PalmOne plans to announce later this month its first hard drive-based product line, broadening its device portfolio and leading another trend in the handheld market.
PalmOne hard drive-based handheld on horizon
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Eugenia Loli
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hasnt sharp had a handheld on the market for months now with a hard disk in it?
I don’t follow the PDA scene, but with portable mp3 players having had hard drives for quite awhile now, I figured the PDAs would’ve had them by now.
Its already on amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0009JMT38/ref=dp_images_0/…
good lord, that has got to be one of the ugliest pda’s I have laid eyes on.
I like the look of it actually. Very modern.
I really like the way it looks. Clean, simple, sleek.
Darius: I don’t follow the PDA scene, but with portable mp3 players having had hard drives for quite awhile now, I figured the PDAs would’ve had them by now.
I use PDAs a quite a bit and I was also expecting them to have hard drives by now. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t bothered to replace my PDA for awhile, because I kept expecting them to do this and as far as I know this is the first PDA to have one. (Of course. I might have missed one. For example dlg says Sharp has one.)
I say they should finally put these ugly buttons on the backside. Honestly, the front would be so much cooler without the buttons and with all these MS thumbwheel “innovations” that idea will really stand out.
Man..that looks pretty sweet. I like it
If only the web browser supports horizontal layout…
and…no camera?
and…any guesses what those function icons are? I’ve never seen that ‘star’ before…
/my last pda is 3 years old/
“and…any guesses what those function icons are? I’ve never seen that ‘star’ before…”
Synchronization. Silly thing to have as one of the main four buttons as you don’t use it more than a few times a day tops.
Last time I checked, they weren’t even going to have a filesystem in Cobalt. Also, someone here said that OS5 only supports FAT16?
And even if they’ve fixed the filesystem support, do they have a proper filemanager? I mean, why does the device need to be switched into “drive mode”?
Still without Cobalt, and its multitasking and vector based GUI, I won’t buy it. Had a Palm since PalmIII, but when Magneto is released, I’m getting a PocketPC.
You know, I doubt a PDA is designed to replace your desktop environment.
“You know, I doubt a PDA is designed to replace your desktop environment.”
What has one to do with the other?
Besides, don’t be surprised if 95% of what you currently do on a desktop you do on a PDA in a not too distant future…
They still insist on running garnet on it … why oh why would you want this big xscale processor then ? It’s all going to waste.
I’m absolutely sure that you will not be able to use it as an usb mass storage device, so why bother with the harddrive?
Also, they do so little on the software front, so they just bundle packages from other companies with it, in this case pockettunes, which is excellent … in other cases, documents2go, etc.
Believe me, with garnet, the applications you will run on it are limited and will not be able to take advantage of what this hardware potentially has in offer.
Same gripes as my zire72, great hardware that will never be really put to use because of the severe limitations of garnet.
IE, every app is in fact 68k, only small snippets of native ARM code are possible. So every app you run on it is in fact EMULATED and does not run natively … how stupid is that people ?
There is no memory protection and no multitasking, the way mp3 players play music in the background is more of a hack then anything else and crashed my zire72 a LOT.
The only pros i could figure are apparent for this is pockettunes, web pro, and probably versamail and documents2go which are all very good.
If you want my take on this, buy the zaurus for sure. A palm now is just like the same old palm years ago with a cheap noname turbocharger ducktaped on there to make it at least a bit faster and oh it makes that good ‘psh’ sound now too.
palm, time to innovate … you are way overdue
– Kevin
It means very soon people will be, unrealistically, demanding surround sound speakers for their PDAs. Either that, or my concept of the purpose of a PDA is really antiquated.
They bought Be Inc some years ago, maybe they have adopted the BFS, but i dont know..
http://bitsofnews.com & http://tech.bitsofnews.com
The Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 ( http://www.dynamism.com/sl-c3000/ ) has a 4GB HD in it. I use my Zaurus SL-5500 and C700 (now dead
) as ultra-portable computers rather than PDA’s – write and test PHP apps, word processing, games, listen to oggs, wireless web browsing from bed. Even wrote essays for my uni course while on holiday. I used to carry a notebook PC around with me on my 4 hour daily train commute, but it was unwieldy, caused me back pain, inconvenient and hot. Try using a notebook in a very cramped economy seat on a KLM 747!
There is definitely a market for ultra-portable PDA/PC hybrids, especially those that run linux, though it may only consist of one person!
