Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale

leetrout writes with this excerpt from a story at Bloomberg News "Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation."

Comments

BeOS!

[Fallingcow]

AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.

Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.

Re:BeOS!

[blind biker]

I think BeOS stil has a relevance today, as it beats the pants off any current OS in respnsiveness to The User: any command/mouseclick has the highest priority, file copy be damned. I have tested with many current OSes (even OS X fails this test) start copying a huge file, and see if responsiveness is affected at all. With BeOS, it wasn't - not even the slightest. The file would get copied a few secconds later, if I interact a lot with the UI, but so fucking what?

What a pleasure it was to use BeOS. For whatever reason, programmers just refuse to create such pleasant-to-use operating systems.

(I won't relay the often mentioned smoothness of displaying videos and playing MP3s. It's not that important. But it sure is impressive when you can play 30 MP3s at the same time, and some even backwards. Is there ever been an OS that dominated all the others so blatantly? The things BeOS was able to do were simply ridiculous.)

Re:BeOS!

[ledow]

I do think that current OS's really suffer from the "give me my damn mouse back, let me click that button, don't make me wait for seven thousand services to start up before you let me click the start button that appeared in the first second" syndrome. But that doesn't make an OS, that makes a GUI on top of an OS. The problem is "easily" solved (for a definition of easily) by queueing user events and handling mouse motion / keyboard input in a separate thread (not at all a performance problem with modern machines).

User reponsiveness is vital, that much I can agree on. I can't wait for the OS that can properly remember and queue user events from the first second so that I can send a list of keystrokes and have it get on with them - I hate when Windows chugs and your button clicks are completely ignored (programmatically, graphically, etc.) and then there's a burst of activity once it's idle again. Ideally, such interaction would be per-application (so non-busy apps would still respond as fast no matter what else was chugging away) - incidentally, window-focus-steals are the worst idea ever invented, whether by the OS or the applications themselves.

But that's a GUI issue, for the most part. Yes, the OS shouldn't chug that badly in the first place but when it does, the underlying GUI still has millions of cycles in which to respond. It doesn't, because of deep-level order dependencies and other things. The main problem, though, is programs and OS's drawing themselves before they are actually able to respond - I've seen Windows desktop, start bar, etc. appear sometimes MINUTES before the start button can actually be clicked in any useful manner, and that's *completely* pointless and just makes me think that the computer is much slower than it actually is. It's a pain in the arse and all programs should be made to draw to a back-buffer until they are actually ready to respond to user input, and any that don't within 0.5 of a second should be terminated in the style of Windows' "This program has stopped responding".

The problem is not the OS (though some OS queueing techniques can help desktop interactivity), it's mainly the application side... programs that draw too early, set themselves up piece-meal and serially, draw the user into clicking them before they can respond (what's wrong with greying out any buttons/menus until you *are* ready to respond to them?), don't queue events properly and aren't allocated a high-enough event priority when they are the main-focus app.

That's not worth an obsolete (sorry, but it is) OS, when it can be fixed by a simple event model and some slightly stricter application requirements. You can't hold an OS responsible if the programs draw themselves, then go through a serial setup and ignore all button presses in between, or when they are busy, etc. Proper multithread use is the main factor. The OS is not.

Re:Google should buy them

[eparker05]

To expand on your point; Google lacks a great deal of intellectual property that puts them at legal risk from competitors such as RIM and Apple when it comes to their Android OS. A Google acquisition would spell a quick end to the HTC vs. Apple suit. On the other hand, if RIM, Apple, or Nokia acquires Palm, we can say hello to a torrent of lawsuits directed at every aspect of their respective smartphone manufacturing competitors.

As an aside, I don't think it would be bad if Microsoft purchased Palm, since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best. I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up that could cut it with iPhone OS or Android, and I don't think that WM 7 is going to do it.

Sad

[jsse]

One of their original flagship 'Pilot 5000' is my first PDA, and people can see the immense potential in it - a lightweight programmable widget. Few months after its first launch a guy called Adams set up a website to share homebrew Pilot's applications and games around the world, the era of Palm had since begun. (Regardless of million hits daily, Adams fold his website after marriage, by his wife's order. He should really regret it by now)

Palm was actually doing good until one day some pinheads in the management decided that sales is more important than technology advancement. It's amazing to see history repeated itself over and over again in tech world.

Another good line of products ruined by great management decision. Sad, really sad.

WebOS actually looks great

[melted]

I'd say it looks better than iPhone OS, and that says something. I hope HTC (or Lenovo, or someone else competent) buys them (and their substantial patent portfolio) and makes an iPad competitor based on WebOS, just to piss off Apple. Steve Jobs will be livid -- any lawsuit will only bring an equal and opposite countersuit, and the software is Apple quality (indeed, much of it was written by ex-Apple engineers and designed by ex-Apple designers), which makes it twice as painful.

Re:No surprise.

[spmkk]

Not compelling enough? Quick: name two smartphones that have a touchscreen AND a physical keyboard on one surface, with no (other) moving parts. The Pre may not be a godsend, but the Pixi certainly is.

I have the Pixi Plus with Verizon service. Other than battery life (which is a well-documented issue that has several acceptable solutions), I cannot find a SINGLE thing I don't love about it.

It's a shame the app store isn't on par with Apple's. As devices go, it's not only one of the most technically capable phones on the market, it's also the ONLY real smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans. For someone who doesn't carry a purse, that is a huge factor.

One of the problems is that in all the side-by-side reviews, the Pre always beats out the Pixi because...wait for it...it can't run as many apps at once. (Note: the iPhone presently can't run more than one, and reviewers worship it.) So people buy the Pre, and then aren't happy with it because the form factor is annoying and the keyboard is unusable (and because they expect their battery to last three days while they watch videos over Wi-Fi). And Palm gets a bad rap, even though they make a device that people would fall in love en masse with if they weren't talked out of giving it half a chance.

To each his own, but for me Palm offers a product that nothing else today can compete with. I really hope the market gives them a fair shake before letting their technology fade away.

Obituary for BeOS

[DNS-and-BIND]

"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.

Re:It's dead for a reason.

[Stormwatch]

BeOS is dead for a reason.

Yes, and the reason is: Microsoft bullied PC makers so they would not sell computers with any other OS. See here.

People hate Microsoft for a reason.