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Palm's Mistakes
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 28, 2005 09:14 AM
from the stuff-to-read dept.
from the stuff-to-read dept.
putko writes "Mike Singer has an article at ZDNet called Five reasons for Palm's slide which describes succinctly how Palm went from owning the palmtop platform -- OS and apps -- to getting chopped into pieces (some recently sold to a Japanese firm), using an OS from Microsoft and teaming up with Microsoft. The author claims, among other things, that Palm's stuff never worked well enough with Windows (while the RIM Blackberry did), which ultimately allowed Windows Mobile to eliminate them. A hard fall for a company that really did innovate."
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If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Interesting)
The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.
In my experience, basic users tend toward basic devices. I'd say nearly 30% of my consulting income for 5 years was helping basic company managers getting their Palms to work. Once they worked (synced, etc), these basic users spent more time navigating the software than using it efficiently. The working install rarely worked for long. My corporate customers hated the software. "Just get it working" was common to hear.
I'd considered teaching users how to really achieve PDA efficiency, but the Pilots that were so plentiful were just not powerful enough and frustrated me. I can't handle spending 30 seconds finding information that took 5 seconds in a paper dayplanner.
Then I started to realize something: people were buying these in a fad fashion. Many used only the calculator or a simple name+phone contact list. Not a renewable market there.
My PDA Phone is great because it is easily customizable, has enough software to give me options, and it has the Internet. But in the hands of a basic user, I'd see them using only the phone part. These devices just don't scream "easy to use."
Apple can turn this market on its head. I don't see them doing it (again), but if there is any market that needs a unique interface, the PDA market is it.
I'm not a pro-Apple guy. My lady has an iPod, I have no Macs. Yet I loved my Newtons. I can still efficiently use them, and basic users loved mine.
The Palm's limited resolution, limited speed, amd limited memory killed it. The market wasn't ready. There were too few customers. The economy of spending millions on the ultimate interface is not there, yet.
The cell phone market will help, as the best interface models get combined with one another. SMS messaging will usher in the perfect mini keyboard someday.
It will take time.
PS The Blackberry has to be a fad fluke. It feels like a Speak 'N Spell.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Interesting)
Me? I don't like having my PDA and phone as a single unit. I don't like overly large cell phones, and sometimes find myself needing to use a PDA while talking on the phone... so unless you have a speaker phone built in, it can be rather difficult.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing not mentioned in the article is that cell carriers may not have liked the Palm precisely because it offered that flexibility, limited as it may have been. Carriers want to be solution providers, not platform supporters. If you need software on your mobile device, they want to be in the loop. The Palm devices work against that idea, making them a tougher sell to carrier buyers. Remember the first Windows phones from Orange - and the first thing the users did was hack them to allow users to install their own software?
The one item that truly irks me is the poor support for WiFi. The WiFi SD card was announced in early 2003. The Tungsten E came out in late 2003 - but it has never supported the WiFi cards. Palm in general seems to have given only a passing thought to wireless LAN support. That just won't fly anymore - heck, the NINTENDO has WiFi!!
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Interesting)
As for WiFi, my model has BT, WiFi and GPRS. My GPRS hits about 3.2K/s down and 0.9K/s up. Its perfect for slashdot, news.google, lewrockwell, e-mail, basic FTP and other tasks. WiFi sucks because the battery life is horrible. There's no solution for this yet, but WiFi needs constant polling whereas GPRS' packet based transceiving is more energy efficient.
The upside of using only my GPRS connection is that I don't deal with data bloat. I had DSL since the beta stages, now I'm back to sub-dial-up speeds and ecstatic.
WiFi is useless to me now. No data bloat = no need for high speed anything.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say nearly 30% of my consulting income for 5 years was helping basic company managers getting their Palms to work. Once they worked (synced, etc), these basic users spent more time navigating the software than using it efficiently. The working install rarely worked for long. My corporate customers hated the software. "Just get it working" was common to hear.
I have used Palm devices since the Palm Pilot Professional and have reveled in their simplicity. I have a Palm m505 and couldn't do without it. I regularly and routinely sync it into my Macintosh and everything works perfectly. In fact, since I use Apple's iSync, my .Mac calendar and address book are kept up with data I enter in on my m505 every time I synchronize, which means I can log onto my account from any web browser and retrieve information. This is the epitome of Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips."
So you're wrong.