What’s the use of having an internal hard drive? Can’t they just use flash cards instead? I would imagine hard drives will make the thing a lot more fragile, a lot bigger, and a lot heavier. I personally never had problems with storage on my PDA.
I know, many MP3 player are HDD based, but from what I see here at work, people handel them with more care than their PDA….
What about battery life? Is HDD realy cheaper than flash memory for a PDA?
Oh well, Apple should put more software on their iPod Color and could compete with PDA!!!
the article claims that this potential palm device at $499 will compete with the much smaller and cheaper $199 ipod mini. That is plain stupid. $300 difference means they won’t compete.
I believe people will eventually want one device (a phone, organizer, mp3 players) but not yet. Easy of use is a major reason why iPod is successful and this palm, though perhaps nice, will be significantly more complicated than the ipod. It also costs more and that means niche market.
Dear palm: focus on cell phones.
combo this with xen and park a xen “image” on the system so that when you plug it into a pc you can fire up a full on desktop system of the pda. work with the files on the pda from the computer with the apps you bring along and then power down the image and move on.
a laptop can be reduced to a screen, keyboard/pointer and battery. just hook up your pda and presto.
it would be interesting to say the least
actually, its possible for a palm OS app to be 99% ARM. IIRC all they need is a tiny m68k ‘loader’ for the app. All the games for the zodiac are pure arm and a lot of newer games in general are mostly arm..
oh, and PACE does not emulate a m68k cpu or other hardware. it translates the m68k -> arm on the fly. its called an interpreter.. not an emulator. it doesnt emulate anything.
I am more happy with their built-in wireless than the built-in HD. I personally like PalmOne more than any PPC but then I just bought a PPC just because of that all PalmOne products don’t have WLAN capability unless you put add-on card. I feel shame on them!!! As they are originally leading in the PDA industry, but their PDAs cannot have both WLAN and Bluetooth, so laughable. Now they finally have Bluetooth and 802.11, I am really waiting to see how good it is.
The star is a programmable button and can be assigned to launch whatever application you choose.
For good justice, I want a Python environment, at least to script the PalmDesktop piece.
And official GNU/Linux support, while you’re pushing the envelope.
I know, many MP3 player are HDD based, but from what I see here at work, people handel them with more care than their PDA….
What about battery life? Is HDD realy cheaper than flash memory for a PDA?
Oh well, Apple should put more software on their iPod Color and could compete with PDA!!!
It’s not so much that HDD’s are cheaper than Flash (larger the HDD the cheaper it gets vs. Flash) as that HDD’s have a much higher potential capacity and number of rewrites vs Flash. I don’t know of anyone who makes a Flash card bigger than 2GB.
The drives are fairly rugged and only draw power when data is being read off of them. I would imagine battery life to be similar to an iPod, possibly less due more to the color LCD and CPU.
Personally I think it’s more natural for Palm to stretch their PDA’s multimedia capabilities than for Apple to turn the iPod into a PDA. Palm’s have had media players for quite a while now and have really only been held back by their storage capacity.
The iPod, however, was designed as a media player only and I doubt that it’s CPU has enough oomph to be a general purpose PDA unless the fourth generation models add a faster processor.
ou can buy 4gb cf cards and there are other cf cards thats are a lot larger.. course they cost a fortune
Are you sure that those aren’t 4GB Compact Flash MicroDrives? Cause those are just mini HDDs in a Compact Flash sized container.
they are actual flash cards.. have a look..
http://www.pretec.com/product/SSD/CF_Commercial/Commercial_CF.htm
256mb-12gb cf cards.. not microdrives..
From what I understand, Palm supplies the LifeDrive with a piece of software for dummies that lets any user pull (media) files from any other device over any 802.11b connection. It can also be used to send media those scart interfaces you have with wireless connectivity.
The device can certainly be used in both landscape and portrait mode, meaning a screen of 480×320 in landscape mode. That’s something for documents to go, mail and webbrowsing in combination with such a bluetooth keyboard.
It’s a thick device, which might point to a serious battery.
Has anybody published a specific reason why the nextgen Palm OS isn’t being offered on any Palm yet? It’s been out for over a year, yes? Is Palm charging too much for it? What gives…
I dont think that Palm is stupid enough to price Garnett so high that it is not being used. Common sense says the OS sucks and is not what it was hyped up to be, that is why it is not being used. I was a palm fan, but damn they blew it.