Palm Devices Are Coming In 2018 Without WebOS, Says Report (slashgear.com)

According to a new report, TCL will be manufacturing palm-branded devices next year. SlashGear reports: The Palm brand has been in limbo for the past half-decade, moving in and out of HP-connected devices then on into relative obscurity. The Palm operating system was acquired by LG and continues to be used (in some form or another) in LG smart TVs to this day -- as such, it won't be coming with the Palm phone set for next year. On the day when gesture controls for the next iPhone just started to look like the last phone version of Palm OS, word appears of Palm's resurgence. Sadly, this resurgence almost certainly wont include Palm OS. Word comes from Android Planet that TCL Marketing Manager Stefan Streit confirmed that they've finally gotten to a place where they can make a Palm phone. TCL acquired the Palm brand all the way back in 2011.

Comments

What the heck is the point?

[ZorinLynx]

PalmOS, and later WebOS, is what made Palm devices unique. If it's just another Android phone maker, big deal?

Unless it's something new and groundbreaking it will stay in relative obscurity as just another Android phone maker.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[hambone142]

HP sold WEBOS to LG Electronics in 2013.

HP typically destroys every company they acquire.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[youngone]

TCL are not just another Android phone maker
They're the Android phone maker that thinks Alcatel is a brand that millennials will pay a premium for.
So, not just another Android phone company. A really stupid Android phone company.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[UnknownSoldier]

> HP typically destroys every company they acquire.

LOL, yup. Reminds me of that old joke:

Q. How do you know when a company is worthless?
A. When HP buys it !

*Zing!*

/Oblg. How Hewlett-Packard And Dell Destroyed Their PC Advantage ... Piece-By-Piece/ --- cached copy because "Fuck you Forbes for your Anti-Ad-Blocker"

Re:What the heck is the point?

[arth1]

PalmOS, and later WebOS, is what made Palm devices unique.

No, Graffiti was what made Palm devices. It was so intuitive that with very little training, you could take written notes in the dark or under a table without looking.
Secondary, calendar functions coupled to Graffiti. Appointments with notes on the go didn't exist back then, and with iOS/Android, it's much more work. On the Palm, you hit one designated button, and it woke up and immediately displayed what you needed.

Also, exceptional battery life. As in going a week or two without charging with daily use. Try that with your smartphone.

I also miss LCD screens that worked in direct sunlight. I take that over colour any day.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[gl4ss]

So, not just another Android phone company. A really stupid Android phone company.

that apparently also thinks it takes years to contract an android phone to be manufactured.

it's almost at a line of ticking checkboxes by now(of course the trick is that it's really hard to compete with price with anyone else who is doing the same thing!) and receiving the phones 6 months later. all it takes is some free cash.

Re: What the heck is the point?

[adolf]

I changed the two alkaline AAA cells in my favorite Palm device about once a month, or a bit more if I was using it a lot to read books with the backlight on.

It always responded instantly to commands. My S7 feels like a turd in comparison.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

HP hasn't done a thing with BeOS, which would have been the obvious choice for a cutting edge OS instead of wasting time and money developing that crappy WebOS.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[drinkypoo]

No, Graffiti was what made Palm devices.

No, being cheap and good was what made Palm devices. Palm Computing's first product was Graffiti for the GRiDPad 2390/Tandy Z-PDA-7000/Casio Zoomer, a PC-GEOS-based handheld about the size of a paperback book which used a V20 processor and ran on AA batteries. It wasn't cheap and the software they made for GEOS sucked, the bundled applications all stored their data in a sort of memory dump format so there was no interchange. The 384x512 (IIRC) mono LCD (4-gray?) didn't really support most GEOS applications, either. The best use of the software was to install it on the venerable GRiDPad 1910, which had a 640x400 display. If anyone is interested, I have a 1910 and a 2390 I'm about to get rid of...

Anyway, what made the original Palm devices good was a combination of very durable, low-power hardware, and the very slim, low-resource operating system. That let them use the absolute minimum in computing resources, basically a 68000 chip in the originals, and only 1MB RAM as well. My first Palm device was a Pro, with the 2MB upgrade.

Re: What the heck is the point?

[drinkypoo]

It always responded instantly to commands. My S7 feels like a turd in comparison.

But it's a shiny turd!

