Palm has launched a new sibling in its Treo smartphone line today, the Treo 680, using the PalmOS. “For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more.” No Wifi though. At the same time, Palm OS died.
Long live the new access reincarnation of palmos, and hope it will get palm back to the supreme powerhouse in pda’s it once was. Even though garnet dies, the devices still out there using it isnt going away until they do no longer serves its purpose. So i guess there is still a market for software developers to support it.
Edited 2006-10-12 23:22
Why PalmOS is not dead:
http://www.access-company.com/products/garnet/whypalmos/index.html
Long live to PalmOS 🙂
I still have no WPA support for my wireless Tungsten C. If that’s not something Palm OS offers, it’s stone cold dead.
On the other hand, if someone can direct me to a patch …
i have wpa on my garnet lifedrive. so palmos suppots it, do you have the lastest firmware?
Well rest assured that there is PalmOS version of this device in the pipeline:). While PalmSource no longer develops PalmOS, Palm does, for example the NVFS layer, codec manager, etc.
I doubt that there will be a “grand collapse” of the PalmOS platform, maybe Palm wants a smooth transition to Windows Mobile, maybe they still hope for Access to get their act together. Still there are too many applications available with too many loyal consumers, making the “dead of PalmOS” a rather long process.
Palm OS isn’t exactly dead… This new Treo 680 is running it.
The news article linked to proclaiming the death of Palm OS is very inaccurate. It states that Palm dumped Palm OS in favour of Windows Mobile, whereas they merely added Windows to their product line.
Why change from the name “PalmOS” to “Access Linux Platform”? It’s Linux, Jim, but it doesn’t sound like Linux as we know it. It sounds more like Linux underpinnings with a PalmOS front end – so why drop the brand?
Because
1) It’s not Linux underpinnings with a PalmOS front end — It’s linux underpinnings with Access’ NetFront browser and a GTK+ front end which may or may not run under X.
2) PalmSource sold the rights to the name “Palm” back to Palm a while ago so will not be allowed to use the name in a few years
and
3) PalmOS Garnet was the last release of PalmOS ever.
Don’t expect Palm to be best buddies with ALP and don’t expect any new “PalmOS” from either party. Access owns the former PalmOS IP, but doesn’t want to use it. Palm owns the name but not the IP and, from all reports, isn’t working on a replacment. (Although the rumor mill *does* have them working on their own Linux…)
Palm has shown a singular lack of vision over the past 5 years and has only been able to hang on by nipping at the edges of other companies innovations.
First, most of the core features of a PDA have been absorbed by the cellular phone companies. While Palm has gathered a bit of the market with it’s Treo line, there’s nothing really distinguishing about the product to set it apart from every other cellphone.
The actual PDAs they make are underpowered and underfeatured compared to their competition and Palm’s product cycle is too slow to catch up. Why buy a 400Mhz Palm with a dead-end OS when I can buy an 625Mhz Axim Pocket PC?
Then there is the LifeDrive. What could have distinguished itself as the first PMP came off as underpowered and poorly engineered. Certainly it wouldn’t have cost too much extra to include real RAM instead of swapping to the hard drive. Oh, yeah, that 4G hard drive was really impressive when iPods released around the same time had 20G capacities.
Besides these blunders there are several markets where Palm could have made a huge splash. For instance, why didn’t they try to get in on the One Laptop Per Child initiative? How about a tablet/origami sized wireless unit? Something like that would be excellent as a Hospital patient database thin-client. A sub-$100 ebook reader (which is why Sony’s ebook reader will sink, who wants to pay $300 just to start reading ebooks that aren’t free?). The list of possibilities is endless but Palm can only see phones and PDAs.
oh I dunno. Possibly because PalmOS WORKS still, who the fsck cares if the company is dead. That doesnt make the unit suddenly stop working. I wouldn’t take a windows mobile smartphone over my Treo for anything. The OS is fast, works well, LOADS of good palm programs… I’ll probably be using a treo running PalmOS until I’m forced to switch for an odd reason, like the cell phone companies refusing to activate the phone. (like Sprint did to me with my old phone.. grrrr… )
Has anyone here actually played around with ALP? How does the interface compare to PalmOS. I hope they may evolutionary rather than (what they think are) revolutionary ones. I’ve always liked PalmOS and its simplicity. It feels like it was designed for PDAs rather that The PocketPC feel of a PC OS shoehorned into a PDA.
Also, am I right in assuming that the new Treo is still using the classic 5.x PalmOS series?
Today, the only trouble with PalmOS is the availability of the upgrades of Garnet. Its inadmissible dont offer the core upgrades to “old users” from Palm devices.
I dont understand why we do not have, for example WPA (T|C), PIM enhacenments (a la T5) and someother features that already have in newer (but compatible) devices.
@bsharitt, the Treo 680 comes with Palm OS Garnet 5.4.9, the same as the Treo 700p; this becomes to be the last PalmOS release until ALP
sorry for my bad english 😉
Okey, let’s see. Palm had one advantage over competitors in the hand-held market. It’s unique and brilliant operating system.
Now Palm aims for the mainstream with…. Linux. Something so common and easy for everyone else to use that Palm simply doesn’t have any advantage left.
If Palm thought it was because of good support or something else that they had advantage, I’m sorry to say management. You don’t have a clue.
Prognosis: You’ll go the SGI way…
Palm had the advantage of a kick-ass PDA user interface (and still does). Whatever kernel Palm slots underneath it doesn’t matter.
R.I.P. PalmOS. You should have died long ago to be replaced by modern preemptive multitasking, protected-memory OS. I’m happy you are finally dead.