PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux 181
gandell writes "CNET is reporting that after only two years, PalmOne is spending $30 million dollars to become "Palm" again. From the article:
"PalmOne, which makes handhelds bearing the same name, plans to change its name to Palm later this year, the company said Tuesday.
At that time, its product line, which currently includes the LifeDrive, Treo, Tungsten and Zire devices, will be branded under the Palm name..."
Some will remember that Palm split into two companies, Pa1mOne and Palmsource (which made the Palm OS). According to the article, "...At the time the two companies created a third company, called Palm Trademark Holding, of which PalmSource held a 55 percent stake. That stake will now be transferred to PalmOne for $30 million, the companies said.'" As well, at a recent show Dave Nagel gave notice that Linux is PalmSource's platform for the future.
Is PalmOS viable anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology has really made a lot of progress since then and that old Dragonball chip looks like a Hyundai when compared to an XScale Ferrari. The processors can handle much more than the simple PalmOS requests, and in some respects this is a good thing. It means that the underlying OS is relatively light and lots of power can be used to run apps. Unfortunately, that also is a limitation of the OS.
Embedded Linux provides a full operating system with a plethora of drivers and applications. It uses the capabilities of the chipset without being too heavy. It is definitely the way to go.
And actually not just Linux, but any general-purpose embedded OS is the way to go. You'd obviously want something that had guaranteed real-time performance as well as a well-done threading model. The API would need to be very well understood too. This brings up a whole slew of embedded operating systems. It also leaves out PalmOS.
Hell yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Even so, it wouldn't be all that bad to port PalmOS to the XScale chip, or any other archetecture. I'd be interested in seeing it run on x86 natively (emulators already exist).
I guess you're one of the
Re:Hell yes (Score:1, Insightful)
Hint: They're made by intel and their name starts with the letter that comes after W.
Re:Hell yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they can sort themselves out, because I really like the PalmOS platform.
Re:Hell yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, to their credit, soldiers on, getting slowly better, version after version, as they always do. Palm had a huge lead, and squandered it on stupid stuff like splitting up into different companies and trying to sell the OS to clone manufacturers (sound familiar?).
I HOPE and PRAY that the embracing of linux on Palm will have the same effect that embracing UNIX had on Apple -- finally building in the robust multitasking and hardware management that have long been needed while letting more resources be spent on the actual user side of things
I quake in terror for the day when i have to use a Pocket PC device daily -- a horribly mangled UI designed for a regular computer and just shrink-rayed down to an unusable abbreviation of an interface. *shiver*
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
Yes, the previous Palm has screwed up so royally that we can't even point the finger at a single company anymore. As a developer of Palm OS applications, I nearly quake in fury when I think of what has become of the platform over the past couple years. And yes, I port my software to Pocket PC or whatever it will be called next week. (Well, actually, I get someone else to. I'm not touching the @#$%ing things.)
This latest move is interesting, but I think it completely fails to solve the core problem: One of
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
PalmOne or PalmSource needs to buy the other, and then they need to focus on creating a great mobile platform... operating system and hardware.
I completely agree. PalmSource needs PalmOne. No other company makes successful Palm OS devices. PalmOne does absolutely need PalmSource (given the rumors about a Windows CE Treo), but PalmOne+PalmSource makes a lot more sense. There are also rumors that RIM may acquire PalmSource, but I don't think RIM can gain anything from PalmSource. RIM's hardware and softwar
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
I have the interesting circumstance of owning both a PocketPC device and two PalmOS devices and I have to say I do prefer the Palm devices more.
The one thing that irks me the most is the multitasking uder PocketPC. Sure, it's a neat trick, but I don't really need it. I can't change the behaviour of it (I can't keep one app in memory all the time -- rather important for the navigation software that I have on the PocketPC). It seems to me exemplifying the typical MS attitude of sacrif
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
For what it's worth I've had the exact opposite experience. I found the Palm to be so limited in it's capabilities that I didn't get much use out of it. As a programmer I don't have all THAT many meetings and contacts to manage. About the only thing I really used my Palm (well actually Sony Clie) for was reading eBooks.