Re:What the heck is the point?

[tlhIngan]

PalmOS, and later WebOS, is what made Palm devices unique. If it's just another Android phone maker, big deal?

Problem is, they have nothing.

PalmOS was sold to Access Limited (Japan) who carried it on as Garnet OS. For a time, they had the Garnet OS VM which ran on Nokia tablets, and this was classic PalmOS all the way. (Garnet was one of the internal names of the legacy PalmOS). Sadly, I don't know what happened to it.

Then Palm developed WebOS and that got sold (with Palm) to HP. HP sold WebOS to LG after failing at selling phones (which had a Garnet emulator inside them at one point), and then the tablet.

Palm being revived now... unless they licensed something seems pointless.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[JohnFen]

Also, exceptional battery life.

Graffiti wasn't a great selling point for me. I mean it was OK, and probably the best solution given the technical limitations of the day, but it wasn't great.

However, the battery life was a huge selling point for me (it's still one of the top three things I look for in portable devices). That, and size and weight -- the other PDAs available at the time weren't even in the same ballpark.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[arth1]

However, the battery life was a huge selling point for me (it's still one of the top three things I look for in portable devices). That, and size and weight -- the other PDAs available at the time weren't even in the same ballpark.

Yes, I remember a colleague who excitedly (and two-handedly) pulled out his Apple Newton. And I pulled out my Palm.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[JohnFen]

In the day, I was developing software for both the Palm and the Newton. I still have boxes stuffed with both!

The Palm was more useful and practical day-to-day, so I always carried one. The Newton, though, was far, far more capable. I took it on trips instead of a laptop.

The Newton was also an absolute joy to develop for. I really liked both of those devices a lot, but for different reasons.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

i read a fsckton of books and scraped web news on my iiix before ereaders were even a thing...

i miss the grey scale lcds as well. full sun readability over color any day... even 160x160

Re:What the heck is the point?

[arth1]

No doubt the Newton was more capable. Except for capabilities like "keep in shirt pocket", "look up a phone number in a second" or "take notes while not looking at the screen".
The Palm was in many ways intentionally made simpler, out of the philosophy of giving the users what they need, and not what they want.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had two models of Samsung PalmOS phones. I loved Graffiti. It was that experience of stylus and stroke recognition that drew me to their Galaxy Note phones years later.

I lost the handwriting ability in the meantime, first with Treo phones (actual Palm devices) and then two Android phones with keyboards. Keyboards went away, but handwriting came back!

I do miss some of the PalmOS apps, though.

Re:What the heck is the point?

[JohnFen]

Yes, they had different strengths and weaknesses.

However, the Newton worked much better for me when taking notes without looking at the screen.

But my overall favorite PDA of the era wasn't either of those. It was the Sharp Zaurus. More powerful and smaller that the Newton, an excellent slide-out physical keyboard, nicer screen, and faster.

It had also been on the market for longer than Palm or Newton, so it was more mature and polished.

I loved my Pre

[rogoshen1]

I'm not huge on random apps and such, i just want a smart phone that i can do web browsing, check email, and that's pretty much it..

But barring a wide variety of apps in the palm ecosystem (not exactly the device's fault), the device itself was pretty top notch. I Liked the physical keyboard and sliding mechanism.

The OS it self was also pretty damn good, responsive, easy to use.

Not sure why WebOS got so much hatred honestly.. it's a shame HP absolutely fucked it up.

Re:I loved my Pre

[ZorinLynx]

WebOS itself was pretty great. The problem is Palm handled the release of its phones very poorly.

For example, the first edition of the Palm Pre was a Sprint exclusive. The second release, the Palm Pre 2, was a Verizon exclusive. That's a huge "screw you" to people who want to upgrade since they have to switch providers too.

Also, the tech in the phones failed to keep up with competitors like Apple and HTC.

A great concept that had a lot of potential, destroyed by bad management.

Re:I loved my Pre

[alvinrod]

Palm's problem was that they were two years late to the party. I think that they easily could be in a similar position to Apple now if they had launched alongside Apple or even shortly thereafter like some of the big Android devices of the time instead of being caught with their pants down. The company sat on their hands for entirely too long and had nothing to show for it when the iPhone changed the game. The fact that the Pre ad WebOS were as good as they were at release showed that the company still had some serious engineering and design chops.

