Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS

BobB-nw writes to tell us that Palm has decided to kill their PalmOS operating system and is instead betting their future on a still mostly unknown Palm webOS. Very little is known about the new Palm webOS, but it will supposedly support HTML5 and enable a local data store so that applications can be used both online and off. All of this is rolled into a Linux framework with a message bus based on JSON. Will be interesting to see where they take it.

Comments

About damn time

[wiredog]

Worst. API. Ever. EVAR!

Bad enough that they renamed standard library functions. They also changed the order of arguments to those functions.

Windows PocketPC, meanwhile, was programmable using the same languages and toolchain as regular Windows.

Re:About damn time

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

That's a bit harsh now, no? It's not a great API, but I've seen worse.

I've been a Palm OS developer for some nine years now, primarily working on Weasel Reader (http://weaselreader.org), so I've watched as it grew, changed, and finally died over the years.

Early on, the OS was really great. It knew what its target hardware was and who its target audience was and it served them both quite well. Very useful and very low powered devices. The battery on my devices would last for weeks. I could even read on my Clie SJ-20 with the backlight on for a surprisingly large number of hours.

But, Palm's failure can only be blamed on itself. They owned the market and they let it slip away. Along with stupid business decisions, one of the biggest problems was that Palm OS failed to grow and mature like it should have. Palm OS 5.0 was the biggest update after 3.x and it was already way behind the times. They also managed to slap all of their FOSS developers in the face at the same time. OS 5 made it much harder to develop under anything but Windows.

And now the grand new thing is WebOS. There's still an enormous number of Palm apps out there in the wild. Useful apps that require very little from the host platform, yet WebOS has no manner of emulation for them.

I'm still subscribed to the palm-dev mailing list, the traffic of which has, not surprisingly, dropped off dramatically. One of the most recent threads was just a lot of old hands saying goodbye. Considering the longevity of this community, you'd think Palm might pay some attention, but no. As best as anybody can tell, nobody on the list was ever contacted by Palm for the WebOS beta, nor has anybody from Palm even dropped by just to promote the thing. This is the complete opposite of the Android dev mailing list which is crawling with people from Google who are more than happy to give useful answers and feedback.

Palm lost me as a developer a long time ago and if it hadn't been for maintenance of Weasel Reader I would have stopped already. Why would I follow them now? Certainly, devs writing commercial and shareware apps will need to evaluate the situation as it pertains to their business, but what about FOSS authors? One of the best things about the Palm platform was the large number of quality FOSS apps developed by a community that Palm never helped and sometimes even hindered. For the time being, it looks like a lot of the FOSS people will be moving over to Android.

What happened to BeOS?

[Doctor Faustus]

Is this going to be a brand-new start? Didn't they buy Be a few years ago to build their new OS versions around BeOS?

Re:What happened to BeOS?

[DECS]

No they bought the BeOS company. The engineers largely fled, with many of them going to Apple, including Newton guy Steve Sakoman and DominicGiampaolo, the engineer behind BeOS' metadata file system who ended up designing Apple's Spotlight metadata search architecture for example.

The Egregious Incompetence of Palm

Interestingly, Palm followed all of the armchair advice that pundits offered for Apple, with completely disastrous results:

â License its OS to other hardware makers
â Copy Microsoft's Windows strategies
â Compete directly against Microsoft in IT markets
â Split into hardware and software companies
â Buy Be, Inc. for its BeOS
â Adopt the Linux kernel
â License Windows from Microsoft

What Palm is doing with WebOS is taking WebKit and making essentially a Dashboard-oriented PDA, where apps are just HTML+ JavaScript widgets. That allows Palm to claim that it is "multitasking" while not actually running any real significant applications. That's a pretty decent strategy for Palm, but sure isn't the iPhone Killer that the media has made it out to be.

Palm Pre: The Emperor's New Phone
Why Apple's Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre

Palm keeps falling flat?

[Dripdry]

Is it just me, or has Palm fallen flat on its face every time they have something that could be big (except when they debuted the palm pilot)?
They used to have so much caché, but every time I hear what sounds like good news it just vanishes.
Why do people keep supporting this company if they can't get their act together? Do they offer a magical pony with every purchase that no one is telling me about?

This is awful

[laing]

I started with WinCE (on a Casiopia) and stayed through 2 revisions despite the crashes, slowness, and rapid battery drain. I switched to a Palm III (clone actually - TRG Pro) and have had 3 Palm devices since then (currently a Centro). I prefer Palm's calendar and contact database to the alternatives. My Palm currently has about nine thousand contacts in the database. Am I going to be able to use the WebOS when there's no wireless data connectivity? I don't think so. Can Palm ensure the security of my data while using WebOS? I don't think so. What happened to the rumored port of PalmOS to Linux? I've been waiting for that for 3 years now. Since they are abandoning the platform, is it for sale? Are they going to open source it? I would not like to see it die.