As for programming the Palm, I found tha
Correction (Score:2)
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
A Palm and a Mac should go hand-in-hand together. Instead we have to depend on a third party (Mark/Space) for real sync support. And since Missing Sync supports PocketPC, Palm is rapidly losing even this meager support.
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history (Score:2)
Linux based would be good, the API would be easier to work with than the current embedded system. They might screw up yet again though.
I'll wait and see what happens.
Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history (Score:2)
I used to love my V, then got an m515 and was totally in love with it. the LED on the power button and the vibrate motor were awesome additions, and the colour was alright too. Battery life still rocked.
Now I've got a Tungsten E and even though I miss the lack of the LED and vibrate motor and I miss the form factor that the V and 500 series had, I can't give up the screen. Hell I miss the cradle/serial port connection but I got over it. Battery life is still stellar but that screen is just unbelievabl
Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history (Score:2)
Re:Palm = JustWorks (tm) - history (Score:2)
It does have a battery-eating color screen, but they put a pretty big battery in there to compensate. I've seen numbers at about 8ish hours of normal use, and more than 11 playing MP3s constantly with the screen off. It has Bluetooth, which is important because syncing with my Mac via IRDA is pretty slow, and it means I can use it with my phone as a portable Internet terminal for email, ssh and the like.
Re:Hell yes (Score:2)
The PalmOS Simulator (NOT POSE) basically is PalmOS for x86, native components have to be in Windows
And oh, Every PalmOS > 5 handheld runs an ARM processor these days. Ok, maybe some of the newer devices aren't in the Just Works(TM) category, but every PalmOS device i've used up to the Treo 600 I have here Just
Re:Hell yes (Score:2, Insightful)
viable and sensible (Score:2)
PalmOS isn't really an operating system, it's more like a window system, toolkit, and standard library. All that stuff already runs on top of a third party embedded, real-time kernel.
Sticking with that kernel for as long as Palm did was a mistake, as was their attempt with PalmOS 6 to develop their own kernel. What they are doing now is to take PalmOS (i.e., everything other than the kernel) and move it on top of Linu
Re:viable and sensible (Score:3, Interesting)
PalmOS is a lot like the original Mac OS, with the difference that instead of trying to cram a minimal OS under the GUI and then crank it up, they licensed the OS from someone else. The problem is their license kept them from being able to take advantage of that underlying OS properly.
I suppose that slipping Linux in underne
Re:viable and sensible (Score:2)
That's what Cobalt is. They've spent years trying that, and apparently come to the same conclusion that everyone else who's tried to use BeOS for real work has... it's less an operating system than a piece of performance art, an ongoing exploration of operating system ideas. It's not actually smaller, faster, or better performing than its contemporaries (in fact it required a faster processor and more RAM than NeXTstep or Windows NT). It was billed a
Re:viable and sensible (Score:2)
I agree, but the other trouble that I see, that Palm does not seem to have addressed yet, is issues with their desktop and sync software. This is especially evident on OS X, where syncing is a terrible mess. (e.g. try putting a multi-day event in iCal.) I can not see any down side to Palm releasing all their versions of hotsync under the GPL, it would open so many possiblities to them.... As for their desktop software, I know of very few people w
Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:2)
Contacts, schedules, notes, and simple applications. Which is still what you use these things for, and it's still what you NEED these things for. You don't NEED the power of an Xscale processor to do what an organiser needs to do.
That's why I'm using a 68000-based PalmOS device again and if anyone's interested in a deal on a Pocket PC mail me.
Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:2)
You really shouldn't generalize blindly. That may be your usage pattern, but other folks do different things with their PDAs. I use mine to listen to music, read e-books, I have Streets And Trips maps on it, and also use it to manage my expenses. I experimented with video too, and I'm working in my spare time on a script that would record a couple of shows on my
Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:2)
OK, maybe I should say "which is still what the majority of people use these things for". Or even the "vast majority": I have done do other things with my PDA, too, but it's the simple stuff that makes it essential. No matter how good it is at being a "laptop replacement", if it couldn't do the basics well I'd find something that could.
And, in fact, did.
I use mine to listen to music, read e-books, I have Streets And Tri
Yeah sure. (Score:2)
One needs substantially bigger batteries, big power efficent RAM caches.
Yeah, you need a media player like the ones from Archos, to do the work properly.
But is that a PDA work? Not in my opinion.
Re:Yeah sure. (Score:2)
You never had an iPaq, have you? With my usage pattern, I only ran out of power twice in the years I had the device (both times in airports). I often listen to music on the iPaq while reading an e-book (didn't bother to check the time, but it's at least 2-3 hours at a stretch). I do turn the backlight off, that's true, and I have recharging cradles both at home and at work.
Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah and I bet the tiny screen and lack of real keyboard are real convenient, too.
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement. People who constantly try to put ten pounds of shit in a one-pound bag are rather amusing, because it's usually those same people who give up after a while, claiming that the Palm platform sucks balls because it can't replace their computer.
If it works for you, great, but you are one of the very small minority who can function in such a res
Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Palms are "a real computer". They're not "a desktop computer", but then a desktop OS makes a crappy server OS (hey, Microsoft, I'm talking to YOU here) and a mainframe would be out of place on the desktop (though IBM's first personal computer emulated the IBM 360 mainframe... and almost nobody's ever heard of it). There's lots of "real computers", just like there's lots of "real vehicles" from a pushbike to a space shuttle.
Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do? (Score:3, Interesting)
For all its limitations, you could still take the Palm 3.5 OS, put it in a box with a screen and have a real computer. Nothing blazingly fast, but it would do word processing, spreadsheet, database type work well enough. Email, even.
I agree with you that people who want the Palm to be a desktop replacement are u
You say that Linux is the way to go. (Score:2)
KDE on a laptop is fine, windows, lots of colours, a mouse, big screen, it's easy and it works. Assuming you can just transfer windowing and stuff to a PDA is a big mistake. The Qtopia interface for instance on the Zaurus was *horrible* to use, it wasted huge amounts of screen real estate. I eventually binned mine
Re:You say that Linux is the way to go. (Score:2)
Archos (at least in France) are selling a combined PDA, mp3 player, video recorder & dishwasher using that, I wonder if technology has moved on to cope with it?
Seconded, I still use a 5mx
As a UNIX SA.... (Score:2)
Linux is the way to go as explained earlier, but Qtopia may not be the best UI.
THe problem we have here is one of UI design, which can be solved easily given the Linux/UNIX philosophy of modularization.
The moment somebody comes with a better UI than Qtopia's then Qtopia's is binned.
Re:Is PalmOS viable anymore? (Score:2)
Where are the Cobalt devices? (Score:1)
Re:Where are the Cobalt devices? (Score:3, Informative)
Linux, though? OK, it's not as badly adapted to handhelds as Windows, since the UNIX API doesn't have nearly as much desktop-nature built into it, but... sheesh.
I will never buy PalmOS device again (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I will never buy PalmOS device again (Score:2)
If an application developer isn't interested in coding optimizations for OS 5 devices, well, your're the customer.
One good thing about PalmOS is backwards compatibility. Go out and buy some old Palm device such as
Just change it's name to a symbol... (Score:5, Funny)
So Palm is now the company formerly known as the company formerly known as... Palm?
Re:Just change it's name to a symbol... (Score:2)
Then they were bought by US Robotics. US Robotics was bought by 3Com. Then 3Com spun off the company known as Palm. And it was good.