Re:I loved my Pre

[Billly Gates]

The hatred is what HP and Palm did and missed the boat while the IPhone taken over and then Android.

WebOS today is 10 years obsolete so it is best to let it go. You will have better luck ressurecting WindowsPhone then that as at least some few people still use them and their are up to date tools.

It looks like we are stuck with Android or IOS which I HATE. I do not like Android which I know will get modded down here, but after using WebOS, some cheap semi smart phones, and even WIndows Phone 8.0/8.1 I have to say the only thing going for Android is it's appstore. There is no reason why a mobile OS can't be lightning fast on 512 megs of ram and boot within a few seconds. My Nexus 6P takes 2 minutes to load and runs out of battery and heats up FAST.

IOS? Well it's pretty. Women love it for that reason and it too has a rich appstore. But you can't even cut and paste the last I looked. WOW.

I really wish we had 3 or better yet 4 different operating systems like we have browsers today. I would (yes slashdot moderators are going to mod me for saying this) but would still use Windows Phone if it was supported and had an appstore and or WebOS if it was more updated and had a rich ecosystem as well.

My non removable battery (p[laced on puprose of course) is about dead on my $700 Nexus 6P. I dread buying another expensive phone and even finding a phone with a removable battery so I do not have to throw it out every every year is maddening. I may consider the Pre if it has such a thing. I mean if you spend $700 on a PC there is a reasonable expection of up to 10 years if the machine is taken care. Why not phones?

Re:I loved my Pre

[Billly Gates]

Not even. HP made me so upset. They bought it and within 30 days discontinued it?? Why buy it? They didn't even give it a chance. Didn't even try. The just layed in front of Apple while they walked over them and it became apparent for those who did not want iphones or Apple that Android was the alternative.

Re:I loved my Pre

[oneiros27]

(Just to put things in context -- I finally retired my Pre3 in February. I was using a Pre or Pre3 since the day after the Pre was released)

I blame the absolutely crap commercials for the fall of Palm. WTF were they thinking? It had multitasking! And copy & paste! And it actually showed you real websites rather than some stripped down 'mobile' version that were absolutely crap at the time. Why did they show some albino woman instead?

And when it didn't go so well, they sold themselves to HP. And HP screwed things up more -- not releasing the Pre3 in the US, but more importantly, that switch from Google Maps to Bing Maps. And then not maintaining the services, so I finally had to ditch the Pre3 when websites just started going blank on me. (I think it was related to expired root certificates, as we hadn't had updates in years). And no Unicode updates meant that I just saw rectangles when people sent emoji, but I could deal with that. (although GChat or one of the others would end up as nothing but rectangles)

And yes, swapping 'exclusive' providers was a pretty dumb move, too. Likely made by the same person (or group) who approved the commercials. Exclusivity itself wasn't that bad of a move -- fewer customers at the release is good when you're dealing w/ a new OS that might need some tweaks.

I think what I miss the most are the notifications -- iOS insists on telling me EVERYTHING. WebOS would tell me how many text messages I had gotten, and what the last one was. Same with mail. I didn't have 50+ alerts popping up every hour as each and every mail message went by.

(and is there some way to have it just give me the subject line? I tried reducing how many lines of text it showed me, and instead of it taking up less screen space, it now just says 'mail message' or some crap like that.)

I *might* switch if it has a physical keyboard on it. (being able to actually read text messages while writing responses, as the keyboard doesn't eat 2/5ths of the screen). And if they go back to the old notifications. A wireless charger + the dock screen behavior would clinch it. Even better if it can be as durable as the old one (sure, the plastic might break, but that thing survived dozens of falls onto concrete and asphalt, and a trip through my recliner before it finally cracked the screen ... without needing some case on it)

Re: I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll much? IOS has had cut and paste since it was called iPhone OS 3. It was released back in June of 2009 with the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. Not saying IOS has its faults, but that certainly isn't one of them.

Re: I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're out of date... iOS has had copy & paste since v3... we're on v10.3.3 now!

Re:I loved my Pre

[MangoCats]

For example, the first edition of the Palm Pre was a Sprint exclusive. The second release, the Palm Pre 2, was a Verizon exclusive. That's a huge "screw you" to people who want to upgrade since they have to switch providers too.

