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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."
I'd buy that for a dollar!
AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.
Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.
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.
Of all the carriers I've had (and I've had all the big ones), I've liked T-Mobile the best. I always have service, I never get screwed on my bill for no reason, the network seems as fast (or usually faster) and AT&T and Verizon. Why does everyone seem to hate them so much?
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.
Lots of great memories Palm, though none recently
I just picked up a Palm Pre for Verizon *yesterday*. I was wondering why Verizon was basically giving these away... Now I know.
I (speculate/hope/hope-not) Apple might scoop in and buy them under HTC at the last minute. Palm has a nice portfolio of mobile technology patents, and letting HTC have them (besides making Apple-HTC lawsuit difficult) could be very damaging for them.
I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up
No thanks, I had enough with the pop ups on their desktop OS.
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.
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.
That's a shame, the Palm Pre really is a nice phone, I prefer it to the iPhone. WebOS is nicer, and the native SDK is out now. The browsing experience was comparable when I compared iphone to pre. And it has a real keyboard that pops out. They totally blew the ads though, those horrible TV ads w/the weird chick going "oh wait, I just did that" - most likely alienated many potential customers. I know the freaked me out.
The problem is there is nothing Google really needs at Palm. The patents would just be used for defense against really crappy patents that should never have been issued in the first place to Apple. As for Android, i personally prefer it over both iPhone, Symbian and WebOS. Palm wouldnt bring anything to the table.
Nokia on the other hand, they would benefit greatly.
HTTP/1.1 400
buy out of palm will be great move if it leads to consolidation of mobile OSes. as of now, we have OS X, android, symbian, winmo, blackberry, webOS, etc... typically most industry have 3 big guys, that is the case for desktop too - win, mac, linux. i think blackberry should buy out palm. blackberry makes solid devices but lack the gee-whiz factor which webOS and ex-apple employees at palm can bring. nokia in turn should buy out blackberry to create a platform which is solid, functional and cool.
What a coincidence... 10+ years of my collected Palm gadgets are up for sale too.. make me an offer :)
i have it with me. kept in my old drawer. even though its b/w touchscreen is old, and the cpu is 21Mhz, it was still very good. it had all the customizability my e71 has and had a very painless ui. indeed, it was better than the s60 ui in 5800.
i have never used the pre because its cdma, there's no decent cdma network here. and of course palm did not launch it outside the us.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I live in a rich country in Europe. Palm will not take my money to buy a Pre, over a year after its introduction.
I hope Palm will serve as an example to companies: If you introduce a product whose sales are uncertain, you need to sell it worldwide as soon as possible, otherwise you are just turning down peoples money.
Palm: Great Engineers, Rubbish Marketeers.
So HTC could pick up Palm, have their own (decent) OS and stop manufacturing for Android?
Android could be in trouble without HTC, especially down here in Oz, since AFAIK the only android phones atm are the Magic and Desire (coming soon)...
Wait! Whats a sig?
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.
I guess that depends on the size of your jeans, and depth of your pockets. My N1 fits rather nicely in mine, and I've seen people do that to their iPhones.
Quick: name two smartphones that have a touchscreen AND a physical keyboard on one surface, with no (other) moving parts ...
... and a tiny screen (2.63" @ 320x400) in comparison to all competing smartphones?
the ONLY smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans
pretty sure my nokia E71 is a smartphone, and I put it in my jeans pocket every day. At the time of its release it was considered the thinnest smartphone on the market.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
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?
That's it? So what?
How many applications are available for it?
And how many jobs are out there for it?
Any proprietary software on it that can't be moved to OSX or something?
And hardware support? Does it support modern hardware?
The to all the above is 'no'.
BeOS is dead for a reason.