My fiancée rarely takes her m505 anywhere. She used to have all of her contacts on it but lost all of the data in a divorce when her ex-husband kept the computer and she did not hot-sync her data to anything (he probably did it for her). When her m505 lost power, it lost everything (I think). I don't think she regularly hot-syncs. She has a Dell laptop and is minimally-functional in Microsoft Excel. She runs a home-based business on the side and understands the value of data entry in order to track clientele, but simply won't do the work. She would not know how to harness the power of a template in Microsoft Word unless someone set it up for her and also wrote most of the document for her (thus making her need the "consultant" as a permanent appendage). She has two paper calendars where she keeps numbers, addresses, contacts, schedules, appointments and so on and leads a busy life that is pretty disorganized -- all things that could be organized with a little more computer literacy and better use of her Palm m505.
So you're right.
The Palm was designed to do few things and do them extremely well. I use my m505 for my date book, appointment book, address book memo pad, and play solitaire and chess on it. That's pretty much it. I have a cell phone that works just fine as a cell phone. I have an iPod that works just fine as a music player. I totally understand the desire on the part of many to reduce these three personal electronic gadgets into one -- fewer cords to haul around, fewer adapters needed, fewer things to plug in every night and so on. The Palm devices I have used over the years have always had more than enough memory, more than enough speed and more than enough features to please me. And they do one thing perfectly: They sync with my Mac (it is my understanding that Windows CE devices won't).
I noted that there were a few specific things that the Palm folks wanted put into the Windows OS for the upcoming Treo, like clicking on someone's face in one's address book to initiate a call. Microsoft still doesn't have "ease of use" down -- even for handhelds.
Perhaps it's time I got another Palm device -- quickly because the new ones next year won't work with my Mac. There are lots of people who wrote code for the Palm OS who are probably really unhappy about this announcement.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, in the free market, items that cost incredible amounts to develop need an incredible amount of users to bear a profit.
Devices need to work for your fiance before they're accepted by everyone.
The days of 128k memory were truly an alpha stage for the market. The hardware is almost where it needs to be.
The software is still in that alpha stage. The interface needs a breakthrough. The syncing is hit or miss for most.
I feel bad about Palm programmers but the same thing happens in any
Re:He's not wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
You obviously didn't read my entire post.
Microsoft Outlook worked just fine with the Palm -- until Microsoft upgraded it so that it wouldn't. Apple developed iSync so that their software would never suffer from the same version incompatibility as Microsoft's. Microsoft could have done the same thing, the specifications for creating a conduit for the Palm are out there in public for all to see and use.
I quoted Bill Gates' vision for what computers would do for us. I should not need to remind you that Mr. G
Re:He's not wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:He's not wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately, that wasn't a critical feature for me, or I would have been up the creek.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's why it was so sucessful at first - it did exactly what people wanted to do, at a sane price point. Making something that worked, and had weeks of battery life at typical usage (and many hours of continuous use), with the hardware available at the time (remember, they were designing this thing in 1995), was a major achievement.
It was usable, acted very well as a 'tentacle' of a desktop machine, and had just (barely) enough juice to attract third-party developers, which ended up coming in droves. Programming for it is quirky but doable, and despite some limitations stemming from the very restricted original configuration (128KB of RAM - remember, 1995), very neat things could be done with it. The sycing Just Worked - unlike ActiveSync which still has issues from what I gather.
But Palm didn't expand the platform very well. I don't mind using Dragonballs per se - their power consumption is tiny compared to even modern ARM processors - but their software model needed updating badly. You just can't write a reliable server-type program on PalmOS, or do any multithreading (or even multiprocessing). That makes it way too hard to get anything sophisticated done on the device.
Even given those limitations it's remarkable what can be done on a Palm platform. See, e.g., this little gem [handera.com]. Does all kinds of neat things (including WiFi and such) and yet a wondrous battery life (6 hours of continuous WiFi traffic, anyone?).
If they'd gotten a real update to their OS to at least enable multitasking of some kind, even cooperative multitasking - they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. There were ways to do it without even trying that hard [google.ie]. Oh, well.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:4, Insightful)
The Achilles heel of PalmOS was always HotSynch. It wasn't bad for individuals on their home computers, but it didn't cut it in the enterprise. And the consumers just aren't there anymore.
The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.