No worse than making your phone an AT&T exclusive for years - some people enjoy abuse.

Re:I loved my Pre

[mea_culpa]

Exclusives were probably less disastrous than other factors, but it was indeed a factor. iPhone was exclusive for a while and they did fine but they excelled in every other aspect.

PalmOS certainly was ahead of its time and would have done very well on decent hardware. Every Pre released had too small of a processor and RAM compared to other flagship devices. It was incredibly frustrating waiting 10-15 seconds between simple tasks like adding something to calendar, bringing up the dialer, while every other device did this seemingly instantly. Had Palm charged $50 more and bumped the specs up a bit and not run the worst marketing campaign in history, they would most likely be in a 3 way split with Android and iOS.

They were perfectly positioned to compete and screwed it up almost as epically as RIM.

Re:I loved my Pre

[Dog-Cow]

Except that AT&T was, and remains, significantly larger than Sprint. Also, AT&T phones can be used on other GSM networks, but Sprint was (is?) CDMA. And Apple didn't abandon AT&T customers with later revisions. So, all-in-all, practically nothing like it at all.

Re:I loved my Pre

[TheRaven64]

But you can't even cut and paste the last I looked.

When was that? Not only can you copy and paste on iOS, you can share the clipboard with your Mac so you can copy on the phone and paste on the computer or vice versa.

Re: I loved my Pre

[that this is not und]

And no Unicode updates meant that I just saw rectangles when people sent emoji, but I could deal with that. (although GChat or one of the others would end up as nothing but rectangles)

That sounds like an upgrade feature I would pay real money for. Can it be in the Play Store sometime soon?

Re: I loved my Pre

[that this is not und]

Be honest. Apple trapped their loyals in AT&T hell for years. Their most slavish, loyal customers. Whitewash it all you want. Yes, we know marketing has put a lot into floating that revisionist history, to hide the painful past.

Re: I loved my Pre

[that this is not und]

Whoo! You can cut and paste!

Re: I loved my Pre

[oneiros27]

All that you would need to do is change it to a font that wasn't extended to support full Unicode. Of course, I have no idea how to get fonts onto a smartphone.

Re:I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

you guys forget that palm made palmos 3.4? 4? phones with the old os i think before anyone tried wince too... i'd really call those the first smartphones as they were even more than the later feature phones functionalitywise...

Re:I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

there were ubuntu phones, firefox phones, amazon phones, m$ phones... noone liked them. Iphone leads then the rest of the market is filled android. No problem, if 1 of them botches a new player will fill the void.
Ok the only problem is to wait it out till 1 of them makes a mistake lol...

Re: I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

A feature that's been around for damn near 10 years on iPhone.

Re: I loved my Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally disagree. Webos was so far ahead that I would switch back immediately if it was available on fresh hardware (doesn't have to be "flagship") and just had an up-to-date browser.

I regularly check in on LuneOS (open source successor still in development) in the hope that it gets the fundamentals (phone, messaging, browser) to the point that I can run it on something like this Nexus 5x.

WebOS UI is still better than iOS or Android. I don't care much about apps - websites and/or webapps are fine by me nowadays.
And the world needs a privacy protecting mobile OS that doesn't belong to any of the big 3 data silos.

I would still be using my Pre3 if the web hadn't moved on from it's unmaintained browser.

Re:I loved my Pre

[ZorinLynx]

An exclusive with one carrier is annoying, but not so bad. An exclusive that changes carriers between the first and second releases of the phone is NOT.

At one point if you wanted to upgrade your Pre to a Pre 2 you had to switch from Sprint to Verizon. Most people don't want to swap carriers just to upgrade their phone.

So, nothing then?

[JohnFen]

It sounds like the only thing that this will be bringing to the market is an old brand name. Are we supposed to be excited?

Re: So, nothing then?

[that this is not und]

That has been the Amiga schtick for quite awhile. Except the Palm userbase was successful, efficient business people. Not slavish zealots championing a consumer PC in a plastic case sold in department stores.

It's hard to tell if there would be a userbase for new Palm branded stuff.

Re:So, nothing then?

