My Palm rant

[emair]

I had one of the original PalmPilot Personal's when it came out (not as old as the original USR version, but close) which ran on OS 2, and then upgraded it with a memory and ROM update to OS 3 w/ infrared. Today's Treo650 owes its OS to that original machine more than you think. The original palm OS was elegant and suprisingly powerful (thank you to the original Handspring folks!). At that time (circa 1994), they balanced the needs for battery life and performance with real applications - not dumbed down memo pads and view only calendars. Obviously, no one would have predicted the desire for on-demand multimedia streams, MP3 players, classic game system emulators, true TCP/IP networking, or vibrant color screens. And, certainly, not all that packaged in a phone!

But while it has been an exciting 10 years of Palm (including developing some of my own software), I cannot help but be amazed at the number of missteps the "Palm" corporations made. Only the fact that the product was truly ahead of its time allow the company to survive. In no particular order:

- Let's get rid of the original designers! (Fast forward 7 years) Oh wait, let's get back the original designers since they did such a great job with the Treo!
- Let's split the hardware and software teams into two separate businesses so we can sell more stock and licensing fees! Oh wait, never mind.
- Let's update the device with a tad more memory, and then sell it for a lot more (Palm Pro, Palm III, Palm IIIe, Palm IIIx, Palm IIIvx.....)
- Let's make a color version and be sure the screen is tiny and unreadable (IIIc)
- Let's release a better color version and piss everyone off who bought the first one (m505)
- Let's release a color version that actually has a few thousand colors and a screen you can read! (m515)
- Let's re-neg on our promise of OS updates (IIIx, etc.)
- Let's come up with a crummy syncing API which causes everyone to lose their info at some point. And let's try to keep fixing it without success.
- Now that some families have two or more Palm's, let's make sure to prevent the ability to share calendars, because that might be useful.
- Let's release a whole new line of Tungsten devices, but let's leave out the features that would be useful for a more powerful machine - true SDIO, WiFi
- Let's release ANOTHER line (Zire) which we can call low cost, but essentially does the same thing as the original Palm Personal and costs three times as much.
- Let's have ingenious developers/hackers/software companies make applications but not build them into the OS so that people have to spend more money just to function as well as WinCE machines (exception - DateBk5)

Last one....
- Let's smack everyone in the face by essentially admitting we didn't know how to run a technology company and team up with Microsoft, only to end up as a by-line in the long list of companies left broke and in the dust by Microsoft.
</rant>

Goodbye Palm/Treo/whatever. I hope my T650 works for a good year longer and then I will end up getting the smallest cellphone I can find running Linux or Java.

[SoufSidah09]

Dude...get over it..

It's gonna be ok..

[Insertion]

Is this really WMTreo related?

[jo2k]

well put... up to 650 I thought they heading to the right way, now, iI am not sure. Remember this: EVERYONE who teamed up w. M$ all ended up in biting the dust...SGI for one. we'll see.

[Tom LaPrise]

Technically, the original designers (Dubinsky and Hawkins) LEFT Palm to form Handspring. It was their choice, not Palm's. (Remember the Visorphone Springboard? You could have a monochrome 16-MHz 8-megs-of-RAM "smartphone" in 2001!)

Also--
"- Let's release ANOTHER line (Zire) which we can call low cost, but essentially does the same thing as the original Palm Personal and costs three times as much."

Let's see... the original Palm Personal had 512k of RAM and no IR port and cost something like $249. (I bought my USR Pilot 1000, which had 128K of RAM, for $199 when the Personal was released.) The original Zire had 4x the RAM (2MB) of the Personal and an IR port, and it seems to me it cost around $99-- or 2/5 the Personal's price. The Zire 21 has 8MB and a 126 MHz processor; didn't that one start at around $130-140?

Don't forget that as each new device came out (up to the IIIx, anyway), Palm released upgrade cards that gave the older devices the same capabilities for a lot less money than the new device cost. The "Palm III" 2MB upgrade card would even work in a Pilot 1000, giving you basically a brick-shaped Palm III with no backlight. And they did OS upgrades (not just "update" patches) through OS 3.5. (There was a 4.1 for the Vx, too, if I remember right.)

Yes, they've kind of lost their way, but it isn't that complete and it didn't start that long ago.