As a PDA, simple is what you want. Well, we use PDAs as mobile data entry devices. The palm was probably the best overall. PocketPC is overcomplicated for users in my opinion.
Simple is good. As PDAs accrete more functionality, they become more annoying (IMO) because (a) there's more opportunity to screw up and (b) the functions run up against the limitations of the form factor. And if there's one thing Palm understood in the early days, ti was form factor, form factor form factor. Apple of the Newton era didn't understand that, but Apple of the iPod era does. Palm didn't do a lot of things, like multitasking, even though the underling OS could handle it, because it didn't fit well.
I don't think convergence killed Palm. I think what happened here is that time and technology has passed Palm's natural niche by. Palm's market position used to be great basic PDA functionality in a practical form factor. But you can buy a good enough PDA now for under $50; there's no margin to support the kind of business they had before. The market position they owned is not lucrative anymore, and the positions they might move to are occupied already. Blackberry owns the email junkie market segment. Microsoft owns the "I only want to buy from one vendor" market segment. Apple will own the mobile multimedia/PDA convergence market if that ever emerges.
The only market segment they have any chance in, thanks to the Handspring acquisition, is the converged phone/PDA segment. But it's not a great segment. I carry a Treo 600, but I'd rather have a really good phone with basic PDA functions. Any device you'd call a converged PDA/phone is likely to be a mediocre phone, and for most people phones are way more important than PDAs. If you compare the Treo to, say, the original Tungsten T, it's impossibly clunky as a PDA. If you compare the Treo to any reasonable phone it's impossibly clunky as a phone. And as a camera it's complete trash. There's nothing to buy it for, other than if you are already carrying two devices. On the other hand, you buy a Blackberry for email and live with its other limitations. Most people I talk to don't care much for the Blackberry as a phone, but live with it.
Palm's developing a MS based phone seems like a really bad idea to me. How can they possibly be anything but an also ran?
What I'd really like to see a vendor stake out as a position is to be a leader in personal networking. This would involve creating a constellation of devices that are task appropriate that communicate with each other and with corporate networks. The centerpiece of this would be a phone with big battery capacity, large buttons and an easy to read two or three line display. This would work with my laptop or if I chose my PDA. If I happened to bring an MP3 player with me, I could fetch playlists through the phone, but I wouldn't have to bring the phone with me to the gym. I could maintain my contact list through my PDA or my laptop, and I wouldn't have any rituals to perform to get them synchronized, it would just happen.
In many ways, my perfect PDA would be a Tungsten T which used a bluetooth phone for comm services. The problem is finding a phone with bluetooth that doesn't also want to be a PDA. It's a catch 22. The devices don't work well enough together to build purpose specific devices. But until there are a set of purpose specific devices with personal networking capabilities built in, then you pretty much have to buy what's available and try to get it working together. If anybody could do this, it would be Apple, who seem to be the only company that understands how to assemble several bits of technology to create a favorable user experience.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you kidding me? The original Palm Pilot sold in huge numbers and was wildly successful by any measure you want to take. At the time I remember reading it was the most successful consumer electronics product ever. People were talking abouts adoption curve being steeper than television, VCRs, transitor radios, personal computers, cell phones, etc.
I too was/am a fan of the Newton, but you shouldn't be blind to the reasons why the Newton did not sell anywhere near the numbers that Palm sold. I think it comes down to three factors: size, speed, and connectivity.
Most Palm organizers can go into your shirt pocket. There was no Newton ever close to being that small. The OMP was the size of a day runner and three times as heavy. The best of the group - the MessagePad 2X00 was even larger. I worked for a company that made medical software for the Newton and we would advertise it as "fits in your lab coat pocket." which it did. Shirt pocket - no way.
Also, the Palm did a great job of feeling responsive to the user. Remember how on most of the Newton models, you would press the page down control and the whole system would stop for about 5-6 seconds? I think that was something people wouldn't put up with. The Newton 2000 fixed that, but Palm was able to pull that off with a motorola 68000 processor and still have better battery life than Newton. The Newton OS was engineered to be a nice modern OS that would be easily maintainable and nice to use far into the future - at the expense of some of Apple's immediate needs. Palm was like the opposite of that and that's why today the thing seems long in the tooth.