[jelabarre]

Hey, if people will actually PAY for the rights to names like "Circuit City" and "Crazy Eddies", some sucker will think the Palm name is still relevant. Sure, we all miss the far-greater functionality of PalmOS over the provider-locked iOS and Android ecosystems, but I miss my 1970 Ford Maverick as well (although I'm still more likely to find parts for that than I am to find something to run on PalmOS these days).

Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Y WONT UR EDTI!?!

Keyboard ... without a clue

[gavron]

What made Palm great was a usable keyboard. Love them, hate them, defend them to death, but their OS was primitive even by Windows Mobile 2002 standards; their hardware was obsolete even by Pocket PC standards; they truly had the pulse of the dead user down.

Their keyboard was another matter. It was ergonomic. It was fast. It felt good. You could use it with two hands.

If Palm wants success... give us the keyboard. Android, IOS, whatever. The keyboard.

If Palm wants to be a failure, keep giving us phones. It didn't work for Nokia (Microsoft put its shil in to kill it) and it didn't work for Microsoft (microsoft mobile phone is dead). It won't work for Palm.

E

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[JohnFen]

I do seriously miss physical keyboards on phones/PDAs.

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[KiloByte]

There's been nothing decent since N900. Yet Gemini looks promising.

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[nasch]

The Droid 3 had a (IMO) nice sliding physical keyboard, and came out about three years after the N900. That was the last Droid phone with a physical keyboard and I too miss the feature.

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[jfdavis668]

I owned a few Palms. Never had one with a physical keyboard. When the iPhone came out, to me it just looked like a tiny, spruced up Palm. Never thought it would be the killer device it turned out to be.

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[murdocj]

What I miss about Palm was an early (PDA) version that had the "write letters with stylus" input. I know it sounds clunky but it was very easy to learn, and because it didn't require full letters you could input really really fast, far faster than I can input with the mini screen keyboard, because there was not hunting for keys and no hitting the wrong key. And it was even kind of fun. I really miss it.

Re:Keyboard ... without a clue

[sremick]

What made Palm great was a usable keyboard.

Your experience with Palm was late and limited, then. Most Palm devices did not have a keyboard. They originated as an almost exclusively (resistive) touchscreen device, with a few dedicated hardware buttons. It was much later, after a few generations, that a few oddball special models were released with physical keyboards to compete with Blackberry. I owned many Palm models over the years, from mono to color, but never one with a keyboard.

What made Palm great was:

- battery life
- simplicity and speed of use
- the number of available apps

There were pretty high-tech things you could do with them at the time, too. They had a built-in IR blaster and you could get apps that turned your Palm into a dynamic touchscreen universal remote. And back in the day, I'd read and respond to emails offline. After queueing up a bunch, I'd then sync which would establish a bluetooth connection to my dumb flip phone (in my pocket or belt clip... didn't even have to take it out) and initiate a dial-up internet connection to my ISP, upload my outgoing emails, download new emails, then disconnect. The fact that someone could do this blew peoples' minds. I later got the SD-wifi card, and the fact that someone could have a tiny handheld device that could connect to wifi and get internet access was surreal to most people at the time.

Re: Keyboard ... without a clue

[adolf]

Droid 4 had a keyboard, too. And a battery that was easy-ish to swap. And MHL. And HDMI. And an FM radio. And USB OTG. And CyanogenMod. And that was the end of the line for non-shitty phones, IMHO.

Re: Keyboard ... without a clue

[nasch]

Oh cool, I thought they went to standard candy bar with the 4. Yeah my Droid 3 had micro HDMI too, that was pretty cool though I didn't use it often. I don't miss a swappable battery at all - yet. The problem is when the battery degrades enough to be annoying, I have to get a new phone or try to pry this one apart and probably break it, and then get a new phone. I would definitely enjoy a hardware keyboard again.

Their reminder note system was the best ever

[sandbagger]

They called it task manager and it was ideal for unorganized task reminders. If there was a new version out as a stand alone app, I'd take it.

That aside, the book on Palm has yet to be written. They invented the smart phone and just as BlackBerry was emerging, Palm sold their increasingly creaky Garnet OS to a third party because their new OS was 'just around the corner'. Well it wasn't and the company went broke licensing their own OS back otherwise their hardware would be bricked.

Someone doubtless made a heap of money on this lunacy.

