[missing-sync-palmos-talk] OT - New Palm handhelds coming up ?

[Brad Knowles]

At 7:34 PM -0400 2006-09-10, Pascal Lessard wrote:

>	The Palm T/X seems good, but this model was released quite some time
>  ago now (2005),

And the newer models haven't really been that much better than the 
older ones.  The Palm W was (and probably still is) one of the 
fastest 802.11b wireless PDAs on the market.  The T5 is still the 
fastest PDA that Palm has produced (so far as I know).  The only 
thing that the T|X added was the NVRAM filesystem, and they even 
screwed that up.

>                  so I am wondering if any of you would have heard gossips
>  and rumours about forthcoming Palm devices. Anything supposed to show up
>  soon ?

They're going to be announcing "new" phone devices on the 12th in 
London, which just so happens to be the same day that Apple is going 
to be announcing something big (most folks assume that's probably 
going to be the iTunes Movie Store, and possibly also a wide-format 
Video iPod), and Apple is going to be coordinating this announcement 
with a live video feed via satellite to a conference keynote in 
Europe.

Interesting that they should both be announcing something big on the 
12th, and both in Europe.  Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.  Or maybe 
Palm found out about Apple's announcement and decided they wanted to 
try to announce something on the same day, so that they didn't get 
completely left out in the cold.


The pure PDA market is rapidly dying, according to all surveys I've 
seen.  What is taking off is the combined PDA/smartphone market, and 
with all of their flaws, the Treos are still the best devices in this 
field.  They make a better Windows smartphone than any other PocketPC 
device, and the Palm version is better yet.

And Palm PDAs have reliably been available with 320x480 displays for 
quite some time now, whereas the best you can get with Windows 
devices is 320x240.  Okay, some devices come with 640x480 screens, 
but then they use a much larger font that ends up giving you less 
useable screen space than the 320x240 models.


But does Palm really care about PalmOS?  Not from anything I've seen 
from them in the last few years.

>         What is happening to version 6 of the OS, by the way ? Is seems to
>  me it was due "anytime now" in 2005...

ALP has been coming for a while, but Palm hasn't licensed it.  From 
what I can tell, it looks like they're going to let PalmOS die a slow 
death of asphyxiation, and they're going to completely jump ship at 
some point and go exclusively with Windows.

I don't even know if they're going to renew their license for the 
Access "Blazer" browser -- they may switch to Opera, or something. 
Must be lots of bad blood there, but I don't know from where.


The Access guys seem to have their hearts in the right place, but 
completely re-inventing the OS underneath the device is really hard 
to do.  Cobalt couldn't do it, and now ALP is taking a very long time 
to come out.

And without support from the licensee, I don't see how the rest of 
the PalmOS community would be able to make use of whatever it is that 
Access does finally ultimately ship in the hopefully 
not-too-excessively distant future.


Basically, it's starting to look more and more like Palm is a 
dead-end vendor, and PalmOS is very much a dead-end platform.  Which 
really, really sucks, because I've had a lot of Palm devices over the 
years, and they've always seemed to be the best overall solution for 
the various things I've wanted to do.  But Palm is run by a bunch of 
incompetent morons, who'd rather sit around and bitch and moan as 
opposed to actually doing much of anything useful.  And when their 
engineers do actually manage to force something to get shipped, then 
Palm makes a point of flubbing a wide variety of support issues for 
the platform.

I wish the Access guys would target other hardware vendors (like HP), 
and then maybe they could kick the crap out of Palm and show them 
that what is really important is the software on top of the OS, and 
not the hardware platform underneath.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.