And finally, connectivity was an area where the original Palm far exceeded the Newton. Do you remember Apple trying to charge like $150 for the Newton Connectivity Kit on the original MessagePad? That was insane - and the connectivity just got worse from there! The best Newton connectivity solution by far was Dan Rowley's X-Port product. There was a thing you could get to synchronize with Outlook for Windows, but again it was third party and not available until Newton 2.0 had shipped. Apple's connectivity SDK for developers was always buggy and perpetually late. They never shipped any connectivity solution worthy of the device.
Palm, on the other hand, had the hot sync and their conduit SDK which was relatively easy to program. They had good synchronization with Outlook and other apps - at least via the cradle.
I will agree that in recent years, WinCE devices have surpassed Palm in synchronization and so have Blackberry devices. Also, Palm screwed themselves by not standardizing on one type of cradle/charger and sticking to it. It hurt their customers and it hurt their own inventory management.
In short, Palm got a lot closer to the mark than Newton, but still never followed through on what their cool devices should have been.
Oh, and not releasing a device with WiFi and Blue Tooth together was stupid. I am aware of the technical reasons why, but it is still stupid. They should have had Blue Tooth and Wifi on the Treo 600 and had a nicer screen, and more built in software. Towards the end, they just couldn't get all the cool features on a single device.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows Mobile uses the same developer tools and API that desktop Windows uses. This is huge. You don't need a huge effort to retrain developers to develop for Windows Mobile. Everything is integrated with Microsoft's desktop and server offerings and other technologies. This is the same strategy that they used makes the Xbox the #2 game system in a single generation of releases. If you had told
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Insightful)
Their secondary use is to indicate boredom in meetings by starting to read their email in the middle of a conversation with you.
And their final use is to 'impress' people, and show how busy they are, by sending replies to your email while they're on the toilet.
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke (Score:3, Informative)
It's about a thousand bucks a year on a 1-off basis. If there's any kind of productivity to be gained by having one (ah, the $64M question) everybody should have one. That's 1/70th of the average yearly loaded cost of an employee.
Maybe that everybody doesn't have one says more about their utility and their role as a status symbol.
Well (Score:3, Insightful)
What about successes? (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, I think Palm's biggest "mistake" was their push for expensive networking features when no good infrastructure existed. Their devices kept going up in cost over useless features all while they stuck with that hideous dragonball processor and low-res screens. Thank God for Sony and their Clie series, or Palm never would have gotten their heads out of their rears. Sadly, it may have been too little, too late.
Re:What about successes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Daniel
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Re:What about successes? (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW, Palms come with Documents To Go out of the box, and they support native files, so no conversion necessary.
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Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little (Score:4, Informative)
Some of those devices still linger in inventories..."
They did not see that the Palm cost too much and delivers too little. I don't think anyone likes to write with a Palm stylus either, it was just too slow and difficult. Cell phones were being given away, Palm prices stayed high and could not communicate with each other easily. Innovate quickly or die seems to be the motto in this industry.
Re:Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little (Score:3, Interesting)
I partially agree with you, they were too expensive. I wouldn't say too late, more like wrong functionality.
The last Palm device that I have been satisfied with was a m505
It's all the Internet Porn. (Score:5, Funny)
processors (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:processors (Score:4, Insightful)
Entirely aside from the question of how efficient the processors are (a 20MHz Dragonball is not ten times slower than a 200MHz ARM)...
If you can always be near a charging station, a high-MHz CPU is nice. But you can't always be near a charger, and then you have to manage your battery life. Those 20MHz Palms could run for weeks on one charge, or many hours of continuous use. How long could your ipaq hold a charge? Plus the OS could execute things directly out of flash so they needed far less RAM than any WinCE device.
Now, don't get me wrong. Palm should have updated their OS to support multitasking, and then they needed to come out with some higher-end models with some of the bells and whistles to keep the higher-end customers. But don't ignore the strengths of their approach...
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Re:processors (Score:3, Insightful)
Doing their wants against customer wants (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I was one of the only people who liked Graffiti. I thought it was really intuitive.
Re:Or Macs (Score:4, Informative)
As for the Pocket PC stuff, I can't figure out how to use the OS on them, much less the rest of the software. Plus I've never heard of one with more than a few hours battery life to it. My Palm gets plugged into my USB port approximately whenever I remember to (read: not often,) and I've never had the battery below 75%.
I guess I'm just in the minority on this.
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pioneered not failed (Score:5, Interesting)
The Palm Trilogy (Score:5, Funny)
Nooo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm got into Cellular phones BEFORE PalmPC did too.