Re: Their reminder note system was the best ever

[mSparks43]

google keep

Re:Their reminder note system was the best ever

[Anonymous Coward]

It was awful to behold what incompetent management did to Palm. Twice.

No Graffiti, no deal

[BLToday]

I think I can still write faster with less error using Graffiti than with onscreen keyboards.

Re:No Graffiti, no deal

[whoever57]

I find that the version of Swype on my current phone does not work anywhere near as well as the version of Swype on the Galaxy SII I had years ago.

Re:No Graffiti, no deal

[murdocj]

Exactly! I couldn't remember the name but yeah, I loved Graffiti. Easy to learn, easy to use, no hunt & peck. Even had some shortcuts for common words.

Re:No Graffiti, no deal

[Dr.Altaica]

You asked for it. https://play.google.com/store/...

Re:No Graffiti, no deal

[Registered Coward v2]

I think I can still write faster with less error using Graffiti than with onscreen keyboards.

Same here. It was easy to learn and didn't require you to look where you were writing. My Pilot was great at what it was designed to do - keep contacts, notes, and calendaring readily available. I also had an expense program that let me keep track of expenses , export them as a .csv and then directly upload into my companies expense accounting system; saving me hours of time. I had a VII that even allowed you to email but the battery life was horrendous. Sure, todays smartphones do that and more but I could drop my Pilot and not have it break or get damaged form being in my pocket. It could even had been a neat little Gameboy like gaming device, in its later color iterations, had Namco or Nintendo been more foresighted; as some games developed for PalmOS showed.

Well what's the point then?!

[Gravis Zero]

Palm made some great stuff but they had WebOS which I complained about constantly. What am I supposed to do now, not complain? THIS IS BULLSHIT! ;)

Small and Thick ! The phones we WANT !

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they appreciate what phone users want - not another enormous but thin slab that will break in our pockets, but a small, thick, sturdy phone.

Time for consumers to be GIVEN A CHOICE.

Re:Small and Thick ! The phones we WANT !

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently consumers choose not to buy big thick chunky phones with physical keyboards. Palm and Blackberry failed. They forgot to pivot.

Re:Small and Thick ! The phones we WANT !

[Dog-Cow]

RIM pivoted. So many times, they puked everywhere and just left a mess.

Even themselves.

[edgedmurasame]

HP typically destroys every company they acquire.

Since Fiorina, the company has even destroyed itself.

Re:Even themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like EA... or at least in the last 20y...

Here's an idea

[Miamicoastguard]

Stick Windows on it. It'd be more useful than you think.

I still carry a Palm Treo 700p

[Anonymous Coward]

If it ain't broke...

Though I only use it as a PDA, not a phone. I also carry a locked down work iPhone that I am allowed to use for personal calls, internet, and emails. But for taking pictures and keeping passwords and notes and my to do list and addresses and mp3s and ebooks and personal spreadsheets and phone numbers... Palm, baby.

If I lose it I'm out $15 for a replacement on eBay. The interface feels perfect to me. The hard keyboard is nice. I tried to migrate all my data to an Android, several times in fact. The necessary apps would either be missing some very important (to me) feature or costed too much. I decided to just keep the old lump in the pocket for now.

Likely I will one day migrate to an Android and just suffer the missing features. But for now... Palm, baby.

Still Use my Palm Pilot

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use a smartphone. I have a flip-phone, and I use my Palm for my appointment calendar. It interfaces to Linux via J-pilot.

Buy/Sell madness

[DrYak]

Yes, Palm (back when they were working on Palm OS 5) did buy BeOS as a potential source of technology and component for future OSes.
But back then, they ended up only using it for the background(*) music-playing capability.
And that part of the company (developpers of Palm OS 5) was then spun of as a separate entity (Palm Source) which went on trying to develop further OSes (spent time failing to make "Cobalt", then developped "Access Linux Platfrom" which hasn't seen much use)

As HP did buy *Palm*, I don't know if there's any asset of BeOS that they got acquired there.
Also buy now, BeOS is extremely old tech that didn't see much development. Haiku is as close as it gets to a modernized BeOS.

Meanwhile Linux (either as parts of GNU/Linux stacks, like SailfishOS, or Google's weird Andoid userspace) has proven to work and is what chipset manufacturer are targetting when releasing their drivers (i.e.: crappy binary forks of whatever happened to be the kernel version in the android du jour).
So even if HP did still have BeOS assets and did decide to use them to develop a smartphone OS, they will have to develop everything from the ground up including all the drivers.

