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Handhelds Operating Systems Software Hardware

Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS 300

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the now-my-palms-wont-operate dept.
BobB-nw writes to tell us that Palm has decided to kill their PalmOS operating system and is instead betting their future on a still mostly unknown Palm webOS. Very little is known about the new Palm webOS, but it will supposedly support HTML5 and enable a local data store so that applications can be used both online and off. All of this is rolled into a Linux framework with a message bus based on JSON. Will be interesting to see where they take it.
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Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS More

Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS

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  • About damn time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:47PM (#26829265) Journal

    Worst. API. Ever. EVAR!

    Bad enough that they renamed standard library functions. They also changed the order of arguments to those functions.

    Windows PocketPC, meanwhile, was programmable using the same languages and toolchain as regular Windows.

    • Re:About damn time (Score:2)

      by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) * on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:51PM (#26829331) Homepage
      I guess I would wonder if anybody really cares at this point. Palm OS is dead. And has been for some time. I still have my Tungsten sitting somewhere in a drawer waiting for the sad day that my Blackberry AND my laptop go tits up simultaneously. Or for me to configure it into an e-reader. But really, does anybody buy anything from Palm these days.

      • Re:About damn time (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Skater ( 41976 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:01PM (#26829501) Homepage Journal
        I still use my Sony Clie SJ-20 that I bought about 5.5 years ago... I think it has Palm OS 3.0 or 3.1 on it. Works great for what I use it for; I don't carry a laptop or a smart phone. But, yeah, it's a dead platform.

      • Re:About damn time (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Abreu ( 173023 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:02PM (#26829537)

        I used two Palm Zires (first a 21, then a 72) as ebook readers for the last 8 years.

        When my latest one died two weeks ago, I started looking for a replacement, only to find out that PDAs have been dead for years...

        Dammit Palm, you had a complete market cornered, why did you have to drop the ball so stupidly?
        If you had developed a decent OS (with a f**kin filesystem!) for your devices 5 years ago, you would still be relevant today...

      • Re:About damn time (Score:2)

        by Rhone ( 220519 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:21PM (#26829767) Homepage

        But really, does anybody buy anything from Palm these days.

        I'm pretty happy with my Centro.

        I tried a Blackberry first and it died within a week. I switched it for a Centro, which does more, cost less, and (best of all) didn't croak.

      • Though inevitable, this saddens me. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by KlaymenDK ( 713149 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:56PM (#26830341) Journal

        As a couple of others at this thread level, I'm a devout Palm user. Actually, I've just bought a Treo 680 (competently refurbished of course) -- "just" as in "it it's still in the mail".

        I've been using Palm PDAs for most of a decade, starting with a Palm III. My two beloved T3's are currently on their last legs; these things are nothing short of fantastic, keeping my mind and life functioning, but no matter how one cares for them they can only be expected to last for so long (which is why I'm upgrading to a Treo).

        On a related note, my brother has been using Psion Series5's for 13 years -- and he still thinks they're the best things out there, although he recently threw in the towel and bought an iPhone.

        It's such a shame that consumer electronics seems to be so ephemeral, it always has been. It means that the junk piles up on the landfill quickly, and it also means that the quality stuff is simply out of support long before the hardware is worn out.

        I say "seems to be", because few people realise --truly, consciously-- that one's gear does not need to change if one's needs don't. Granted, for most (young) people it's at least as much about the fashion statement as the functionality, and so they buy into the ephemerality. Meanwhile, the stalwarts who cherish their devices for their usefulness quickly appear to be dinosaurs, as not keeping with the times.

        I know that this Mac-like OS transition was necessary for Palm in order to be truly free to innovate, and I wish them luck, if for nothing else the market players need diversity to keep each other on their toes. I'm sure they're nervous about this gamble of leaving behind literally tens of thousands of 3rd-party applications; I know we are still many, many users out there who are -- even if we're being drowned out by others who don't feel the same.

        What am I trying to say? I wish Palm luck with their new OS and device, and I hope they get to survive on that account. But I also hope that the PalmOS community survives, for one does not rule out the other, and the old tools will not suddenly, lose their usefulness.

