate company that was focused on just the OS would do a better job developing the OS, and would handle the licensing of the PalmOS to other companies.
Well, the OS company ended up being purchased by Access, a company that did NOTHING. Palm was now licensing the OS that they had developed, and Access eventually decided to make a Linux based OS that would be compatible with the existing PalmOS software base. Years passed, and finally we are at the end of 2007. The ALP(Access Linux Platform I think is what it stood for) just didn't end up being what Palm was looking for.
So, here we are, Palm having wasted years waiting for Access to get their act together. Palm decides to do what they should have done years earlier, do the work themselves to make a new OS. The press from Palm indicates that they hope/expect that the OS will be ready toward the end of 2008 under the code name NOVA. NOVA based Palm devices SHOULD show up in the first half of 2009 if all goes well.
The sad truth of what has happened to Palm comes down to letting others control YOUR OS, and trusting another unproven company to develop what really is the key to keeping your company doing well.
For what it's worth, the UI for the Treo line of smartphones is a bit better than the competition, but the ancient OS is holding it back. If NOVA turns out to be any good, it has the potential to bring a LOT of people back to Palm. UI is CRITICAL to making people either love or hate a smartphone, and Windows Mobile really sucks when it comes to the UI. Symbian isn't very good either, and don't get me started on the Blackberry crap, which is only good when it comes to corporate e-mail.
So, that's the short version of what happened...customer service goes downhill when a company loses it's focus and the employees don't love the products the company produces.
I have to admit, I kind of liked the Newton. It was a handy dandy device that was more than happy to accept a hand drawn sketch, straighten out all the lines, and output to a post script printer.
The palm in my mind was sort of a lightweight in contrast. Good appointment manager and contact list.
I wonder if there is anything your average palm can do that a cell phone can not. Sure the screen is smaller, and most don't have options for full keyboards or stylus entry. But with bluetooth, or a data sync cable, one can effectively have a keyboard for phonebook or date entry. Heck, one can use web to phone options. A digital pad was kind of nice to write down things, but I can do the same thing on my mobile, and it has a shitty camera to boot. If I wanted to price bamboo flooring, I can just snapshot the price tag, faster than hand writing by any standard.
So to me, a Palm would be kind of redundant.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I agree with what people are saying about the T|X. I had gone to Best Buy to purchase a Compaq iPaq pocketpc, but the only one left was a display unit, which they refused to sell to me. So, being impatient, I just bought the Palm T|X. What a piece of CRAP! I used to have a Palm VII (the one with the wireless internet service) some years ago, and loved it, but the Palm T|X, while it looked great in concept, failed miserably. Before I was even able to install any third party software on it, the thing had to be hard reset no less than 10 times on the first night I used it. The next day I returned it to best buy for a full refund, and just ordered the pocket pc. I had to wait nearly 2 weeks to get it, but I've been using it ever since, with only a few slight problems that are few and far between.
I think these two great companies merged together some time ago...
signature is pants
Are you insane?
http://freewarepalm.com/
Please before you die, release BeOS as open source. I don't even care if it is GPL or BSD or anything, just toss it out to hobbiests.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
You have a decade to advance your platform and make it the most compelling, ubiquitous line of handheld/smartphone products around.
You can't garner the talent and mindshare and we're supposed to care?
What can Palm do? Easy:
1. Make a device that's better than the iPhone
2. Make the software open source
I've had a Palm device of some sort since the Palm Pilot Pro. My Treo 755 is, hmm, let me count... my 7th one. From DAY 1 on Windows, I was syncing with Outlook. Not exactly flawlessly. That much I'll grant. I had a lot of problems with duplication of entries, but I suppose because I was synchronizing between both work and home computers. However, it always fired up and worked.
I switched to using Linux as my main desktop about 12 years ago now. (My user agent will tell on me that I'm typing this from Windows, but I've been playing video games, and just checked /. before going to bed.) Linux support for Palm has always been there, but it's always been BUGGY. Just two days ago, I finally figured out that I can now sync ONCE, and then I have to reboot in order to sync again. What happened? I have no idea. I run Gentoo, so I guess something changed out from under me, but I have no idea what it might have been. I haven't updated any of the usual suspects in the chain of tools that it takes to sync. At least, I didn't THINK so...
