New Palm Pictures?

New Palm writes "It looks like pictures of a new Palm os5 device codenamed 'Oslo' have hit the web. www.pocketpcthought.com had them up, but after a phonecall from Palm's Director of Global Information Security, pulled the pictures. A number of people are mirroring them. Looks semi-legit - but who knows, and who knows how long the images will stay up?

Nah

[HomeGroove]

Take a look at the mirror. It looks like p.shop hacking up to me. The corners on the right are too sharp. I know he put rendered some clouds behind the image (God knows why) but this thing just reeks of photoshop shenanigans.

Great for games!

[John Harrison]

Finally a Palm with a button layout that can be useful for games! This has taken too long! If they had put a little bit of thought into this in the first place we never would have had to deal with non-intuitive control layouts for so many games.

That alone might make be purchase one since my Handspring recently died.

Re:Keyboard

[rleyton]

Moving parts are a Bad Thing(tm). They're always the first thing to go wrong, and the most expensive to replace.

*Sigh*

KISS [magicpub.com] is a sensible design methodology that I fear organiser manufacturers are forgetting.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Nah

[gcshaw2nd]

You people are ridiculous. Everything is touched up in photoshop. It's not a conspiracy anymore; it's just the way it is. Did I miss the competition to be the first person to claim every photo is a photoshop fake?

And such as it is, I spend a lot of time photoshopping and those corners don't look "too sharp" to me. If anything, I'd say the glare along the right edge of the graffiti portion seems abnormally sharp, but it's in keeping with the quality of the photo.

Bad design

[totallygeek]

Moving parts are a Bad Thing(tm). They're always the first thing to go wrong, and the most expensive to replace.

You are right. While speaking about bad design, the worst is the CD jewel case. I mean, they come out with compact discs -- awesome, but make the hinges on the jewel cases the weakest two pieces of cheap plastic known to man!

Be folks working on v6

[brokeninside]

AFAIK, the engineers from Be are working on v6 which is currently a nebulous "next generation" OS for Palm Computing.

Palm OS v5 is essentially the Palm OS kernel hacked to run on ARM with a few kludges for a bit of functionality that Palm OS currently lacks to make it competitive.

If these pix are real, they are far more likely to be of a unit running Palm OS v5 than v6 as v6 doesn't really exist yet except on whiteboards in the heads of the OS architects.

I have two hopes for v6:

1. Palm Computing doesn't pull an IBM (OS/2 PPC) or an Apple (Copland, the original MacOS 8).
2. The Be invasion of the software division of Palm Computing proceeds a la the NeXT invasion of Apple.

And I still think it a shame that Palm Computing decided that Linux (because of the GPL) was incompatible with their business model in relation to IP. It is also a shame that they didn't (apparently) look into one of the BSDs.

Of course, the Be crowd was purchased at a fire sale price. I bet JLG is kicking himself in the head when the company he refused to sell to Apple for millions barely managed to get hundreds of thousands in liquidation.

Ah! I didn't know!

[kitzilla]

I didn't know I wanted a pocket-based version of iPhoto in my life. What I THOUGHT I wanted was inexpensive wireless email, and an improved version of Graffiti that isn't so apres- 1995.

Hmm. No obvious antenna, and that aure looks like a standard Graffiti pad.

Thanks for straightening me out, Palm!

Making is smaller means making it wearable

[trainwrek]

I'm glad they are at least thinking about how to make the PDA less of a hassle to carry around. I think Oregon Scientific have the right idea with this one [weathertools.com]. Once you can carry a PDA w/o the obnoxious bulge in your pants they will finally be usable by normal people and not geeks. They need to basically disappear into your clothing to make them really useful.