        • Re:Though inevitable, this saddens me. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:43PM (#26836337)

          The devil's in the details. I've got ten years of Palm OS use under my belt. I've had a Palm III, a Palm IIIc, a Palm V, a couple different Sony Clie devices, and my wife and I both run Palm Treo 650s. Why? Because I've got dozens of apps, and more than a little investment in them.

          From mileage trackers to payroll sheets to games to little utils that adjust the UI to make it work the way I want it to work, I've got a device that works the way I want to work.

          Problem is... WebOS isn't backwards compatible. Not even an emulator. So now what for my wife and I? We're starting at 0 no matter what platform our next PDA/phone purchase is. So I'll have 0 investment or loyalty to the Palm platform. Advancement is good, but this effectively says "our existing customer base isn't worth anything to us".

          I smell a Blackberry coming my way in a couple years.

    • Re:About damn time (Score:2)

      by Chatterton ( 228704 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:56PM (#26829417) Homepage

      I will say good ridance too.

      I have programmed a little soft on it (a Go board generating SGF files of the games I played in my club) and the API was so stupid/complex/borked that it has taken me 10 time the time I have used to program it on a Pocket PC :(.

    • Re:About damn time (Score:5, Informative)

      by Major Blud ( 789630 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:02PM (#26829513) Homepage
      Don't forget that Palm is still going to produce devices running Windows Mobile alongside WebOS. Having spent much time with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and a Palm VII, none of those come close to an iPhone (I haven't used the new BlackBerry Storm so I can't comment). But, you are definitely correct in that that Windows Mobile has the best SDK and development tools available, bar none. There is something said about being able to write your own apps and distribute them freely.

    • Re:About damn time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @03:09PM (#26831447) Homepage Journal

      You try shoehorning qt or gtk onto a 68000 running at 16MHz with 128K of memory.

      If I recall, it wasn't any worse than any other API of comparable ability capable of running on similar hardware. It was idisyncratic of course because it wasn't Win32 which only seemed normal because so many people had to deal with it, and it didn't have the luxury modern frameworks do of burning processor time and call stack in order to provide an orthogonal model with close one to to one correspondence between what you saw on the screen and the objects you manipulate to make it happen.

      Anything new you have to learn is a pain in the ass.

      I think we have to judge an API like this by its results. A lot of people managed to develop a lot of applications for a lot of users, and by in large those applications were useful, functional and stable.

      Still, I think that the direction palm is going from an API standpiont is good. They've lost the developer mindshare war, so having a totally foreign API and application model is a luxury they can't afford. It sounds like they're doing the right thing on PIM data synchronization too. It's a scandal how you can't get a decent shared calendar on a mobile device without buying Exchange.

      On the other hand, I wish they would still offer non-converged devices. I realize it doesn't signify anything from a marketing standpoint, but I'd run out and buy a Pre right now if I could get it without the phone. I already have a phone, and I really hate having my PIM tied to my cell provider.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @03:39PM (#26831953)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:About damn time (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Elrond, Duke of URL ( 2657 ) <JetpackJohn@gmail.com> on Friday February 13, 2009 @01:21AM (#26839579) Homepage

      That's a bit harsh now, no? It's not a great API, but I've seen worse.

      I've been a Palm OS developer for some nine years now, primarily working on Weasel Reader (http://weaselreader.org [weaselreader.org]), so I've watched as it grew, changed, and finally died over the years.

      Early on, the OS was really great. It knew what its target hardware was and who its target audience was and it served them both quite well. Very useful and very low powered devices. The battery on my devices would last for weeks. I could even read on my Clie SJ-20 with the backlight on for a surprisingly large number of hours.

      But, Palm's failure can only be blamed on itself. They owned the market and they let it slip away. Along with stupid business decisions, one of the biggest problems was that Palm OS failed to grow and mature like it should have. Palm OS 5.0 was the biggest update after 3.x and it was already way behind the times. They also managed to slap all of their FOSS developers in the face at the same time. OS 5 made it much harder to develop under anything but Windows.