I've hassled with this for OVER A DECADE now. At times, early on, it was enough to keep me in Windows for stretches of time. I spent a lot of effort -- and put up with a lot of incomplete support for things like priorities and categories -- to setup sync'ing with Evolution, but it was so buggy, I finally just gave up after a couple years. I've been just using jPilot for some time now, and now the whole thing has gone pear shaped on me. Not even using pilot-xfer at the command line can get around the one-sync-per-boot problem.
I guess that just leaves the kernel and udev as the problem, but messages in the log look the same on subsequent tries, so I don't know what to think. I tell you, the whole thing has become so frustrating, I just want to throw the Treo against the wall. I know I should jump in there and work on it myself, but if I'm going to spend time on something like that, this problem doesn't make the top of the list. I guess I'm willing to live without sync'ing in Linux rather than fix it.
I don't really have a point here. Peripherals not playing well in Linux. Film at 11. I just needed to vent, and this thread came along at the wrong time.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
The problem is not their hardware. The hardware is great. It's their inability to deliver on a stable, usable operating system. Whoever has been in charge of the OS division of their company should not only be fired, but charged with criminal negligence.
They haven't yet delivered on their Linux OS, and their use of Microsoft Mobile is a total disaster.
In my own experience, I've owned several Treos, and recently upgraded to a 750. It came with Microsoft Windows Mobile, which, though I generally haven't had good experiences with Microsoft software, I thought I'd give a quick whirl. Little did I know what I was in for.
Among the many, many instabilities, the worst is the SMS application. It freezes about 25% of the time when a message is received, dropping the message. This means that SMS is basically unusable. Perhaps an upgrade would fix it, but I hesitate to upgrade because the online message boards are filled with posts of people who've attempted the process and bricked their phones.
I was also shocked to discover that there's no way of syncing your calendar, contacts, etc. on Windows Mobile without using Outlook. No way at all, unless you want to rely on a really buggy pre-alpha open source package, which I don't.
I don't like Outlook, I don't want to use Outlook, and I certainly don't want to pay for more Microsoft software after I've already (implicitly) paid for their OS, which replaces what Palm previously did for free.
I've given up on waiting for Palm to get their act together. I still love their hardware, but their total incompetence in delivering a stable and modern OS will mean I, for one, will never be a customer again.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
I got a sony clie TG50 palm device some years ago. It was a great device. Except that Sony crippled it and made things incompatible. Still, its a great device.
But why I can't get a half way decent web browser on it? From what I can tell, even the newest Centro palm phone, which I have considered upgrading to, still has a browser not much better than this 5+ year old clie.
I have trouble using the UI (particularly the scroll bars) even with a stylus, much less a finger. Its also been unstable, frequently crashing.
When there are things like iPhones or iPod Touch, why the hell should I pay just as much for a Palm device anymore? The only thing stopping me from getting one is that I dont want to switch cell phone carriers.
I thought their apparent plan to make palmos on top of linux was a great idea, but where is it?
It all just kinda feels like Amiga all over again. Great technology -- initially, but then it just ages badly and festers under poor company management.
It seems like Palm is all but dead, and approaching the time when there's just no point in keeping it going or resurrecting it.
Its too bad. I have my TG50 and my wife has a Palm Tungsten, both great little units, but practically useless anymore.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
THe common element was the lingering, or maybe malingering presence of Eric Benhamou at Palm. This man's sole skills were self-aggrandizement and self-promotion - his main achievements were in destroying 3Com, a company once considered to be the main contender in networking with Cisco, and then Palm, the first successful foray in pen computing. Once he has scored the stock option windfall at 3Com, he did absolutely nothing with any companies he was involved in, but having the gall to keep collecting $1M+ salaries even though he was already vastly wealthy.
If there ever was a poster child for the undeserving rich CEO, it is Eric. 3Com in general is a classic example of the worst case outcome with American corporate governance. The board of 3Com, ranked at on occasion as THE worst board in the tech industry allowed all of this to happen because it had been packed with friends of Eric.
There have of course been numerous other instances of this, cf. George Fisher at Kodak, but the complete contempt for even pretending to do his job means that Benhamou will be immortalized in b-school cases for years to come. If that had been his goal, I guess I could have some respect for that, but alas, by Occam's razor, venality and stupidity is the answer.
Let's just say it's getting hairy.
You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means. :)
... but I actually like my Centro. A lot.
WinMobile stinks on ice (reboot my *phone*? WTF?) and the Symbian offers from T-Mobile (where I stay for the reasonable data plan and the fact that they don't get their knickers in a twist when I tether my laptop) are just ... well ... lacking. And RIM--well, unless I want to spend several hundred more, I'm back to WinMobile again--did I mention that that stinks on ice? Ah, yes, I did.