Then Palm split the company in half, into PalmSource and PalmOne (which bought Handspring). Now, PalmOne is buying the Palm name from Palmsource. They will be known as Palm. And it was good.
Such a waste of time... (Score:4, Interesting)
The new names are often awful, as well as the justification for changing them, like when the Post Office here in the UK announced they were to change their name to "Consignia" to enable them "to better serve the needs of customers". So many people went "WTF?" that they scrapped the plan, but not before they'd already wasted loads of money on it.
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't get a much better name than THE ROYAL MAIL. It's just about as good an endorsement as you could get. Why, then, change it to some wishy-washy, made up word which, I assume, is supposed to be a concatenation of Consignment and Insignia?
Mars/Snickers, Cellnet/BTCellnet/O2, Opal Fruits/Starburst, etc. all did the same for little reason. T-Mob
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2, Informative)
It was actually Marathon->Snickers, and there was a slight difference in that case, in that Snickers was the US name for the product and they just brought it in line. As for all the others, totally pointless indeed!
I've seen that warehouse myself from the M25, and wondered... A quick google just revealed they [sericol.co.uk] make screen-printing ink - so when they say "more than ink", they just mean "ink" :)
Snickers/Marathon (Score:2)
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
I think you would find it unsurprising if I said that for many of the kind of companies who can't come up with anything better to improve themselves than to change their name, disappearing reputation can be a worthwhile goal.
By the way, what's Arthur Anderson calling themselves these days?
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
This is especially visible in mergers. Compaq+HP became just HP, which was supposed to mean that they were keeping
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
That's just an example, but the point is if these corporate genius
Re:Such a waste of time... (Score:2)
Re:No Teeth, No Balls. (Score:2, Funny)
Money use (Score:1)
Changing names, logos and even Internet domain names seems to me to be just a waste of resources.
What about giving that extra money to some third world aid program?
What if Microsoft spended USD 300M to switch the name to Megasoft in order to give its mobile OS better chances over the PalmOS?
Re:Money use (Score:2)
Big thinkers (Score:2)
Re:Big thinkers (Score:2)
Re:Big thinkers (Score:2)
Palm has lost their direction. Make good, simple devices and you'll win. I'm still on my Handspring Visor (basically a Palm III). I'd love to replace it, and I've almost bought a Treo 650 a few times, but I don't think the current devices would work as well.
Re:Big thinkers (Score:2)
It handles email (as long as I sync often), my various log databases (HandDBase) - relational at that, notes, todo, etc.
About the only driving factor is that I would have real time access to my mail (and the subsequent raping by my phone company for data charges), a slightly more modern device, and avoiding bat-belt as I'd be replacing my cell phone. The main reason though is that I'm looking to switch my cell service to one that uses VOIP wh
BeOS clarification please (Score:2)
If it's now Linux all the way, what aspects of BeOS, if any, are going to be in there?
Re:BeOS clarification please (Score:2)
This mistake has been going around forever, and it's still here.... Palm bought Be because it was a company stuffed full of acclaimed OS developers that was about to go bust. That's all. They needed to massively boost their development resources in order to make Cobalt and the easiest way to do this was to buy an OS company.
Of course, it didn't work - I don't know what state Cobalt is in now but no-one has put it into a production PDA yet, so I'm assumin
Is it time for the funeral dirge? (Score:2)
I had been fervently hoping, as a former BeOS developer and BeBox owner, that the OS would survive in some form. I had some high hopes in the Palm acquisition of the Be intellectual property. Then I noticed that PalmOne kept using PalmOS 5 instead of releasing devices running PalmOS 6 / Cobalt. So I waited,
They're circling the wagons... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Drainwagons!! Ho!
some ideas are just too big to be one company... (Score:2)
this was their original (public) explaination for the split between palm source and palm one.