Over all, webOS was a very decent OS. In my personnal experience (Palm Pre, then HP Pre3) - the problems weren't as much the OS it self, as that it needed a decent hardware to manifest itself.
(the first Pre had a little bit limited memory and would be very restricted if you didn't enable compressed swap.
CPU wasn't that powerful either which did complicate matter a bit, specially when most apps are actually web apps written in HTML and Javascript).
Pre3 was finally a decent platform where the OS could shine. Only HP decided to shut down everyting a mere few days after the european-only release.
But on Pre3 webOS did indeed shine.

----

(*) Note: PalmOS was an almost single-task only OS - task switching was actually "state saving, closing app, starting another app, reload its saved state" - helped a lot by the fact that devices back then only used flash for the boot rom and were 100% (battery-) RAM for everything else. Yes, long before all this "non-volatile RAM" revolution, we already had OS using byte addressable storage.
That's unlike WebOS which was a full blown GNU/Linux, with full multi-tasking capability, and a nice visual interface based on a "stack of cards" metaphore to help organise it. (Back at a time where iOS and Android had respectively either no 3rd party apps or basically the same approach to app switching as PalmOS)
Modern-day SailfishOS is about the only smartphone OS that did a similar good job on multi-tasking (and BTW uses the same "light weight" approach to apps : most are QML+Javscript).
But unlike webOS hasn't found an elegant solution to the "two-levels of multitasking" (i.e.: individual apps vs. tabs inside the app) - webOS 2 had a nice solution. Everything is a separate card *including down to the tabs themselves*. But by default, those tabs are grouped in "hands of cards" (but still can be moved around). Meaning that the same metaphore of getting around between tasks is used to get between tabs in tasks (with the added benefit that you can freely move cards around, meaning you could actually group together tabs belonging to different tasks).
This is unlike every other modern smartphone OS, in which you use one metaphor to manage apps themselves (a grid in Sailfish OS and Windows, cards in iOS and Android), and then need to use whatever tabbing system the app themselves use.

Re: Buy/Sell madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Username should be DrBlather

Re:Buy/Sell madness

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS is software, not "old tech". It doesn't just go obsolete due to time, especially since nothing since has been able to match it.

Colours LCD

[DrYak]

I also miss LCD screens that worked in direct sunlight. I take that over colour any day.

Tapwave's Zodiac screen was exceptionally good from this point of view.
- a CFL-lit colour LCD, giving a nice picture in indoor conditions.
- the best ever screen readibility in the sun. Yes, the colours weren't that much distinguishable under strong light, but the screen was perfectly readable.

(It's the kind of sun-compatible screens that was used at some point in time by Nintendo for the GBA).

App ecosystem

[DrYak]

But barring a wide variety of apps in the palm ecosystem (not exactly the device's fault),

Actually it was the devs slight oversight.

They were pretty much aware that being part of an app ecosystem is critical. (The success of Palm devices was partly due of the incredible success of PalmOS apps - the switch from Motorola 68k to ARM did pay attention to keep backward compatibility for this exact reason).

It's just that, back when they started developing webOS, Android was still a small emerging platform, and iOS, hadn't even started to allow 3rd party apps (it was all about having only web-apps opening in the browser). On the other hand PalmOS was still a major relevant platform.
So they did build support for major app ecosystems : the first webOS was to support an emulator (called "Classic") able to run PalmOS apps.

It's just that, by the time webOS device started to get market presence, PalmOS wasn't relevant anymore, and Android started to gain traction as the common app ecosystem.
HP/Palm did eventually try to get support for android apps by contracting OpenMobile.
But then HP decided to pull the plug on the whole webOS thing and the rest is history.

OS, Primitive ?

[DrYak]

Love them, hate them, defend them to death, but their OS was primitive even by Windows Mobile 2002 standards;

Which OS are you talking about ?
PalmOS - which of course was much older than Windows Mobile, so it's more a Captain Obvious quote than anything.
But which was still extremely quick and responsive for the tasks that the PDAs covered (calendar, notes, etc.)

or webOS - which basically was a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, with a nice UI with a very practical "stack of card" metaphor to manage the multitasking. Supporting both heavy Linux apps with direct gfx (SDL), or lightweight web-apps written in HTML and Javascript and running locally.