Palm didn't flop so much as its purpose was absorbed into cellphones and laptops with instant wireless connections.
It was an calender/address book with some note taking capabilities. No one really uses snail mail anymore for "quick communication" so the phone directory in a cell phone is more than enough and if you need more than that, most people are carrying around their laptops or can access GMail or Yahoo where their address books are stored online.
That leaves the calendar function which these days is stored centrally on company servers. So it's just easier to access it via the laptop everyone has then carry around yet another electronic device.
That plus its confusion as Handspring/Palm/Trio its hardware missteps over the last few years, lack of a clearcut development vision of what a PalmPC should do (it's been almost 10 years and its main functions are still... calender/address book/notes) and the perception of not being a multimedia device.
But it died because it didn't hook up to Windows properly? Nah... I still use mine and it hooks up to Windows just fine.
Innovation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Palm's Mistakes or Microsoft's Tactics? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not Palm's fault. Microsoft keeps their protocols and file formats secret, so as to make it difficult for competitiors to develop products that interoperate with Microsoft's. One more instance of Microsoft driving competitors out of the market by using their desktop monopoly, and one more reason why we must demand open formats and protocols [nyud.net].
What killed Palm for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Now it has to be said that PocketPCs stink as PDAs, but they great all-rounders. Whereas Palm Pilots are great PDAs but just awful for anything but PIM functionality. I guess that Palm's problem was that the world started expecting more than PIM functionality from their devices and they couldn't deliver.
One would hope that they would still follow through with their plans to run over Linux - it offers the opportunity to leapfrog CE - but somehow I doubt it. I wonder if MS didn't throw a lot of cash at them to throw the towel in on that front.
Isn't Palm a success? (Score:5, Informative)
I own a Win Mobile 2003 device, and I would never give it to one of my users. It's far too complicated. To the degree that most people want the basic address book, calendar/todo, and notes, the Palm is far superior: Endless battery life, far more stable, far easier UI.
Re:Isn't Palm a success? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fall of Palm has nothing to do with the technology. The Treo 650 is wildly successful, and does what it does very well. Palm is failing because they are screwing up the business side of the company.
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Palm's Windows software killed them (Score:5, Interesting)
Palm, who buys PDAs? Business people. What software do business people use? Windows and Outlook. In most businesses that have a lot of people with PDAs, do they all have Administrative rights? I sure hope not, but that's what you designed your software for. You deserve to loose your market share, you bastards.
Palm Dominance to Palm Insignificance (Score:3, Insightful)
What made Palm truly suck was their unwillingness to upgrade the OS and to make it easy to upgrade as it went along. There are no decent controls over the quality of products out there and everything you could even consider adding to the OS costs too much money for what we've already spent on the device.
There are two versions now of the PalmOS that have yet to really see the light of day, and now they probably never will. Sad. They restricted the OS, when they could have made it free to download and even easier for people to get rid of their old palms, recycle them and get into the newer models. Moving from old to new was a pain in the ass.
Last year I bought a Palm 650. Now I'm sad I did, despite using everything from the Contact Book, getting an instant messenging client (Agile's an ok client when it's not crashing), Web browsing all the time (why is it so difficult to find a new browser for palm? the one they have onboard stinks!) for a variety of important tasks, and Versamail for email checking.
The thing is, the power users DO want Video and Music on our handheld. We want to be able to customise it. We want to be able to use it as a checkbook register AND to track our finances when we're not in front of the computer (thank you PocketQuicken!).... But no matter what you do, the applications are painfully outdated and as the UI gets more and more frustrating to use...Why spend $500 to get into a PDA that just doesn't expand and doesn't really allow innovation?
For Palm, going to Windows is an easy out for them. Their phone/pda (which isn't that great. It's just a shell to most folks, they just want it to work) at least has a solid if not innovative platform for what will amount to serious inflexibility.
No amount of Windows goodness (blech, I hate saying that) will change the hardware limits, and let's face it, we're entering a time when the Sony PSP is a step away from becoming a phone, when Apple's iPod is a step away from becoming a PDA, and basically everything handheld wants to really be a Phone/PDA/Media Device combination. It's use and adapt the technology time or lose the battle, and instead of releasing what was going to be a really innovative new operating system (Cobalt's next generation) out into the wild as open source for people to work with, Palm sidles up to this to keep the hardware sold. Again, Sad.
