Why Palm Still Covets Palm OS

munchola wrote in with news that Palm has just announced a one-time payment for perpetual, royalty-free use of Palm OS. In 2005 Palm spun off PalmSource to an outside company, Access Systems Americas, and since that time has been paying out royalties for its use. At the same time Palm announced products based on Windows Mobile. Palm's latest announcement reduces the uncertainty among Palm OS developers. From the article: "In an unsurprising but symbolically important move, handheld and smartphone maker Palm this month signed a perpetual license with Access Systems Americas, which gives Palm the right to use Access' Palm OS operating system in whole or in part in any Palm device forever more. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the context is interesting, in particular what it means for the army of Palm OS developers out there. Believe it or not there are at least 160,000 Palm OS developers — and they're just the ones that Palm knows about."

Re:Good tools and source code count a lot

[hey!]

The one place where Palm screwed up was in Hotsynch. It worked great on your personal computer, but it was a pain in enterprise environments. There was a point where palms were multiplying in companies like rabbits, but Palm left the enterprise support to third parties like Pumatech. As a result, they hit the wall where Microsoft was able to walk through the door, leveraging its position in corporate messaging. Blackberries also moved in by connecting to corproate email.

Re:Good tools and source code count a lot

[cnettel]

A C-based API with a quirky event handling model, obscene attempts to preserve backward compatibility and somewhat loyal developers? Hmmm... I've never heard of that before.

Ordinary People still use PDA's?

[Penguinisto]

No, seriously... not trolling here.

I once used an iPAQ (w/ a brick-sized battery pack/PCMCIA slot accessory on it) almost religiously several years back. At that time, the iPAQ was great for keeping appointments, a few games stashed onboard, and to top it off, I could shove a PC Card adapter and a CF card full of mp3's in it, or a PC Card-based 802.11b card. It was fun to mess with and was even halfway practical.

Nowadays I can do pretty much all of that (and more) with an iPod and a decent cell phone - or just a really decent cell phone, methinks (except mine doesn't do mp3's, so...) So where does a stand-alone PDA fit in these days? Crackberries, yeah, I can see that - but it appears (IMHO) to be nothing more than a glorified cell phone with a really big screen, and definitely not something you'd want to tinker with under-the-hood too awful much, like you could with a PDA.

I guess I'm just curious, now with the increased power of mobile phone devices glommed together w/ PDA functions, if Palm's core business model even has a future, or if someday they'll just be sucked up by, say, Nokia or Motorola...

Does anyone actually use straight-up PDA's anymore?

/P

Access Linux Platform (ALP)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.access-company.com/about/opensource/ind ex.html [access-company.com]

"We believe that everyone, partners and competitors alike, would benefit from the specification or development of a standard basic Linux platform for mobile phones. With an open and available platform, companies would be able to focus on their main areas of differentiation, develop phones cheaper, and get phones into the markets much faster."

"Q. Does this mean ALP will be open sourced?
A. We expect that we'll be contributing some of our technologies to the open source community as a part of this change. The user-visible parts of ALP (user interface, PIM applications, etc) and the Palm OS middleware will be a separate software layer on top of Linux, and will not be open sourced."

Re:Ordinary People still use PDA's?

[Ngarrang]

Yes, there are people who still use an ordinary PDA. There are people who still have a beeper. There are people have a cell phone that is just a phone, not an MP3 player. And, AND there are people who still use a device is just an MP3 player.

While some may argue that function convergence is the future, I would argue that it is not the end-all-be-all that it could be. Different users have different needs. The problem I see with glomming all of these functions into ONE device is that the provider then raises the price. The end-user pays for more than what they want. Personally, I want a cell phone that is just a phone. I don't want web access, I don't need a crappy digital camera function AND I certainly don't want to play MP3's. As result, I don't own a cell phone. I refuse to pay for functions I don't want and won't use.

Function Convergence is good for some and bad for some. There is room in the market for both types of users and those in between.

Re:Lying with numbers

[Gadget_Guy]

Hang on. He is lying because you don't know how he came up with that figure? And you back this up by just guessing that it is wrong and calling it reality.