It didn't work for Nokia (Microsoft put its shil in to kill it) and it didn't work for Microsoft (microsoft mobile phone is dead).

The comparison is very valid :

- Nokia did fire their engineers (the guys responsible for the Maemo/Meego platform, and the N700/N800/N900/N9 line of devices), Microsoft basically acquired them for the brand name recognition.
And the upcoming return of "Nokia"-branded phone have only the name "Nokia" in common.

- webOS technology is lost somewhere in the meandre of LG's smart TVs. (And that's not even mentionning Palm Source's OS which we haven't heard much about since their "Access Linux Platform")
These upcoming phone have only the brand name "Palm" in common.

Re: OS, Primitive ?

[that this is not und]

PalmOS was like MS-DOS. A single tasking operation that simply got the hell out of the way after loading the program and came back when it was finished. That kept it fast and very directed. I kind of wish there was a PalmOS emulator, a robust rocklike one, that could run on Android. It could replace a lot of the junk Android tries to be.

Keyboard

[DrYak]

I owned a few Palms. Never had one with a physical keyboard.

During the PDA-era, most PalmOS devices and all Palm-made device were using Graffiti as an input.
(There *was* some Psion-shaped text processor featuring a hardware keyboard and very wide screen.
Some Sony Clie had a clamshell design revealing a keypad)
The only hardware keyboard where the various W-shaped foldable by Stowaway/ThinkOutside - officially supported by palm and some even branded.
(I love them, I still use the bluetooth one with my modern Jolla smartphone).

It's during the smartphone-era that Palm started to make keyboards :
Thungsten W, then the various Centros, and subsequently their Windows-powered smartphones.
(all having physical keypad in the place normally reserved for Graffiti)

The webOS-powered smartphone had all vertical sliding keyboards.

When the iPhone came out, to me it just looked like a tiny, spruced up Palm. Never thought it would be the killer device it turned out to be.

Specially since at the beginning, Apple insisted on keeping their platform close, not allowing 3rd party developpers, and insisting that all needed to by webapps accessed on-line from within the browser.
Whereas Palm had a very vibrant ecosystem of 3rd party PalmOS applications. (To the point that during the Motorola 68k to ARM transition, Palm made sure to keep back compatibility, and when they designed webOS, Palm made sure to have the "Classic" emulator - except by then the platform started to dwindle).

But on the other hand, it's Apple. They have such a huge fanboi userbase, coupled with geniuses in the marketing department : they'll be able to take over any market just by slapping their logo on the product. And the people will be praising them for "inventing" the decade-old product that they replaced.

Graffiti 1

[DrYak]

extremely important question :
- does this one also support the Graffiti 1 alphabet (100% single-stroke letters ? i.e.: "T" is written as a left-handed reversed gamma, "K" has the shape of an alpha/fish, "X" has the shape of an left-facing reversed alpha/a fish, etc. and "A" has a "/\" triangle shape)
- or is it only Graffiti 2 alphabet (the thing that Palm release during the PalmOS 5 due to an ongoing suit over "jot" and which used multi-stroke letters, i.e.: "T" is written as "-" and "|", "K" is written as "|" and "<", "X" is written as "/" and "\", etc. and "A" has a cumbersome "a" shape).

Overwriting PalmOS 5.x's Graffiti 2 libraries, with PalmOS 5.0 Graffiti 1 has always been the first thing I'd do after acquiring a device (or after resetting the RAM storage).

This is like new "Atari" devices

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same thing with Atari, every few years someone else buys the name and tries to sell a product that tries to capitalize on the fond memory many people have of the original Atari products. Yet the products are garbage that nobody wants. I suspect this will be the same with any new "Palm" devices. Zombie brands.

Youll never make a Web "Reviewer"!

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to say "Premium" instead of shiny. As in: "The build of this new phone is so REMIUM that it should be worth the removal of many desirable features."

I still use my Palm Tungsten C daily

[TheDarkener]

Shameless plug to a blog I wrote in 2014. I still use it daily. I'm an independent I.T. consultant. I love the looks and questions people give me when they see it for the first time.

Why I still use a Palm Pilot