No feedback to give. I just saw all the *rats and had to say hi.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I thought the band U2 had a stake in Palm?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
now i dont know jack about the palm-pre of web-os, but since when do you NEED an app store on a proper smartphone? The iphone might have triggered android in hopping onto the "app-store" bandwagon, and with all the ipad-hoopla, the media might make you think that without an app-store you cant do anything, but a proper smart-phone should be able to have software installed which isnt given the official X seal of approval.
My 3 year old nokia doesnt have an app-store (come to think of it, it has the n-gage thing for games), but i still managed to get opera installed... or just about any piece of java code i write.
I thought the entire point of smart-phones was that they grew closer and closer to a general purpose computer, not being a walled-garden
People, what a bunch of bastards
Even if the patents that Google need to defend against are really crappy, it may worth having some ammo because bogus patents still can be used for suing, while zero patents can be used for nothing.
Moreover, invalidating bogus patents is quite expensive, risky, and time-consuming.
OTOH, how many patents does Palm have, and how many of them are valid ones?
The N1 is an inch shorter, but almost exactly twice as thick. That's probably a better combination for some people, but it doesn't work for me. Also, no keyboard.
/. and post this comment :-) But like I said, to each his own. I just hope the technology sticks around so we continue to have this opyion, too.
As far as the display, 320 x 400 at 2.63" is apparently enough to comfortably read
Just because Apple's App Store = walled garden does not mean app store = walled garden.
The stock started to rise last week on Wednesday. Luck or insider trading ?
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I guess that depends on the size of your jeans, and depth of your pockets. My N1 fits rather nicely in mine, and I've seen people do that to their iPhones.
That's nothing. In the US, I've seen people do that with their iPads! They've got some wide butts out there ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
i know, but itsme posted like the palm-pre is worthless because its app-store isnt up to par, my point is that the app-store shouldnt be the only means to get apps
People, what a bunch of bastards
> To each his own, but for me Palm offers a
> product that nothing else today can compete with.
The problem, historically, is that Palm will continue to offer this same product with minor cosmetic tweaks for a few years after their competitors have adequately competed and the entire market has subtly changed to the point that Palm's products don't really fit in. Palm will respond to this by changing their branding.
Palm's had some real hits over the years, but between hits they stagnate like no other major company I can think of...
c.
Log in or piss off.
They were still managing to sell quite a few copies. Be could have made a business out of distributing and selling operating systems online. Indeed, that's really the only way Linux got distributed. I thought they were doing a good job of it too.
This is my sig.
The problem with BeOS was that that which made it sweet also made it difficult to program. In Windows and other STA modelled applications, you don't have to worry about your application being pre-empted within the context of a message. BeOS would do that, which is why it was so responsive and so scalable. If you did the cheesy thing and put a locking mechanism around the body of your message handlers, you would effectively cripple what the OS could do with your application and essentially "Windowsify" it.
This is my sig.
No, that would be ACCESS who own the BeOS code base and who have already blessed the Haiku developers with permission to distribute the BeBook and other assorted documentation. The BeOS code is safe. The Haiku clean room implementation will make it easier to modernize the base for R2 once full BeOS compatibility is reached.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Of all the carriers I've had (and I've had all the big ones), I've liked T-Mobile the best. I always have service, I never get screwed on my bill for no reason, the network seems as fast (or usually faster) and AT&T and Verizon. Why does everyone seem to hate them so much?
Probably because their coverage is crap if you don't live in at least a medium-sized city. They know their coverage is crap, and they don't do crap to fix it, either. The T-Mobile approach to dead spots is to list them as "low signal" on their online maps and then ignore consumer complaints about dropped calls in that area.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone
A few (million) people own devices that Palm made prior to the Pre...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Same here. I am/was seriously considering a Pre Plus when it lands on AT&T, allegedly in a few months. The OS looks fantastic.
The other problem is that there is nothing anyone needs at Palm. Palm is the only one using WebOS, and anyone can order up a million devices from a manufacturer using reference designs from Symbian or HTC (using either Windows CE/Phone7 or Android) and market them under their own brand name with almost zero licencing fees. By building a phone around the Palm platform you're doomed to vendor lock-in from the beginning, on a mostly-dead platform to boot. From a development standpoint Palm is a terrible choice in the long run, unless you've got some killer licencing deal from Palm from the get go.
moox. for a new generation.