what a joke. now their going back to their old name, but in the meantime the focus on thier product line is fuzzy at best. i.e. the treo 650 is canibalizing sales from the 600(yet both are sold at the same time) and although the lifedrive seems like a cool idea, it just doesn't to have the sex appeal of an ipod, and will probably have a rocky product life before being shelved.
palm needs to
Why Palm is failing (Score:2, Interesting)
It is primarily due to the lack of development tools available. The main ones (I know of) are Metrowerks Codewarrior which is a fairly hard to use development environment and AppForge MobileVB which allows you to develop in VB but port to PocketPC and Symbian. I mean sure there is Java but come on, we all know that is unrealistic on these devices. None of these tools make people want to stick with that device.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of
Couldn't care less about Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Nagel's response was that they're thinking about porting their Eclipse toolkit to Linux. No one wants or cares about it.
Years ago Palm employed and then fired authors of open source tools. They've got a terminal case of NIH and don't understand that they're dying because they don't do enough to make it easy to develop for Palm OS. It doesn't matter what the handhelds run if they don't have third-party developers, and they shit from a great height on the Linux alpha geeks who could be incredibly valuable.
Re:Couldn't care less about Linux (Score:3, Informative)
I want their Palm OS Developer Suite [palmos.com] (eclipse kitted out as a full Palm OS ide) on Linux. I have the sources and their patches but haven't been able to put aside the time yet to see how far I get and what problems I hit. In fact, their desire to maintain their own Free Software based ide was a significant factor for choosing Palm for our product. I'm not complaining about PalmSourc
Oh let's see.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Self-proclaimed genius works on stylus UI for Psion (IIRC), decides to take it further, comes up with one of the few interfaces would-be PDA makers hadn't thought of and it actually takes off -- though slowly at first.
Genius forms a company with a bunch of bitter ex-Apple folks.
PalmPilot starts to take off and Palm immediately make plans for the Nth generation of the OS, which will work on handhelds, phones, game consoles, etc. They also make plans to split the company into a hardware and OS division so there will be no conflicts like Apple had when Palm takes on Microsoft and kicks their butt. They talk about this for years.
The split is a disaster. They didn't figure out how groups would work together and left lots of unanswered questions -- and then rushed the split. The result? Two half-staffed divisions with no plan for how to work together.
Carl Yankowski is hired, who tells all of Palm to stick it 'cause he's here to tell y'all that Bluetooth is the future. A year is wasted trying to a) figure out how to cram Bluetooth into a Palm without sucking its batteries dry, b) trying to figure out the protocols, c) trying to figure out something useful to do with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. The result? Carl is fired (Oh I'm sorry. He resigned. And all that cheering when the door hit his huge butt? Um...that was cheering.)
The two divisions are re-merged, with plans to split them again at some future date. Jobs are duplicated, jobs are lost. Nothing is gained.
The relatively inexperienced guy who runs the supply chain operations, after years of pressure from marketing over parts shortages, finally works out a contract so that Palm will have more Palm V's in the next couple of years than you can shake a stick at. I don't know how it got approved, but someone finally worked out that the Palm V was supposed to be end-of-lifed in six months and they needed to clear out the channel for the new devices. This is bad.
In Europe, in March (IIRC), Palm announces the release of the next-gen Palm. People say "Wow, that sounds good, so I'll put off my purchase of a Palm V until the new one comes out." Later marketing claims no one told them that the project was delayed until at least June (it actually turned out to be September). The channel is stuffed with Palm V's -- with tons more on the way -- and no one's buying them. The new Palm isn't ready, so no one's buying them either. Palm's revenue dries up faster than an earthworm on a sunny day.
The billion dollars or so that came from its IPO was partially committed to all those Palm V's no one wanted. But there was also some kind of fallout from the land deal for the new World HQ, that was made worse by ever-abusive parent company, 3Com, raping Palm yet again to pay for its own lost business. Palm loses something like $800M in six months.