He is just a blogger, so it is possible that he just made it all up, but that would only make him equally uninformed as yourself.

Every application or shared library has to have a unique, registered CreatorID. It would be easy to track which developers were still active (writing new programs) based on who was still submitting new CreatorIDs. I do not know if that is how this number was divined, but it does show that it could be accurate.

Just because you have not heard of all 160,000 developers does not mean to say that they do not exist. A lot of the development work is for in-house applications. I occassionally write some programs just for myself. Nothing ever gets published, so you would have never heard of me. That doesn't mean that I don't exist (I think).

If I am incorrect, and it turns out that I do not exist, then feel free to ignore me.

Re:Lying with numbers

[isaac]

PalmOS is definitely stone-age internally, but guess what: being a PITA for programmers has *NOTHING* to do with its unmatched usability for end users.

I don't care how good WinCE's CLR is - it's a usability nightmare on a phone-sized device (why should I care what apps are running? I have zero interest in quitting this program to free up enough memory to run that program. The PIM functions also blow. And a Start menu? Please die.)

And J2ME is a very decent programming model? Yeah, great for programmers. Shitty for users. Have you ever actually *USED* third-party java apps on a Blackberry? I had the displeasure of having to carry one for $WORK years ago. Here's four words that sum up J2ME: "loading... um... still loading."

PalmOS is a crusty nightmare under the hood but somehow it's still the only thing out there that delivers a seamless *USER* experience. No loading time for app launches, excellent mapping of functions to single button presses or taps, etc.

When I want a system that's great for coders and tweakers, I use Linux on my desktop. I don't want that experience on my phone - I want a device that JUST WORKS NOW and lets me run the apps I want to run (devices that are closed to open-source or freeware developers fail it.)

Maybe Symbian will get there someday but the impression that I have is that it's entirely too carrier-friendly, not sufficiently user-friendly.

-Isaac

Re:Ordinary People still use PDA's?

[scarolan]

I use a Palm Zire 31, and I like it. Here's why:

* Much longer battery life than my cell phone
* I don't want my PDA use sucking my phone battery life
* I have some very useful apps on the Palm that don't exist for my phone
* If I lose or break the Palm, I'm only out $89 or so, rather than the $500 that a Treo costs
* E-books are much more comfortable to read on the palm screen than my phone's screen

Re:Ordinary People still use PDA's?

[pruss]

I've used Palms/Clies for ebooks (lots of stuff can be stored on a 1gb SD card, and I have a lot of books relevant to my academic work), movies (tcpmp is great, except for the MPEG-4 patent issues which I solved by actually getting a patent license from MPEG LA), WiFi-based web browsing and email, audio books, games, notes, appointments and addresses.

For those of us who need good search capabilities for ebooks (e.g., scholarly texts), dedicated ebook readers are not an option (despite how nice e-ink is). Cellphones are definitely not an option for ebook reading, given their small screens. I like to have the complete works of St Thomas Aquinas in my pocket, seven volumes of Leibniz, a bunch of stories and novels, etc., mostly in Plucker format. I actually prefer reading in ebook format--no need to think about bookmarking (though of course if I have a crash, I might lose my place), I can carry around lots and lots of books, access lexical tools, search, insert annotations (Plucker's annotation support is now adequate but not very good--I need to improve it), read in the dark, etc.

The 320x480 screen of a hi-res+ device is a good option for movies--iPods have smaller screens, I think. My four-year-old daughter gets to watch movies on trips. When we get a new movie at home, she asks me to "make a copy" for putting on the PDA. (I've had to explain to her that I can't do that if we don't own the DVD.)

Text input is better than on a cell-phone (I use the ATOMIK on-screen keyboard on a TX; it's not quite as good as a Clie's keyboard, which in turn isn't quite as good as a blackberry's or Treo's, but it's OK, apart from some hardware flaws in the TX digitizer (I am the developer for the keyboard software, so I'm biased)). It's OK for short emails, notes that are one or two sentences long.

I don't do much in the way of gaming these days, but I have a couple of games loaded.

Unfortunately, the TX is not perfectly stable (the worst of what I use is the included VersaMail email client). But it's pretty good if one is careful about what one installs. I rarely get a reset, unless I'm testing buggy pre-release software (say, my own).