      And now the grand new thing is WebOS. There's still an enormous number of Palm apps out there in the wild. Useful apps that require very little from the host platform, yet WebOS has no manner of emulation for them.

      I'm still subscribed to the palm-dev mailing list, the traffic of which has, not surprisingly, dropped off dramatically. One of the most recent threads was just a lot of old hands saying goodbye. Considering the longevity of this community, you'd think Palm might pay some attention, but no. As best as anybody can tell, nobody on the list was ever contacted by Palm for the WebOS beta, nor has anybody from Palm even dropped by just to promote the thing. This is the complete opposite of the Android dev mailing list which is crawling with people from Google who are more than happy to give useful answers and feedback.

      Palm lost me as a developer a long time ago and if it hadn't been for maintenance of Weasel Reader I would have stopped already. Why would I follow them now? Certainly, devs writing commercial and shareware apps will need to evaluate the situation as it pertains to their business, but what about FOSS authors? One of the best things about the Palm platform was the large number of quality FOSS apps developed by a community that Palm never helped and sometimes even hindered. For the time being, it looks like a lot of the FOSS people will be moving over to Android.

  • RIP My Friend (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clonan ( 64380 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:49PM (#26829309)

    I have used palm OS for almost ten years.

    Rest in Peace my friend, you will be missed.

  • What happened to BeOS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doctor Faustus ( 127273 ) <Slashdot.WilliamCleveland@Org> on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:51PM (#26829337) Homepage

    Is this going to be a brand-new start? Didn't they buy Be a few years ago to build their new OS versions around BeOS?

    • Re:What happened to BeOS? (Score:2)

      by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:04PM (#26829563) Homepage Journal
      That was the speculation, but that is all it was, was speculation. Be already had BeIA which you could use much like Windows NT/XP embeddeded Platform Builder. If they really intended on using it, they already had everything they needed from the get-go. Just some drivers would need written.

    • Re:What happened to BeOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by steeleye_brad ( 638310 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:05PM (#26829573)

      Palm did acquire Be Inc in 2001. After this, it get's really fucking goofy and confusing, so I'll just quote Wikipeida (article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc. [wikipedia.org])

      In January 2002, Palm set up a wholly owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS[4], which was named PalmSource in February[5]. PalmSource was then spun off from Palm as an independent company. In August 2003, the hardware division of the company merged with Handspring, was renamed to palmOne, Inc. and traded under the ticker symbol PLMO. The Palm trademark was held by a jointly owned holding company.

      In April 2005, palmOne purchased PalmSource's share in the 'Palm' trademark for US$30 million.[6] In July 2005, palmOne launched its new name and brand reverting back to Palm, Inc. and trading under the ticker symbol PALM once again.

      In late 2005 ACCESS, which specializes in mobile and embedded web browser technologies, acquired PalmSource for US$324 million.

      Who knows where Be's intellectual property ended up. Nothing ever came of the Be acquisition, and most likely nothing ever will. Palm's WebOS is entirely new, developed in-house, and has nothing to do with PalmSource/ACCESS.

    • Re:What happened to BeOS? (Score:2)

      by rbanffy ( 584143 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:57PM (#26830345) Homepage Journal

      "Be a few years ago to build their new OS versions around BeOS?"

      THAT was a major blunder. Hope the patents were worth it at least ;-)

  • Isn't JSON insecure? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:52PM (#26829349) Journal

    I may be wrong but I thought you only use JSON when you're passing messages between trusted sources.

    Is that perception incorrect?

  • Who or what is the target for WebOS? (Score:2)

    by LDoggg_ ( 659725 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:56PM (#26829409) Homepage
    Are these guys still making PDAs and phones?

    If they're a hardware vendor, why not just use Android?

    Wrapping webkit and giving javascript APIs to talk to the hardware isn't a bad idea and it's working for PhoneGap. I just don't know why they have to re-invent the wheel.