First round of layoffs are announced. People panic. Next two rounds of layoffs are not announced. But someone reserves every conference room in the Outlook calendar, so it's kind of a tipoff.
All those friends of friends who were hired when everyone thought they were going to get rich from the IPO fall into two camps: A) Friends in high places are still there to protect them, B) first to go. Where Camp A people are found, so are scapegoats.
Lunatic VP of engineering cheerfully announces that the only way to continue on towards greatness is by adopting parallel development. To wit, every engineer is now on 5 projects. Project A on Monday, Project B on Tuesday, etc. Completion dates are not changed.
Stock options are repeatedly given as incentives. Let's say options at $10 are granted on Monday. By Wednesday, when they can be distributed, the stock is down to $9.50. This happens repeatedly.
A calendar company is bought, not used, its people fired. A web portal company is bought, not used, its people fired. A French software company is bought and the engineers are actually vit
Re:Oh let's see.... (Score:2)
Re:Oh let's see.... (Score:2)
Re:Oh let's see.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jeff Hawkins deserves most of the credit for Palm's early success. He really did figure out exactly what customers wanted in a PDA, where no one else had successfully figured it out before. He specified that the first Palm must: fit in a pocket; syncronize seamlessly with a host PC; use Graffiti instead of whole-word writing recognition; and have at least one model that cost $300 or less.
The first
Re:Oh let's see.... (Score:2)
Is it just me (Score:2)
I have this sick feeling (Score:3, Interesting)
Asshead corporate suits blow it again (Score:2)
What a stupid move on the part of (Palm || PalmOne || NameThisWeek). This, of course, is why they'll have to outsource their developers to India "to stay competitive." Their entire upper management should be summarily terminated.
Palm is fscked (Score:2)
I could give a fsck if its on a 300mhz ARM, i could give a fsck if its linux (which seems like a recipe for disaster on a handheld). Adding a non GUI thread scheduler should be easy( and not require a heavyweight OS like linux) As a developer what I wan't is a consistant API that extends rather than gets replaced every few years. The
Re:Palm is fscked (Score:2)
Well, you put your finger on the problem for palm.
What will people give a fsck about, at last enough to allow Palm liberate them from a couple of hundred dollars every two years or so?
The thing is, Palm used to be about two things; form factor and simplicity. Now everyone has pretty small PDAs. There isn't a lot of ways you could simplify the classic platform say from the m500 era.
So how do they respond to competition? Can they survive on the momentum of current customers repla
Re:i could be wrong... (Score:1, Funny)
And while we're on the topic of free advertising, if you quote the promotion code "slashdot" on my new website www.getpalmnow.com you will get a palmone t-shirt for free.
Way OT (Score:2)
Regards,
Mike
Re:i could be wrong... (Score:2)
fire escape
fir escape
fire scape
fires cape
fi res cape
hmmm
Re:700 - PalmOne = Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Quite to the contrary: PalmOS on Linux will be highly backwards compatible with existing Palm applications according to Palm, probably more so than than Cobalt would have been. That's one of the big attractions of doing this.
PalmOS started out as Palm libraries on top of a third party kernel. With PalmOS 5, they added a 68k emulator into the mix. With that history, moving to a different kernel while preserving backwards compatibility should not be all that hard.
Re:wrong (Score:2)
I, um, haven't actually read anything about PalmOne going to Linux by themselves. So I have no comment on that.
However, I would expect PalmOS-built-on-Linux (hypothetical or planned, whatever) to be 100% compatible with all existing PalmOS 5 applications, so long as the processor remains the same. PalmOS 5 offers very few services to ARM code, and those are made available through a procedure pointer.
Moving forward, there'd be ways around the processor limitation as well.
In short, I believe you're 100%
Re:wrong (Score:2)
(You also made several factual errors. For example. you claimed that Cobalt is a combination of CMS/Linux, PalmOS, and BeOS. But the first version of Cobalt was completed before the acquisition of CMS, so that can't be true. We don't know yet what PalmOS/Linux will be called.)
