The Palm OS Ends With a Whimper

PetManimal writes "Computerworld reviews the Palm Treo 755p, the last Palm device with the Palm OS, and concludes that the OS is going out not with a bang but with a whimper. The article says there are some useful improvements (better integration with Exchange and IM, limited speech recognition, etc.) but 'nothing that will make you sit back and say "wow."' Palm already has at least one device with Windows Mobile (the 700w) and soon will make a big push to Linux devices, maybe by the end of the year. But the Palm OS, which was top dog for a while back in the 1990s, and is still used by many people who own Palm Pilots or Treos, is going to quickly fade, it seems."

palm interface on a linux kernel?

[User 956]

Palm already has at least one device with Windows Mobile (the 700w) and soon will make a big push to Linux devices, maybe by the end of the year. But the Palm OS, which was top dog for a while back in the 1990s, and is still used by many people who own Palm Pilots or Treos, is going to quickly fade, it seems.

Ok, but what will the interface for those Linux devices look like?

What's the status of handwritting recognition?

[oni]

To anyone who owns a modern PDA, how fast can you write? I've went through two Palms (no pun intended) and two handspring visors back in the late 90's and I loved them - but more importantly, I could enter text at least twice as fast as anyone I knew who had a WinCE device.

Has that changed?

Sad

[edwardpickman]

I recently had my Zaire die and tried to find a replacement but nothing availible came close. Instead of getting better the line has largely stagnated. I loved my Zaire so I guess the next move is iPhone. I just hope they add in more desktop apps soon. I have high hopes on the second generation. The Palm OS was a landmark OS and for many years it was the best. For the people that loved the devices it's definitely a time to mourn it's passing.

Good.

[koreth]

I have owned various PalmOS devices for over a decade, and still use my Treo 650 daily, but I'll be happy to see the old OS go. It's unstable (a null pointer access will reboot the whole device), has no OS-level support for multitasking (applications have to hook into timer interrupts to run in the background), the memory management system is a monstrosity to code for, it has no ability to launch apps directly from a removable memory card, and even its strong suit, the UI, has some serious problems (try replying to an SMS message when you're in the middle of doing something else; when you're done sending the message it will take you back to the app launcher rather than to what you were doing.)

A new Linux-based core will solve many of those problems inherently. Plus, one hopes, it will be even more hackable. So I say good riddance to the old OS.

Palm is dead, long live Palm

[soupforare]

I started with a Pilot, moved to a III. I flirted with wince devices for a while and have now come back home to the IIIxe. When it breaks, I'll buy another one, they're cheap and plentiful.
It doesn't play movies, mp3s or emulators but that's what computers are for.

Treo 700p was ok, for about 2 months

[SnapperHead]

The treo 700p was great when it didn't have much data on it. However, when you load it up with a few hundred contacts, appointments and about 8000 emails ... it fails apart. Switching between applications results in a white screen for 7 - 10 seconds. Common lock ups, at least once a week. To top it all off, Palm didn't respond to any of these problems. Numerous support requests and calls got ignored. That pissed me off more then anything. The only answer I ever got was to do a hard reset.

Needless to say, I am done with Palm. I will not purchase another phone from them. Even if they solve the software issues, they have a very serious problem with their support that they need to tend to first.

Disgusting

[JonnyO]

Great: Windows Mobile can handle screen resolutions my Commodore could handle 20-something years ago. Ah, progress. Seriously, has anyone tried using Windows Mobile for anything serious without wanting to send their device to an untimely death? I tried a VX6700, replaced it with a Treo 700w, and replaced that with a Motorola Q, all within the past year. I eventually paid (or, in all honesty, my employer paid) Verizon's termination fee just so I could get out of the contract so I could get something else. If you want to experience Windows Mobile, take a ten-penny nail and drive it into your crotch... it's about the same feeling. I now have a BlackBerry Pearl, and - I can't believe I'm saying this - I quite like it. It's responsive, doesn't crash if you look at it, actually knows that it's supposed to charge when the power cord is attached, syncs with my mail, and just plain works. All the things a WM5 device does not.