Within the next few months, I'm going to go buy a new PDA, and it's going to be a Linux or Windows box, since the Palm Hardware with Windows on it is crippled at best and horrid at worst.
Hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh and Sony, who bailed out ... and that wasn't until they had to go and implement a whole bunch of Sony only API's to support colour screens and higher resolutions because Palm didn't.
I had a Vx, it was great for the time, but now I'm a Windows Mobile person as I haven't seen the Palm camp innovate for a very long time.
In fact, I still consider them to be the classic case of a company that owned the market, dragged their feet and suddenly found that everyone else had overtaken them.
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
When Psion stopped making consumer hardware, it was like hearing the news about Concorde stopping flying. We'd taken a great step backwards: there was nothing out there which would come close to what a Psion would do routinely, in terms of stability, application support, usability, and preceived speed. I've used Palm and Wince before and after, but both are too unstable to trust completely. Wince these days is fast enough, at the expense of battery life, but Palm hardly seems to have changed. The closest equivalents to the Psion 5 now are the Nokia 9300 and 9500, which use a later version of the OS. Nice smartphones, but they have a fraction of the battery life, perhaps 20% of the speed, and my 9300 reset itself within a week of buying it. In a sense Psion deserved to fail in the consumer space. They spent very little on advertising, and never moved to support features we would now consider essential such as USB and Bluetooth. Still, they remain the only "real" PDAs in my entirely unbiased opinion.
It happens, though they could have avoided it... (Score:3, Informative)
Those of you who wrote that Palms are great as PIM-tools but they suck at everything else - you're wrong. If you take your time to learn the device's habits, you can become very efficient with it. I understand that some random person in the street might not have the skill needed to become a power-user, but I am absolutely sure that any slashdotter has what it takes.
I use my PDA for these things:
- book reading
- dictionary
- writing articles
- schedule/contacts/notes [but this is an obvious one]
- mathematical calculations [see EasyCalc on sourceforge]
- and as soon as I get a decent mobile, I'll add 'email and websurfing' to the list.
Maybe this is caused by the fact that I am getting along well with computers, but I had absolutely no problem with getting used to grafitti, or the Palm GUI - I just used the tool to do my work, rather than "a lot of work had to be done before the tool became usable".
IMHO, Palm is a perfect example of how mobile devices have to be built. So, did they go wrong from the technical point of view? NO.
Where did they go wrong? Well, I will not say that they weren't wise enough to anticipate the competirors' actions, yada yada... What disappointed me, a dedicated Palm-er, is their attitude towards some customers... The story is below:
Some time ago they announced that PalmOS 4.1 is available as an update, and I told myself that I had to go for it, as I needed to work with memory cards of a capacity which 4.0 couldn't handle properly. Their official updater only worked with English Palms, while I had a multilingual one.
I found a 4.1 ROM somewhere on the web, flashed it, everything worked fine... Until the moment the PDA started crashing out of the blue, when running various applications. I tried this and that, but everything failed. It happened many times that I was writing something for several hours.. and then the whole doc is gone after a crash..
Sure, the flasher told me that the ROM is not designed for the device I have, etc.. but what was I to do?
Then I decided to switch back to 4.0, screw the new features.. but get my stability back. Nope.. it never happened... I flashed the ROM, but now it keeps crashing anyway. It's not that bad anymore, it only crashes when I'm in DocsToGo, and only when I am editing a WordToGo document. [which still sucks, because this is the application I need most].
So, at the moment, the only explanation I can find is that I need to flash it with a multilingual 4.0 ROM [the 4.0 ROM I used was an English one]... That must be it, as I am very cautious with my devices, I never dropped my PDA, never got water on it, never hit it too hard with the stylus
I contacted Palm, via email asking them to provide me a ROM, or some troubleshooting tips - because I could not rely on my PDA anymore. But I got no reply. I used the feedback form on their site - nothing.
Now THAT is what makes Palm not attractive to me anymore. Sure, it could be my fault, but can't they at least explicitly state that, so that I will stop trying to find the non-existing solution and move on to a different device?
So, to summarize, there are two things I don't like about Palm:
1. they let me down from the tech point of view; by designing an instrument which is not entirely fail-safe.
2. and then there's the 'social factor' - their actions can be interpreted as "we don't give a damn about European users" and then they don't even reply to people's emails.