I've had it about a week and with Google Maps w/ My Location finally working I'm nearly as happy as I'd be with an iPhone (except that the iPhone doesn't (a) come on T-Mobile except by hack, and (b) doesn't support Bluetooth DUN--no tether via iPhone except by SOCKS5 hackaround, not ideal to say the least).
And it's rock-freaking-solid. Newer != better in all cases, after all. Yes, the browser could be better, yes, the screen could be larger--but you know what? It's good enough. And if I need more I've got a laptop. Or my N800, which also happily tethers to the Centro.
Add to that the fact that I can buy it unlocked and why would I want something different?
-- Cerebus
I had a palm M105, which i loved very much (especially for it's capability to accept AAA Standard batteries and rechargables, which are available even in the middle of nowhere). It did what it should-it kept my Adresses, my Appointments and my notes - and was well readable in bright sunlight (simple plain monochrome LCD). Then I bought a Z31 (after the M105 was stolen). It wis not readable in Sunlight, but i overall appreciate it because you can use it as MP3-Player and the memory card gives you space to store dictionaries etc. In End of 2006 my beloved Nokia 6310i started to fail and it was clear i was going to Japan for my Job. So i decided to get a smartphone. I tried to find a Palm Treo to buy (i really would have liked it), but missing 3G just excluded the models from the list. Now, nearly two years later, i see still no Palm OS device with 3G. For me it's dead. I am missing a lot of the convenience of the palm's PIM functions on my Nokia E61, but i have gotten used to it. I am looking forward to the day when a Palm OS Emulator will appear for Symbian OS to run the old calendar app on a Version of a Nokia Phone with a touchscreen.
They need to merge all of thier linux oses with the android google phone and put out a few android phoes that run the old palm apps as well as the pretty google oes. And they should pray.
Of course they could try to draw salaries and options and rn the whole thing into the groud, but that seems to be right where they are right now.
I started with what I believe was called the Palm Pilot Pro. Wow! What a handheld marvel. It was the iPhone of its day (that neat tech gizmo that everyone had to have). So many new apps being developed for it!
Today, I have a Palm T|X. What do I use it for? #1: MP3 player #2: Video player on an airplane #3: Simple web access via WiFi in a pinch (or for boredom).
What has changed? The third party apps really have dried up. I used to see all sorts of neat things coming out for it on a daily basis. Today, I only see a few die-hards programming for the platform anymore.
The existing Palm line is dead. No life. You all should have been updating it, but you totally bet your business on the future. Bad mistake.
And what kind of a future will it be? Oh, you've got a mobile device like a unixy type platform. Kind of like the iPhone? Kind of like Android? Kind of like that LiMo foundation and the Symbian foundation? Good luck with all these well-backed competitors.
Palm: At this point, if you don't produce something completely stunning, you're dead.
Seems clear to me that what happened was that Microsoft got Palm to take their eyes off the ball. It's not that Microsoft ever delivered what they were promising. (A reservation that I haven't really used the latest version--but why would Microsoft even worry (or care) about the promises now? The threat from Palm?) What Palm was originally doing was something very different--and wonderful. But, but, BUT it wasn't Microsoft compatible. With the pressure of Microsoft's advertising, they were able to persuade lots of Palm customers that the PDA should be some kind of Windows Lite mini-monster. The strategy worked. Palm started losing money--and they never had the deep pockets of Microsoft--and they let Microsoft define the terms of the debate. It didn't matter to Microsoft that they were also losing money. Pocket change losses to Microsoft were more than Palm ever made as profits--but Microsoft could just fritter it away--and the latest diagnostic financial report I read (filtering under the camouflage) concluded they were *STILL* losing money on Windows Mobile. If you've used it, you'd know why. It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on the pig.
In conclusion, I am delighted to announce that I just retired the Windows Mobile device I was basically forced into when Palm PDAs were abandoned here. It was only a couple of years of suffering, but it sure felt like forever.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The Palm 755p is running the same software on the same processor as the Palm 650, the 680p, the 700p, the 750p, and the Centro. They change the form factor a bit from model to model, but honestly, Palm hasn't had a really new idea in YEARS. With everyone out there competing to be the hottest new thing on the market, Palm just keeps treading water.
They haven't upgraded the goddamn processor in 4+ years!