Re:What's the status of handwritting recognition?

[jinxidoru]

I agree. One of the things that Palm got right was Graffiti. Although it takes a little time to get used to, Graffiti allows you to input text so much faster than text recognition, and with much better accuracy. That was one of the main things that pushed me towards getting a Palm rather than a WinCE device.

Re:Palm is dead, long live Palm

[that this is not und]

I started with a Visor Platinum, went to a Tungsten E, then rolled all the way back to a Palm III, because it:

1. Does everything I want a PDA to accomplish.
    and
2. Is one HECK of a lot more durable than the Visor, or the pitiful flimsy Tungsten E (which failed a few weeks out of warranty)
    and
3. I have found Palm IIIs in almost new condition sell on eBay for under $10 at this point in time.
    and
4. I have Code Warrior for PalmOS, so I can code up any practical PDA-scaled application that I need for classic PalmOS and will be able to forever.

Maybe I have taken a 'survivalist' approach, but I'm hunkering down and buying Palm III devices for my stockpile. They're 'good enough' and it's wonderful to still have a PDA that I don't have to charge, and that runs for several months on each battery change (two AAA's, mind you.)

It's sort of ironic that one can be luddite these days and an active user of a Palm Pilot at the same time.

PDA Keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and I first had a full-sized, folding keyboard (Targus Stowaway) for my Handspring Visor somewhere around...2000. (That's Palm OS 3.1, BTW)

Re:What's the status of handwritting recognition?

[5pp000]

Forget handwriting recognition. Fitaly [fitaly.com], a tap-optimized virtual keyboard, is much faster -- in my experience, at least twice the speed of pen and paper. And while it's neither as fast nor as accurate as touch-typing, it's plenty good enough to make it unnecessary to carry around one of those folding keyboards.

I've used Fitaly on a Tungsten T3 to take voluminous notes at multi-hour seminars. It's that good. I wouldn't even think of going back to Graffiti.

It will, be backward compatible

[feranick]

PalmLinux will be fully backward compatible, so you can use all your old apps with no problems. They will include a 68K emulation layer just for the purpose.

Re:Out with a bang?

[Daengbo]

I prefer "Not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a muffled cry." In my version, PalmOS gets bought by MS, who promises to continue support, then is knifed quietly in the back room when no one is watching.

Re:May It Rest in Agony!

[Anonymous Coward]

There were so many problems with the OS design. I could not understand why you would build an OS that lacked any sort of filesystem. Instead, they had a very crappy database-esque system from which you could retrieve data. You couldn't simply load a file onto the system, it had to be loaded into the database and accessed using their bass-akwards method of database access. Be aware, we're not talking SQL here.

Because it was originally intended to run a system that had a 16 MHz processor, 128 KB of memory, and a very specific purpose. It was an organizer, they figured the kind of data that was going into it and they tried to figure the most efficient, low memory way of storing things while being able to write relatively interesting applications relatively quickly.

That being said, yes it turned into an ancient clunker. The core portions of the OS should have been updated years ago. Palm continued with little incremental improvements that didn't address the core issues, then went through a huge number of management missteps. They spun off their OS development, changed their name, changed it again, bleh.

At one point Palmsource had the Future, and all us Palm developers were excited over Palm OS 6. I even went out to California to a conference where they were telling us all the new toys we'd get to play with. Multitasking, real memory management, TrueType fonts, a BSD networking library, and hell, even backwards compatibility to boot. It was going to be awesome. And then they couldn't get a single damn licensee to actually use the damn thing. I don't know if it turned out to be unstable or overpriced or what, but it just never materialized.