The only reason I am still that supportive, is because I know that it used to be a great company that did a lot of great things. There are many people who chose a Palm over a PocketPC after my 'intervention'... Palm, don't make me feel sorry for supporting you.
The truth is... that my next PDA is still going to be a Palm...
And since I'm here:
Could someone with an 'untouched' multilingual m505 please dump their ROM to a file and let me have it? Please?
Jot - WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
I really lost out when I bought my latest Palm a couple of years ago, an m130. It came with OS 4.1.2, whose whole claim to fame is that it "replaces Graffiti with Graffiti 2 on the same Palm OS 4.1 code base [palmsource.com]". Since the m130 is a ROM-based model, that also means I can't "backgrade" to Graffiti - I'm stuck with Jot forever. Yay.
I couldn't care less about Palm's Outlook integration or lack thereof. For me, it died whenever they destroyed the most important feature: its handwriting recognition. See ya, Palm. At least my DayRunner has a place to put a pen and pictures of the kids.
Just bought an m500 (Score:3, Insightful)
I just bought a near-new Palm m500 on eBay for $43 (to replace my ancient m105). New, it was 10x that. I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Palm, but they somehow missed that usability was their #1 asset and their price point could only match the usable features they offered.
Palm was always a simple device that did all you needed to manage contacts, memos, calendar, and todos. But once telephone, wireless, music, media, games, etc. began to be demanded by customers, they couldn't figure out how to integrate them into their concept. The basic idea was good, but it wasn't extensible. It didn't match what was demanded by their customers. For example, I spent two days just trying to get their Palm Desktop installed on Windows XP. It works well on Windows 95, but it never became dead easy for XP, a complete failing on Palm's part to make their devices useful with the current generation of technology.
Palm failed to understand how to keep going. They tried to merely extend their current offerings instead of re-designing and growing them in scale to market demand. That included a more sophisticated operating system and better interface with desktop systems. This explains why I can be happy buying a legacy unit at 10:1 original cost and be happy while at the same time explaining why I will never buy a new Palm.
Re:palm os (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line: Palm would still be the leader had it supported better OS interoperability, and not been so anal about 3rd party developers back in the day.
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Re:Really did innovate- not recently (Score:5, Interesting)
This really isn't true either. The truth is that both OSes and devices sucked, and that consumers are finally giving up on them. On one hand you had the Palm Pilot. It was a good device, sized perfectly for a satellite device, but failed to keep up with improvements in embedded technology, memory needs, and display resolutions. In the end, the device ended up being overpriced for too little power.
On the other hand you've got WinCE devices. They're far more powerful, have color screens, run Microsoft software, play multimedia, and they do it all for seemingly no reason what-so-ever. In the Real World(TM) it seems that no one really is looking to play movies on their tiny handheld screens, nor are they looking to wait five minutes for Excel CE to come up so they can do computations they could have done on the back of a napkin in less time.
So then along comes the Blackberry. The idea is seemingly stupid. It's a super-simple email reader with an analog coupler for a modem. It flops. Then they add wireless support. Suddenly, everyone loves the thing. It's the pager/personal organizer that everyone wanted. It does what they need and it does it simply. You have your email at all times, and you can even type a simple message without resorting to a stylus. So where are all the Palms and WinCE devices now? Replaced by BlackBerries. Funny how the world works, eh?
(Disclaimer: My wife uses her Palm everyday to manage our home and finances. She can't live without the thing.)
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Re:Really did innovate- not recently (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that those doodads are really, really late to the party. The Blackberry had a dog's age to dominate the market of phone-PDAs, and dominate it did.
Plus, Grafitti2 was Palm's inexcusable blunder. That, and the overly high price point of the Zire 21 - no machine that does that little that late in the game should cost that much (and I know it was still PalmOne's cheapest device ever).
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Re:Really did innovate- not recently (Score:5, Insightful)
Mobile computing in general has been stagnating. PalmOS completely failed to grow with the technology. Windows Mobile has never quite grasped that the hardware on which the OS is about the size of a stack of index cards and has a usage pattern that generally consists of pulling it out of a pocket, using it for 15 seconds, and putting it back in the pocket.
I killed my Tungsten|T2 last month. I'm making do with a dead tree notebook and my laptop until something worth spending money on comes out - not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
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Re:Mistakes? (Score:3, Funny)
You must be new here: Teaming up with Microsoft.