The RIM BlackBerry doesn't need an app store either. They created one in the same me-too fashion as everyone else, of course. But MobiHand also has an app store that can run on the device.
Having an official app-store (and/or a 3rd party one) is important because without it, many users seem to think "it doesn't have apps". But, not requiring you to go through said app store is also important.
I find the Droid commercials quite amusing, actually. Not because they advertise anything special and unique, but because they've managed to turn "iPhone deficiencies" into "Droid features" (even if many other platforms also have those features).
...since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best.
What makes you think this? Microsoft has been in the smartphone market for much longer than Apple, and they've also got R&D departments in a lot of related fields - multitouch computing and the like. I'd be shocked if they didn't have a large number of patents that cover smartphones.
This sounds like the punchline of a 'where's the most expensive place you've ever say down' joke.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are wrong.
The problem is that the disk I/O priority in Windows is done in a (presumably) FIFO kind of way, regardless of which application and thread is performing the request. So when Explorer requests 5 x 10 KB files (the icons for the start menu items) from disk, it has to wait 5-10 seconds before Windows finally delivers because 10 other services currently booting are loading DLLs.
Suggesting that Explorer should instead have already loaded the icons into memory will not work simply because the user STILL has to wait 10 seconds extra before he can click his start menu. Not to mention the problem of how deep you want to load icons in the start menu tree. Even if it loaded them all it would still not help you because when you then selected your application to boot, that process would now need to load 10 megabytes of executable data and that too would be delayed by the other processes doing disk I/O.
Sadly when faced with this problem Microsoft chose to first ignore it for 10 years. Then they made the hack called Superfetch in Windows Vista. It attempts to solve the problem by actively loading all DLLs into memory and thereby reducing the amount of I/O requests that require actual disk access, hiding the problem somewhat in certain situations. Unfortunately that tactic still doesn't work when you start your file copy or when Windows Search decides to start scanning your disk in the background or if you do a simple file copy.
I have an USB disk that can stall Windows 7's I/O so badly that if I start copying large movie files to it, any other I/O request can end up being delayed for over 30 seconds! And these other requests were not even intended for the USB drive but my primary Velociraptor SATA disk. Clearly there is something in kernel space that could benefit from some serious improvements. But hey, at least we got ribbons in MS Paint in this release. ;)
I do agree that resurrecting BeOS for this feature alone is fairly pointless when one could simply just improve the I/O code in the kernels used today. Too bad it requires someone at Microsoft to do it.
And it isn't. Palm already has a vibrant non-official app ecosystem. Because it is so dead-easy to program for, many iPhone and Android programmers have ported their apps to WebOS, and they are in the unofficial "catalogs" (Such as PreWare) already.
Very sad to see this happen to Palm. I have a Pre and absolutely love it. Hopefully they will get picked up by HTC or another handset maker and be turned into an OS company. Let's be honest: While WebOS is without a doubt the very best smartphone OS yet made, (Yes, Google Fanboys, it is better than Android in almost every way possible.) it has been crippled by inadequate hardware since launch.
This is clear when you get a Palm Pre Plus from Verizon and use one of the custom patches that are out there to overclock the processor to a level equal to that of an iPhone or Android handset. WebOS becomes WAY more responsive and is such a dream to use you want to weep for joy.
So with luck we will see WebOS on HTC or some other great handset within a year.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Is that a Pixi in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
I have good coverage in an area where T-mobile has shit, AT&T has shit, everything but Sprint and Verizon has shit for coverage. Sprint has had coverage here for 10 years and Verizon for about 6, with Sprint improving over the course of the past 10 years as well. I often use my Pre in elevators and never run into a problem, even in the basement. There's one place that's a dead zone for me and that's almost a complete Faraday Cage. I can hardly get wifi out of that room with the door open and the router 20 feet away.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
But like I said, to each his own. I just hope the technology sticks around so we continue to have this opyion, too.