I got a 750p and I like it, but when my contract comes up for renewal next year... not getting another Palm. Probably not sticking with this one. If Apple would do a bulkier iphone with a slide-out QWERTY keypad and a replaceable battery, I'd seriously consider them. But since that doesn't seem likely, I'll probably get a Blackberry.
Start a happiness pandemic
... by giving the Mac OS users a second class treatment with their Palm Desktop application.
It's always the first sign of a decline, if a company's Mac application qualtity goes down. This is because Mac users are extremly loyal. By that they are even forgiving. But Palm never released a first class experience after that.
Just to show an opposite: while Microsofts Word 5 was WORSE on Mac, they listened to their Mac base and did everything - up to now - to make a real "Mac" product.
Palm lost the faith of the Mac users. And I bet that this was something that within Palm hurt the morale of many employees...
And the rescue is Linux on Palm hardware. They must foolow Nokia success with mojo project and support community effort of guys at http://hackndev.com/ that ported linux to many Palm models. Only few thing needed - full hardware specification of devices available to developers, tiny financial support and a bit of PR.
How they can be so stupid? Why they spent a lot of money on closed-source project with Linux kernel and PalmOS emulation, that did not give then anything?
I think they deserved to be drown for greed and torpor.
Seems to me that Palm has just been sitting on their hands. Made some great products then did nothing to improve on them. The Centro doesn't even have WiFi.
Their Products' Strength is the APPS, yet they don't push that as the REASON to go with Palm.
It's frustrating!
Treo, with a usably-big screen, is an incredibly effective/useful system.
Yet Palm.com is murdering this excellent platform.
They need to read "Focus" ( Al Ries ) -- because they don't understand that a company can be Known As/For exactly 1 thing.
"The Definitive Business Plan" ( Richard Stutely ) -- because it seems they don't understand what they're planning.
"Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines" ( David H. Freedman / Forbes editor-in-chief, or something )
-- because getting the culture of survival/success requires the *attitude* of success, and
"The Feiner Points of Leadership" ( Michael Feiner ) -- because their day-to-day process has obviously produced their demise, and they NEED DIFFERENT MEANS*RESULTS RIGHT NOW.
PALM, if you CAN hear this, AS MANY OF YOU AS POSSIBLE DIG INTO THESE & CHANGE TO LIVE, PLEASE.
Many of us find the closed Sony/Ericsson units appalling,
Motorola's anti-Linux-user blockheaded & offensive,
etc...
We WANT Effective Palm Devices & Support, but you need to understand your strength, the APPs!
Get the best apps, get people excited about 'em, make useable & effective devices
( Centro's more a trinket/toy/fashion-accessory, not a good organizer -- If you've already a Blackberry, then maybe, but if you're wanting IN STEAD of a crackberry... full-size, and NOT Windows-based )
I can tell you what happened to Palm, Charlie Brown.
The simple matter is that they're selling the same crufty old hardware today that they were selling 5 - 7 years ago. Same elderly version of Bluetooth, same low-resolution camera, same old version of PalmOS, same obsolete display, same antiquated specs, same tired old apps. And still no wifi. I've been hanging onto my ancient Treo 650 since 2005, having replaced the screen, antenna, misc screws and twice replaced the battery, in the vain hope that Palm would come up with something that would make it worth upgrading. During that time, they have come up with new marketing slogans and some different, rather clunky packaging but nothing substantially different in features. It's like they fired their engineering staff in 2004 and have been coasting since.
For the last time, this is what we want to see from Palm:
- Refresh the OS and applications, especially the mailer and browser.
- Bluetooth version 2, for God's sake! It's been out since 2004!
- Wifi. Don't give me crap about Palm OS 5 being incompatible with wifi. Either fix the OS or get some new engineers.
- While we're at it, stop making noise about someday running the PalmOS API on Linux and how neat it will be. It's time to put up or shut up. Release something now. Anything. Let us know that you still have the capability to design a product and bring it to market.
- Minimum 3 Megapixel camera with flash. C'mon, Blackberry is doing it. Get with the program.
- Palm was one of the first with touch screen, and then they never did anything else with it. Excite us. Not with blocky new packaging, but with substantially better UI. And this *doesn't* mean porting the same old Windows Mobile platform everyone else is using. We're excited about what Apple is doing. We endure Windows Mobile. Do you understand the difference?
When other companies continue to innovate and improve, Palm continues to coast, wasting what feeble engineering capability they still have on abortions like the Folio.