    Do they intend on making money licensing their WebOS to other hardware manufacturers?

  • Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dripdry ( 1062282 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @12:56PM (#26829423) Journal

    Is it just me, or has Palm fallen flat on its face every time they have something that could be big (except when they debuted the palm pilot)?
    They used to have so much caché, but every time I hear what sounds like good news it just vanishes.
    Why do people keep supporting this company if they can't get their act together? Do they offer a magical pony with every purchase that no one is telling me about?

    • Re:Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:4, Informative)

      by xoundmind ( 932373 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:02PM (#26829509)
      Not sure if it is true in 2009, but 4 years ago: Many, many medical and nursing students were required to have a Palm for running some handy med-apps.

      • Re:Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by bockelboy ( 824282 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:09PM (#26829643)

        Indeed.

        Which is why all my doctor friends are now ecstatic that most of those applications are on the iPhone.

        Apple FTW!

        • Re:Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:3, Informative)

          by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) * on Thursday February 12, 2009 @02:05PM (#26830469) Homepage
          Or the Blackberry. Epocrates [epocrates.com] is the big one. There are a number of smaller companies that take medical books and format them for PDAs with Palm OS being the dominant base (still). Back in Ye Olden Days I thought they were a great idea, even if it was really, really hard to get much out of Harrison's Internal Medicine in 480 x 320 pixels. With the ubiquity of real computers and Internet access, I've used them less and less.

          Most of the publishers had various and incompatible DRM strategies - you couldn't easily load the book on another PDA if yours got flushed down the toilet. Updates were sporadic and difficult. The search function in the Palm OS is pretty primitive. The Internet gave Palm a pretty good broadside. (They never could get a decent browser in the things). Palm managed to finish themselves off. While the Pre may be a marginal success in the increasingly crowded smartphone market, I don't see Palm regaining anything resembling the dominance in the field.

    • Re:Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:16PM (#26829719)

      Yeah. I've done a few of the Palm PDAs over the years, starting with the Palm Pilot Pro. Back then, those things were cutting edge, lots of software, lots of support. You looked at the device and you knew it had a future.

      It just seems like, since then, the company has had high goals, but has been on a behind-the-curve downhill slide ever since.

      I now look back with regret on my decision a little over a year ago to buy a Palm T|X. Little third party development these days. Almost no vendor support on the built-in software. And yet, somehow, these are still selling today for $250-$300?

      Sadly, it only performs the following functions for me to today:

      1. MP3 player
      2. Notepad
      3. Emergency wifi web browser

      Palm only has one shot left, IMHO. They need to put something out there, and it needs to be WOW.

      If this isn't a Killer OS, then it'll be the OS that killed the company.

    • Re:Palm keeps falling flat? (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:31PM (#26829953)

      They used to have so much caché,

      I don't usually do corrections, but the word you are looking for is "cachet".

  • Palm doesn't own PalmOS anymore. They can choose not to use it on their devices, but that doesn't mean the operating system can't continue to develop and be sold to others (in the form of GVM or whatever).

  • Does this mean... (Score:2)

    by camperdave ( 969942 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:07PM (#26829621) Journal
    So does this mean that nobody will be supporting my Handspring Visor anymore? I tried hot synching it to Vista the other day, but it was not recognized. With PalmOS being discontinued, I guess there will not be any support in Windows-7 either. Synching support in Linux is a bit hit or miss. When it does work often wind up getting duplicate entries in evolution.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:08PM (#26829637)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Too late (Score:3, Informative)

      by iburrell ( 537197 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @02:30PM (#26830837)
      They did write a new OS with the technology from BeOS. Palm OS 6, aka Cobalt, was a failure when released five years ago. No devices were ever released that used it. Part of the problem was the split between Palm and PalmSource. Palm went with Palm OS 5.4 for the Treo 650. And started using Windows Mobile about the same time. There were rumors that it was hard to write drivers for Cobalt.