It would be nice if the TX was also a cellphone--one less thing to carry--but Treo screens are too small for extensive ebook use, I suspect.

Re:Lying with numbers

[DrVomact]

I agree. I love the PalmOS for its usability. I've been using Palm devices for...um...ever, and am the proud owner of a brand new Treo 680. I love this thing. It's completely intuitive, has no major drawbacks that I've found (except it's fatter than my Razr was), and I expect to use it for the next couple of years.

When I think "PalmOS", I don't think "programming model", I think GUI. Just because another OS is easier to program for doesn't make it "better" in any sense of the word that is meaningful to me. Running any variant of Windows on a phone seems nuts. This is not a little computer, folks. It's a phone (and a contacts manager, calendar, music player, picture shower, whatever), and it cries out for an interface that is simple, intuitive, and quick. Has anyone ever thruthfully used any of those words in the same sentence with "Windows"?

And don't forget that if you get a WinCE phone, it's going to expect you to sync with Outlook. The horror, oh the horror...

Re:Palm OS is the better OS honestly.

[fm6]

do you REALLY need it to be a full blown computer when most of the time your going to be using it to take contacts and stuff.

Not only do you not need to, you don't want to. One reason the Palm succeeded where the Newton failed is it's sense of focus: the Palm is designed to be an adjunct to a PC, not a replacement for it.

Re:Why did they spin it off?

[fm6]

Why would a company be so dumb as to spin off the most important part of its product (lets face it, hardware is commodity these days) and THEN sell it off to a competitor and THEN pay royalties??!

That's not exactly what happened — the story has its history wrong. Palm did not sell PalmOS to Access. Palm split itself into PalmSource (software) and PalmOne (hardware), with joint ownership of the Palm brand. Later, PalmOne bought back the right to call itself "Palm", and PalmSource got bought out by Access.

Am I picking nits? I don't think so. All the investors in the old Palm ended up with stakes in the two new companies. And a software-only company was better positioned to be bought out by a company like Access, a buyout that must have been very profitable for PalmSource stockholders. Meanwhile, PalmOne/Palm is free to develop hardware that is not based on an OS that is quickly losing ground to Windows.

Also, you're wrong when you say all hardware is a commodity. PC hardware (or more precisely, PC motherboards) are a commodity, because they're produced on a huge scale by lots of different manufacturers who fight each other to sell them cheaply to big PC companies. But PalmOS-based PDAs have a tiny market with very little competition. Palm does not face the problems of commodity manufacturers (fierce competition to sell virtually identical products), it faces the problems of a specialized manufacturer that has gotten a little too specialized. If Palm survives at all, it will be as yet another manufacturer of smartphones, where competition is based as much on features as on price.

Windows Mobile is a "killer" feature for me...

[ivan256]

In that it kills the deal. It is not useable. With PalmOS, you get a dirt simple UI (no nested menus. I can get to any feature I use on my Treo with two button presses without looking), you get zero arbitrary restrictions (unlike the arbitrary screen resolution limit, and various other limits that Windows Mobile has to make it "not PocketPC"), and you get full hackability (which allows you to bypass all ridiculous carrier restrictions, and implement features that carries charge per-use for even though the device is capable of doing it on its own).

I don't care how hard it is to program for (but I've done it, and quite honestly I think a lot of developers are a bunch of whiners), and I don't think it is the best possible system, but it is the best one on the market right now, and nobody has caught up even though the platform has stagnated for over 10 years.

Re:Lying with numbers

[ShinyBrowncoat]

You are absolutely correct about PalmOS being the more user-friendly, even after many iterations of WinCE/WinMob. Case in point: What do you do to add a new appointment on PalmOS (since the original PalmPilot)? Click on the screen where (when) you want it and start writing. What do you do on WinCE/WinMob? Click on the "new" button, and when the dialog box pops up, click on the text entry area to write the description, then click on the date/time selector a bunch of times to set it, then click on "ok" to close the dialog box. How many different versions of WinCE/WinMob and they still don't have built-in support for in-line editing?