That's what happened to Palm, Charlie Brown.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Palm stopped focusing on what made them famous, useful pda's. The Palm TX is great, they should continue to make them better but it seems they're only interested in cheap smartphones now, trying to compete with mobile phone giants. I would have paid a couple hundred extra for a high end TX with a metal shell and extra memory. If they had offered high end options they could have made them pretty desirable to a good sized niche market with better profit margins but they instead tried the one size fits all, cheap as possible approach instead. I think things like the EEE pc are going to eventually replace them. Its too bad, Palm had a lot of potential. I still use my TX almost every day as there is so far nothing else that compares but I haven't seen any new palm products in a while.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx
I recently thought it was time to upgrade to faster net access, and a better camera would be handy too. I thought the processor must be faster too, being newer, but silly me didn't check. So I caved to the lockin and got a Treo 755p from the Sprint store.
The faster networking is nice, but the phone renders so slow, it's not a major win
The camera is the first of my treos (previous ones were 600 and 650) with a useable camera
Comes with a few more apps, and particularly like the voice recorder button, which always seemed like an obvious thing to have. I confess to getting addicted to Bejeweled on it too
Then I fired up Acrobat. See, my treo is my primary reading device. I have gone digital, and my entire library fits in the sd card (ok, I've kept a number of real books I can't get digital yet, but there's more digital content available than I have time to read, so for practical purposes...). This is one of the primary applications I use on the phone, at least the equal of actually using it as a phone or a pda, and one it's surprisingly good at. Well, the 650 is. Granted, it's a little slow --- 1-2 second page turns. Not really so different from paper page turns though. Not so the 755: 5-10 seconds. I kid you not --- I timed it. Particularly going backwards. I finally checked the specs, and it uses the same processor the 650 does, so it should be at least as fast, but something they've done really slowed it down. Didn't matter if the book was in local memory or the sd card either.
Given that the improvements were marginal, spending $300 and getting locked into it for two years (or another $200) was just silly. Hopefully Android or Openmoku will work well on a phone with a useable keyboard (ssh is another critical app, though not frequently used)...
And I bought bejeweled for the 650 ;-)
Well, they could use well known strategy - sue!
Some suggested steps:
1st - Sue Nokia for open sourcing Symbian, because Palm actually owns the source code.
2nd - Sue General Motors for using Palms some seven years ago.
3rd - Claim GSM was invented by Palm and sue anyone using it still.
4th - Insist that someone wants to buy you and that you cannot be touched, until that deal is off. (Don't forget to forget who the potential buyer was)
5th - Hire a pile of scum bag lawyers to raise your stock market value.
6th - Get as many enemies as you can in the established industry and the hobbyist open source movement.
7th - Squeek
I am sure there are more ideas they can come up with themselves. Just innocuously.
Palm is doing the same that Psion did, with equal success.
They have a very good product, but then two things happen: (a) the market changes and they don't keep up; and (b) they make 'newer, better' devices that just aren't.
I used to have a Psion Revo (my brother still uses his Series 5mx). I loved it, but it died. It did everything I needed it to, and nothing I didn't need it to -- hence it had awesome battery life (but even so incomparable to a 5mx). But, it *was* an old and worn device, and it just did not last forever, in spite of the great build quality. Then the company died (very slowly, awkwardly, and unworthily). I miss it, though.
I have a T3 (well, two; one as a spare). I love it, but it's dying. It does everything I need it to, and nothing I don't need it to. But, it *is* an old and worn device, and it just is not going to last forever, in spite of the great build quality. I'm not surprised the company is dying. I'll miss it, too, though.
"Good news, everyone!"
When I first heard about OLPC, I realized they would never reach the U$S:100 mark. The better alternative instead of reinventing the whell would have been for Palm to use their Zire 21 (that already sells fro U$S:100 retail) and add it wifi. With that functionality, if you sell it directly in millions of units (how OLPC does), you would get a zire 21 with wifi for U$S:100.
That would have been really transforming.
The public is really aching for a mobile platform that is capable but that is not locked in.
The constant fight against companies in order to do more with the devices we have paid for indicates there is a real need there.
What Palm needs to do is to release new products with a new OS that covers the basics (input/output, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) and let the community get on with things creating applications and new innovative uses.
If they just release something else that is closed they simply have got no chance, Nokia, Apple and other players in the market can afford to release closed stuff, wait for the market reception and adjust with new models to the demands of the market. Palm has not got the resources for that, openness may be their last chance to avoid oblivion.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is still no Vista x64 support. Shocking.