As to the lack of a filesystem -- if you only care about reading, you can make a little wrapper around the database stuff and make it look like normal file access fairly easily. It's what I ended up doing for some cases where I wanted to read large data files that could either be put on the card or the device itself. Using the Palm Object Library also makes programming for the platform a bit more sane (wish I had learned this before my first major project).

I agree that the OS sucks in its present form, but it did make sense for the problem it was originally designed to solve. It just didn't grow to fit the hardware as time went on.

Oh, and WinCE programming sucked worse. At least it did for me. :-P

Re:palm interface on a linux kernel?

[embsysdev]

Although Palm has done this before, I doubt they will do it again. Around 2001, they offered 3.5 (I think) as a paid upgrade for Palm III users. They also had other upgrades for other models. I don't think it was very successful because a few years later, they stopped offering the upgrades.

FWIW, there is already an open-source project to get Linux on a tungsten: http://palmtelinux.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:palm interface on a linux kernel?

[Archibald Buttle]

They are talking Intel for the platform, same as the latest generation of, well, everything. Processor should be in the 400mhz neighborhood.

Sorry to be a pedant, but it's highly unlikely that Palm will be using an Intel platform for any of their machines, especially not a mobile phone. It is however likely that they will use XScale, which is these days owned by Marvell.

Re:palm interface on a linux kernel?

[serveblunted]

Think that when talking about mobile phones you definitely need to consider both Symbian and Blackberry as platforms.

Re:palm interface on a linux kernel?

[rbanffy]

Sorry, but you have your facts wrong.

Microsoft never did a big kernel switch. They had two different kernels - the "classic" one that was in 3.x with win32s and 9x up to Windows Me and the NT that started back in the 3.1 days and went up to the 2000, in two different product lines. They co-existed in different products for many years. What MS did is that they kept more or less the same look and feel on two different kernels and they simply EOL-ed the older one when they came out with Windows XP.

They never did a kernel transition within the same OS.

They only discontinued the 9x line when they thought XP was good enough for playing games.

Which, by the way, is pretty much what XP is good for ;-)

Got my first (only) Palm III 1999

[gelfling]

Got my only Palm device, an IBM rebranded III (C20) for free in 1999. After dutifully messing with it, flashing an OS upgrade or two all the way up to PalmOS 3.5 and then back down to 3.3, after installing 3rd party hacks up the wazoo and an application that allowed me to use unused flash for applications, speeding up the system clock and EasySync versions from 2.0 up to 4.3 all of which failed, broke or could not work with Lotus Notes then using Notes export functions to clone data to the Palm Desktop app then moving that to the Palm, I finally gave up on it last year when at one point the batteries conked out (old models had AAA batteries) and I just couldn't find a good enough reason to put another $3 in batteries into my paperweight.

Palm always seemed to be progressing about half the speed the marketplace wanted them to. They split off hardware from software, bought BeOS and wandered around doing silly pointless things for years. Ultimately their vaunted stability and battery life over PocketPC just wasn't enough. Palm always remained a work in progress, a lab experiment really in search of a stable suite of business apps and a good business model. The idea that apps generally to be workable needed big chunks of RAM, that Palm never seemed to be able to deliver on the hardware in time, or, if they did it cost a fantastic amount of money was inane. Does anyone remember that the first 2MB -> 8MB customer RAM upgrades required you to take apart the motherboard and spend more than $200 for the chip?

Yeah so I not glad or angry Palm is dead. I gave up on it years ago. I think the next thing I''ll get is a Moto-Q or whatever is roughly a Moto-Q next year when Sprint gives me a discount. The idea of a standalone PDA is over. And the idea of a PDA/Phone without good enough data entry is over too. I have the first and the last version of T9 for Palm which was great until T9 decided they only wanted the phone market and abandoned Palm. I had a portable keyboard and found it clunky too. Better to have a small built in hardware keyboard on the device. In retrospect the commonsense product decisions that would have made the Palm platform a viable handheld communicator, PDA, Phone, computer, whatever always seemed to elude Palm executives.