Re:wrong (Score:2)
It disregards Cobalt because it isn't relevant to my statement. Given the history of PalmOS, you had a simple, obvious path towards a highly backwards compatible PalmOS on a Linux kernel. Are you saying that what you are actually creating is going to be less backwards compatible than the obvious and simple solution?
all you would end up with is PalmOS applications sitting in a big, isol
Re:Thank you, Palmsource (Score:2, Informative)
PalmSource acquired the rights for BeOS and he's right, they didn't really do anything with it, but at the same time people who wanted to do anything with it had the problem that they couldn't get the rights needed.
P.S.: Why BeOS should be the polar opposite of Linux is beyond me.
Re:Thank you, Palmsource (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thank you, Palmsource (Score:2)
Re:We tried working with PalmOne... (Score:1)
Employee makes reasonable suggestion, management tries it but it doesn't work out, employee sacked.
I notice you didn't resign for allowing the trial.
One law for the boss, another for the workers.
Re:We tried working with PalmOne... (Score:2)
I think what we have here is deciding to only dip one toe into the pool as well as not identifying the type of user who needs one. The comment about batteries makes me suspect that they went out and purchased the cheapest Palms i.e the M100-125 range. I should know I have one. The biggest thing I hate about it is the replaceable batteries. If your batteries die and you wait longer than a minute you lose everything and have to resync. The nice thing about the more expensive ones is you can kee
Re:We tried working with PalmOne... (Score:1, Offtopic)
your trolling from an account with karma bonus too wow!
Re:We tried working with PalmOne... (Score:2)
That doesn't sound like a Palm experience... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That doesn't sound like a Palm experience... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, you are wrong.
PalmOS has gotten worse and worse in terms of stability (lookup information on PalmOS 5.4 aka soft reset ten times per day).
All this years while PalmOS5 has been becoming more and more technologically retarded, Microsoft was slowly enhancing its offering, like they always do: PPC2000 and below was horrible, PPC2002 was somewhat usable, WM2003 was okay and 2003SE is actually pretty good.
Compare PocketPC devices with VGA screens, exceptional communication capabilities and good ba
Re:That doesn't sound like a Palm experience... (Score:2)
When I've tried to use my Palm as a "laptop replacement" then I've had that experience too, though I never managed to suffer irrecoverable data loss no matter HOW hard I pushed it. Palm OS was designed to manage the information you use to manage your life. That's what it's for, and that's what it does better than anything else.
The Pocket PC started off as the "Palm-Sized PC", as a l
Re:That doesn't sound like a Palm experience... (Score:2, Informative)
When I've tried to use my Palm as a "laptop replacement" then I've had that experience too, though I never managed to suffer irrecoverable data loss no matter HOW hard I pushed it.
Yep. That's why "soft reset ten times per day", not "hard reset". Very annoying anyway and doesn't really speak well for PalmOS programmers.
I don't use PDA as a laptop replacement. As I posted some times before, generally I read books and use PIM. I don't even have a laptop and feel no need for one, that's why I didn't say
Re:That doesn't sound like a Palm experience... (Score:3, Informative)
I get soft resets occasionally running "find", I'm sure it's some application that I haven't managed to identify yet. I don't like it, but at least recovery is reliable, which hasn't been the case on the Pocket PC... I've had corrupted files and occasional hard resets following a soft reset. And hard resets on the Pocket PC are MUCH more traumatic than on the Palm, because ActiveSync only backs up part of the system on a sync.
I don't use PDA as
Re:How Strange (Score:2)
Make haste - there are many more highly subtle and devious astroturfing posts requiring your keen intellect and observation skills that must be found out before some poor unsuspecting sysadmin attempts to set up a web server using WinCE on a 4-way PD
Re:Rosie Palm etc. (Score:2)
Re:Give me a non-proprietary system! (Score:2)