Palm OS Spinoff

iCharles writes "According to this SEC filing per this Palm Infocenter story, it would appear that Palm is spinning off its OS devision. I'm a Handspring user, so it sounds quite interesting to me."

hercules using arm?

[htmlboy]

The story mentions that at least one future Palm is going to be using an ARM processor (Hercules 1.0). i guess that means we'll finally see linux on genuine Palm(tm) hardware, at the expense of have a cool processor name like the Dragonball VZ.

It also brings up interesting prospects for the future of Palm OS. If Palm's OS division is making a Palm OS for an ARM processor, will we start to see Palm OS as an option on iPaq's and th like? It's just my personal opinion, but I like Palm's interface more than WinCE, but right now, the hardware that runs it is slower. I guess we'll see.

Spinning off an OS division. What about BeOS?

[yerricde]

Palm currently owns BeOS. If Palm is spinning off its operating systems division, this new division will probably own BeOS. Is this a good thing?

Unfortunate for us Palm users

[nyquist_theorem]

Unfortunate because:

#1 - Having the OS and hardware made by the same company is IMHO part of what has kept the Palm stable enough to be useable in a "if this crashes with my [flight information / meeting notes / date's phone number] in it, I'm screwed" sort of way. As Apple has shown, there are definite advantages to having the hardware and software guys on the same team.

#2 - As anyone who's dealt with Windoze will attest, the "it's their fault" / "no its THEIR fault" blame shifting that goes on between software and hardware vendors whenever a conflict comes up can only mean one thing: much longer waiting times before issues are resolved. With present-day Palm, like with Apple, we the consumer can say "your problem, you fix it!" and, while they may not fix it, they at least have to acknowledge that, hardware or software, its their company's problem and not some other company's problem.

#3 - Dilution of the OS. The Palm OS works as well as it does because it is purpose built. I daresay Win CE has, as one of its many faults, the "all things to all people" problem, which makes it bloated and cumbersome and all that. Once a seperate company owns the Palm OS, logically they would seek to expand it across as many different pieces of hardware as possible, to maximize revenue and marketshare. As the OS is rewritten to run on more and more things, it moves away from the original "here's the OS we wrote to run on this one little machine" and closer to "here's a Windows CE competitor. Hey Bill! Come and crush us!".

Obviously, I'm no expert. But its food for thought.

Why did they spin *THIS* part off?

[hacker]

I for one, do not understand this. Their hardware business is the lower cost-center. They get licensing from all of their OEM partners, and frankly, Palm's hardware sucks. They haven't yet innovated in any way that they can call their own. They're on third and fourth generation devices, and they're still shipping with 8 megs of memory.

• Symbol Technologies licenses the Palm and creates several units [symbol.com] which can do RF, 802.11, and include a barcode scanner (high-output LED)
• Handspring [handspring.com] invents the Springboard slot [handspring.com] and implements pseudo-USB support for connecting the devices.
• Sony [sony.com] mimics that with the MemoryStick, but adds VFS support, and takes Handspring's USB protocol, changes one function, and makes their own spin on it.
• Handera [handera.com], formerly TRG builds upon that with a sliding graffiti area (thanks for incorporating my idea from #palmchat back in 1998 on that one), and adds CF and SD slot architectures (still serially connected storage though, can't "run apps" from each card concurrently)
• Palm [palm.com] comes out with the replacement to the Vx, called the m505 [palm.com], and includes the Sony VFS extensions, the Handspring hardware port design (internally) and the Handspring USB modifications, but changes it enough to make yet a third fork of this pseudo-USB protocol. They also make sure to make every single thing about this new device completely incompatible with every single other thing available for their devices, even down to a 2mm change in the stylus length (I have a more detailed enumeration of those changes found here [moongroup.com]).

Why does Palm think they're about to, in any way, create a new hardware device that they think will surpass these existing innovative devices? Palm is ALWAYS behind the curve on hardware advances in this area. We're not even talking about comparing them to the iPAQ [handhelds.org], VTech Helio [myhelio.com], Agenda [agendacomputing.com], Yopy [yopy.com], and the other dozens of non-PalmOS, non-WinCE handheld PDA devices.

Currently, Palm's OEMs for the PalmOS® software include:

• Sony
• Handspring
• Handera (formerly TRG)
• Qualcomm (bought out by Kyocera)
• Kyocera [kyocera-wireless.com]
• Symbol Technologies
• ...and others.

They get licensing from each and every one of these OEMs. Their hardware is the last thing to ever be updated. It is without a doubt, the least innovative portion of their business.. and they're choosing to keep it?!

I don't quite understand the motive behind this decision on their part. I suppose I'll find out at Palmsource [palmsource.com] in February.

Clever move, but late

[PatSmarty]

According to industry analysts, WinCE is on the way up while Palm will go down due to lack of multimedia features and beeing a "real computing platform" instead of an organizer.

Changing direction for Palm is clever, but one has to ask if they aren't late: Developing a new OS might take 2 years, while WinCE is pretty much there.

Disclaimer: Yes, I have a Palm. No, I dislike MS.

Why?

[driftingwalrus]

Why is it that every time a company comes up with a good sideline product, they spin it off into it's own company? I mean, how are you supposed to build a company that way?

Every time Edison came up with a new invention, he didn't spin it off into it's own company. Everything remained the product of Edison General Electric, or one of it's divisions. Same thing goes for IBM. Ford hasn't spun each model into it's own company.

How are you supposed to build a large business if you keep giving away all your best products?

Re:The future of handhelds

[iCharles]

I think you are right: WinCE was never a contender. Palm may or may not be the future, but it does something that I don't think WinCE does, or a port of Linux would: fit the market. I don't hide I perfer NT to Linux. However, when I went out this year to get a new PDA, I didn't get a WinCE device.

Why? WinCE wasn't trying to be a handheld. It is trying to be a slimmed down version of a desktop OS. While it does enable some interesting ports (I'm still waiting for a port of Perl to the Palm (what a tounge twister!)) for a lot of PDA use (calander, to-do list, contacts, quick notes), it isn't the right model.

Palm, on the other hand, seems to do better. Perhaps Linux would with the right mix of apps, but I simply don't see it scaling that way and fitting into the day-to-day life of the average user.

Perhaps, instead, it will be a third (or, in this case, fourth) thing all together. Are there any serious PDA OSs out there aside from Palm and WinCE?

Re:What a great idea!

[Goronguer]

Now if we could only convince Microsoft to do the same thing!

Or better yet, if we could only convince Apple to do the same thing! This would free Apple's OS division to aggressively market their products to all OEMs. Imagine if all the owners of x86 boxes out there had the option to install OSX instead of Windows.

I know this has been debated before, but I still think it makes sense.