How's that keyboard working out for ya?
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Palm had a niche market in PDAs and always the genius gap in technology; there are other CTOs whose knowledge of engineering is second-hand at best, but at least they make sure the products have no apparent flaws. With Palm, it kinda sorta works, it ships.
This approach does not kinda sorta work when you're in competition with the entire world trying to make money off of cell phones - or when you design in a slide out keyboard that's way too small because it kinda sorta looks like the earlier models.
Plus I don't need a cell phone for a little while yet and my PalmOS PDAs still work okay and I don't feel like learning another set of APIs just right now. But hang in there, Palm.
The problem, historically, is that Palm will continue to offer this same product with minor cosmetic tweaks for a few years...
You mean exactly like Apple have done for years?
Ceci n'est pas une
My T-Mobile phone rolls right over to AT&T's network when I leave T-Mobile's coverage zone in Hampton Roads. When I get far enough into the country that AT&T doesn't work, nobody has coverage. At that point your only options is a Verizon land-line.
No, Apple usually does major cosmetic tweaks. Even if they didn't, they have the marketing savvy to actually get people excited in a way that Palm just doesn't. WebOS is the first major thing to come out of Palm in ages, and it arrived about 3 years too late.
c.
Log in or piss off.
You put stakes into VAMPIRES, not Palm.
Poor Palm.
Whoever buys them, it will be for the brand and the patents portfolio. The products... are ok but there are a lot of other good products out there that they have to compete with; and, Palm is not winning market share...
I've been a Palm user for close to a decade (Palm IIIxe, Handera 330, Treo 650), and it's sad to see Palm go. The IIIxe has 8MB RAM and a 16MHz CPU, but it's still responsive and usable (and the batteries last for no trace of weeks). Palm knew what the heck they were doing, technically. The Treo didn't have true multitasking, but the actual UI layout was very carefully thought out and usable. But I got a Droid a couple weeks ago and I'm not looking back. Migrating my data to either Android or WebOS would be about the same, and the Droid had better specs from my perspective and it just seems like
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Umm.. you really haven't been following Palm at all have you?
That e-mail exploit was closed back during the initial months after launch, and hasn't been needed to install software for AGES. If you read my post above you might notice Preware mentioned. There is also WebOS Quick Install available, Which many people use to initially install Preware with.
When I open Preware on my Pre I show (as of 04/12/10) over 2000 apps available. Admittedly, that's not as many as the iPhone or even Android. But the app availability has been growing steadily.
One notable item is that Palm has been uniquely open and forthcoming with the home brew community, even going so far as to integrate some of their improvements into WebOS. Palm has also made their programming staff available to some high profile community developers to assist them in fully integrating apps that they were developing. So in all the ways that count, Palm has been much friendlier and easier to work with for developers than either Apple or Google.
I just hope that whoever buys them continues that tradition.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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.
My 5800 fits nicely, it has a slightly slimmer "candybar" form, compared with the wider smartphones. Not that I disagree with your post in general, just pointing this out.
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.
Indeed. The rule is that if Apple miss out a fundamental feature, the media rave about it anyway and it gets spun as unimportant, or even an advantage. If another company does this, it's seen as a bad thing.
2000 apps might be a lot (never used that many on all platforms) or nothing at all (my old Sony C702 had at some point more than 3500 apps available and it wasn't even really a smartphone). Let me ask you for example if there is any application similar to Garmin Mobile XT or iGo/Amigo with nice (off-line) routable vector maps from most of the world? Or some chess program that can compete at least with a 5-8 years old Pocket Fritz 2 ? What about fring or skype? Or something similar to Pocket Stars?
Or to put it simply: how many apps from those 2000 are as far as complexity goes above iFart or similar?