  • This is awful (Score:5, Interesting)

    by laing ( 303349 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:11PM (#26829671)
    I started with WinCE (on a Casiopia) and stayed through 2 revisions despite the crashes, slowness, and rapid battery drain. I switched to a Palm III (clone actually - TRG Pro) and have had 3 Palm devices since then (currently a Centro). I prefer Palm's calendar and contact database to the alternatives. My Palm currently has about nine thousand contacts in the database. Am I going to be able to use the WebOS when there's no wireless data connectivity? I don't think so. Can Palm ensure the security of my data while using WebOS? I don't think so. What happened to the rumored port of PalmOS to Linux? I've been waiting for that for 3 years now. Since they are abandoning the platform, is it for sale? Are they going to open source it? I would not like to see it die.

  • Misleading story (Score:5, Informative)

    by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:18PM (#26829735) Homepage Journal

    First off, Palm don't own PalmOS. It's owned by Access, who bought PalmSource.

    Secondly, PalmOS's plug was pulled back in 2005, when Access announced no further development work would be done on it.

    Thirdly, Palm didn't *decide* to pull the plug; their license from Access to ship new PalmOS devices expired, so they have no choice.

    I wrote about all this back in 2005 [ath0.com] when the news went around. I guess everyone's forgotten.

    • Re:Misleading story (Score:5, Funny)

      by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:37PM (#26830039) Homepage Journal

      Don't know how we all missed it, what with our daily checking of your web site.

    • Re:Misleading story (Score:2)

      by Teese ( 89081 ) <beezelNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:38PM (#26830063)
      "In December 2006, Palm, Inc. paid $44 million to ACCESS for the rights to the source code for Palm OS Garnet. With this arrangement, a single company is again developing Palm hardware and software. Palm can modify the licensed software as needed and it need not pay royalties to ACCESS over future years."
      --Wikipedia, no citation given.

      So it sounds like palm did decide to pull the plug, the new agreement gave Palm rights to the source code (again).

      Assuming it's true, how much money was involved in splitting palm up, only to reunite (sort of) later?

    • Re:Misleading story (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @03:24PM (#26831693) Homepage Journal

      Well, not to meta-nitpick or anything, but I'm sure Access would have sold Palm a new license if Palm had been willing to pay anything like it must be paying to get a whole new OS.

      Still, in the era of $300 laptops, I wonder how cheaply some Chinese company could sell a knock off of the old Palm m505. For a lot of people, that pretty much was all the PDA they really needed. PDAs got powerful and converged partly because the companies built around selling PDAs were built around selling expensive, high margin items. If you could buy such a device for, say $29.99, it would sell. Add bluetooth and the ability to dial a number of common phones out of the addressbook, and you'd have something.

  • So what upgrade/emulation options exist? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Thag ( 8436 ) on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:37PM (#26830033) Homepage

    I am using a Zodiac 2 now, and have a TX in storage if the Zod dies, but I am wondering what options exist for moving/using my data on other platforms?

    I know Access has sold their ALP platform to a couple companies, it's on at least one digital camera, too. They also put out a PalmOS compatible layer for the Nokia internet tablets.

    I think there is a company that emulates the basic built-in apps on WinCE and iPhone/iPod Touch. Haven't heard great things about that.

    Are there other options out there?

  • Palm lost the plot years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <peter AT slashdo ... taronga DOT com> on Thursday February 12, 2009 @01:49PM (#26830245) Homepage Journal

    IF they'd kept the original PalmOS model and followed it to cheaper devices you'd be seeing Palms instead of Ti graphing calculators as the standard handheld for schoolkids by now... which would have translated into massive sales as the kids grew up. But Palm decided they HAD to go head to head against the Pocket PC, and threw away most of the advantages of the small, tight, lightweight Palm OS while keeping most of its disadvantages with PalmOS 5.

  • The Only Surprise Here (Score:4, Insightful)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) * <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Thursday February 12, 2009 @02:09PM (#26830515) Homepage Journal
    Is that it took them this long to do it. Palm has been selling devices running windows for how many years now? I was surprised when I recently saw a (new) Palm device for sale that was actually running Palm OS.

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