Motorola has always made crappy software for cell phones. If they bought Palm they'd have some first rate software development they could leverage. Somebody whose big in hardware but struggling with software should buy them. Android is not going to be a good differentiator by itself. You still need to have good software skills. Compare HTC's Android UI with the Droid. I'll take HTC's work over Motorola's any day. Apparently Apple agrees which is why they are suing them.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
The lack of a card slot is a bad design choice, but it doesn't have the memory limitations that the other smart phones have either. It has twice the RAM of the iPhone 3GS and Droid. The 16GB of storage can be limiting, but that is still quite a bit. On the positive side, the mobile hotspot feature is really awesome and no other phone can do it right now and the OS is much friendlier.
As far as there being no GSM version for a long time...The iPhone has been exclusive with a carrier for a while now too. That's common practice...Blackberry does the same thing with their devices. AT&T will have their hardware available in a couple of weeks and GSM versions have been available in Europe for quite a while now.
The Palm does have fewer native WebOS apps right now (if you include PalmOS apps, it is up there with the iPhone except with a higher ratio of useful apps, but classic is a clunky way to run apps), but the iPhone didn't have its current 10,000 fart simulation apps in its first year either. Palm is missing some WebOS apps that it needs to get in order to be a top contender, but the iPhone and Android don't have all of the apps that people need either, if you can even find them after wading through all of the garbage. If Palm (or whoever buys them) can keep the platform above water long enough to get it onto all of the carriers and they start to market it, the apps will come.
Umm the market gave palm a fair shake, well over a decade. The Palm Pixi and Pre, while great devices are too little too late. Palm was the bad ass in the market that thought if they didnt change what was selling then they would stay the bad ass. Luckily, markets quickly make mince meat of the lack of ingenuity in a company. Palm should be dominating the marketplace but they underestimated the value of eyecandy and the importance of multimedia capabilities in their devices.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
My T-Mobile phone rolls right over to AT&T's network when I leave T-Mobile's coverage zone in Hampton Roads
Where I live the AT&T coverage is marginally better, however I have yet to own a phone that can handle the switch during a call.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There's a difference between need and want. Technically speaking you and other customers don't need an app store. However most consumers want one. Look at the iPod. Really it didn't need a music store. But Apple realized its customers wanted one so that they could get their music easier. It is all about catering to your customers. Now most iPhone consumers can't write their own java code. And they don't want to learn coding. They want to go to a UI pick what they want, pay, their money and get it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Why!? Nintendo makes games and consoles, not cell phones. I'm not sure how well a Nintendo cell phone would do in Nintendo's corporate culture.
(However, if they DO, I'm buying one and replacing my iPhone. If it's any good I'm buying two.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
And if you read my post, you'll find we agree... the original comment was about whether BeOS did this any better than any other OS. Nobody cares what the OS is so long as they can click their damn icons when they see them on the screen.
Good for voice, but expensive if you use it for data.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Well that's true. When I have transitioned from T-Mobile to AT&T the phones drop the call. They all try to hang onto the T-Mobile network until all contact is lost with the tower, which happens after voice communication is no longer possible. Fortunately for me (based on my typical routes) I have a 4 mile wide river that tends to delineate the area where there's coverage or not. The only time I seem to have problems is when I'm close to the shore and the phone can still "see" towers across the river.
You seem to equate {something_new = assumed_goodness} without reasoning that sometimes you don't have to put something new in just because it's 'new'. Apple has actually been good about adding useful features, while ignoring flash (no pun intended). If a new idea make sense, or offers potential, then yes, but just tossing something in because it's the latest fad doesn't make much sense. I would also argue that the changes Apple has done to the iPhone are a bit more than cosmetic. The app store wasn't available until v2.0. Wireless-G wasn't available on the 1st gen. Copy/Paste. MMS. These were lacking on the initial hardware or software. Enough folks clamored for them that Apple included them. Same with Multitasking outside of the core apps, which will show up in v4.0.
A cosmetic change is just for show with no real world usefulness. These are not cosmetic as they are meaningful and useful to some portions of the iPhone population.
The app-store makes things dead simple.
I don't think the target audience of the iPhone has never seen a piece of java code.
The change from WinMo 6.5 to Windows Phone 7 seems to indicate the walled-garden being where manufacturers are going (for better or worse).
General purpose computers do have app-stores. Or as they're more generally called, repositories. They're fantastic. Apt-get on a phone would be beautiful.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS based on Linux and Webkit.
-- Seq
You don't need an app store, but you need people to write software for it. There's too many platforms out there, and for non-enterprise consumer cell-phones, Palm is a third-run in the market for apps, at best.
It would be nice if we could standardize on something a la the web, so it didn't have to be "android apps vs. ipod-os apps vs. web-os apps"... but here we are right now, and that's killing the Pre.
i looked at my old palm. Actually its not palm. Its a handspring visor. It does not have wireless. Only connections are the dock and irda. I remember it was quite a marvel when i got it. I used to think 'OMG! 20 million operations per second! In my hand!'. I have an app loaded on it that even overclocks the cpu to 24mhz. I don't think you can do that on any of today's device
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Hmmm...If Google bought Palm, they could release an "Official Palm Emulator" for Android phones.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
There is a lack of some types of apps, but it's not as if the entire app store has no merit. Most of the content of all of the app stores is trivial. It's possible that the overwhelming majority is like that. But there are definitely exceptions to that, and some of them are available on WebOS. Here are a few examples:
- X-Plane (flight simulator series with several forms of it)
- Need for Speed
- Epocrates (Medical reference program)
- TimeTracker (project-coordinated time tracking by GPS location and/or SSID)
- Graphing Calculator
There are also several good fitness tracking apps, some apps for geocaching, and some reasonably good sudoku and crossword apps. I couldn't tell you how good the chess apps are, as I'm not very good at the game.
I haven't seen any stand-alone GPS navigation apps, though it wouldn't be hard to put one together, I think. Google Maps does not (yet) have turn-by-turn, though Sprint's Navigation app is fairly decent and well-integrated (though requires a data connection).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I have had a Pre for months, and love it. I have had an iPhone and worked with Blackberries and WIndows Mobile phones a lot, and it blows them all away. I also as far as developing for webos goes, its a dream. I love it, way better then development for the iPhone was when I did that. I really was hoping they would licence the OS to a few good hardware developers, but I hope whoever buys them keeps the OS and the same ideals the developers of it have.
The Nokia N900's OS, Maemo 5, is based on Debian and uses apt as its package manager. You can add http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ and related repositories right in the application manager UI (which is just a fancy interface for apt). The OS updates can even be done with apt-get dist-upgrade. You can even install a chrooted real Debian environment and pull random packages from the Debian repositories. And yes, pulling stuff off of apt-get is beautiful.
Frankly, I think tablet-like appliances with touch input are going to be far more important within three years than they are today. HTC is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity.
Now, an obvious thing to do for HTC would be to make a tablet based on Android. But that would only bring another Apple lawsuit. Now, if they buy Palm, Apple will even withdraw the lawsuit they've already filed, because Palm has a patent portfolio Apple can't win against. WebOS is a superior OS, IMO. Pissing off Steve Jobs by using it would be just icing on the cake.
This.
Also this.
That is why I love my Pre so much. Fuck Apple.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
But actually, you can overclock the Droid if you root (jailbreak) it. I've heard of people clocking it up past a GHz (from the stock 550MHz): http://gizmodo.com/5457672/how-to-overclock-your-droid-possibly-to-death
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Greetings fellowRat.
i was going to say, Egghead, CompUSA, and Babbages, but we all know what happened to THOSE...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Along with Google, they could make the Pre into an alternate version of the Google Nexus. Not so sure about the Pixi though.