Back in 1996, Palm released its first Palm Pilot PDAs onto the market, and quickly became a household name in the PDa business – so far as that Palm and Palm Pilot became synonyms for any PDA device. The company has hit some rough waters lately, but if it’s up to CEO Ed Colligan, that’s all going to change in the coming years.APCMag interviewed Colligan, asking him first and foremost if there’s still a place for Palm in a world seemingly dominated by Microsoft, RIM, newcomer Apple, and up and coming star Google’s Android. With a smile, he replies “Palm’s got maybe 15 million customers and 50 million devices around the world, it’s brand that’s globally recognised. We sold a million Centros in the first five months of it going on sale with one carrier in the US, so to say were not an active player in the market is not really accurate.”
Colligan also explains that the phone market is so large, there is enough room for multiple players. “There will be 1.2 billion new handsets sold this year, there’s billions of users around the world, so there’s a huge opportunity,” he explains, “And it seems to me that when there’s a billion of anything sold per year – well, we don’t have to have Apple, RIM or Nokia be unsuccessful for us to be enormously successful.”
The most interesting bit of the interview is about Palm’s next generation operating system, which is not yet branded but is based on Linux.
“We’re focused on executing our own system, mostly because we really believe that to create the most compelling solution it should be an integrated package much like we started with the Palm OS and doing the original Palm Pilots: we did the operating system, we did the hardware and we did the whole synching architecture and the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days. One of the things we wanted to do is to make sure that we had an end-to-end solution we really controlled and could deliver the end-user experience we want to deliver.”
Confusingly enough, the classic PalmOS, as well as Windows Mobile, will continue to play important roles in Palm’s product strategy. Colligan divides their product lines into three directions: consumer, prosumer and enterprise. Palm’s consumer devices (Centro) will continue to run the ‘classic’ PalmOS, the new prosumer devices will run the new Linux-based OS, while the enterprise devices will continue to run Windows Mobile. The new OS will makes it debut in 2009.
As a Palm developer, and a Palm user (Centro), I vote ditch the Classic OS except in a VM on top of the Linux or CE OS. My Centro has great features – I use SSH, VNC, sync my Palm over the Net with my home Linux box. It has a lot of things for me to love as a geek.
HOWEVER, 2-3 times a day I have to pop the back off (which is not that easy) and take the battery out to reset the device. Putting the cover back on is even harder. The lack of memory protection in the Classic Palm OS is no longer acceptable. It would be OK to run classic apps in a VM (like StyleTap on CE), as the inevitable lockups would not trash the device. BTW, the apps that lockup on a Palm are across the board – some 3rd party, and some from Palm (or Sprint) itself. It must change!
I was never able to get the Tungsten T5 synchronized against a Linux distribution; it became one of the few reasons I keep Windows installed. I couldn’t wait any longer for them to build an update to the T5 (Livedrive was close but not quite).
They had enough challenge with WinME eating there market share alive, now they’ll have to best the Nokia N810.
I had a 600, 650 and 680. Like the earlier poster, I had to reset it at least once a day, if not more. If it wasn’t also my phone, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but occasionally I’d lose calls because the OS crashed.
If they can’t go to a more stable OS, I don’t see much of a future. I use my 680 still for e-books and the occasional Palm OS program or game, but I switched to an iPhone.
I recently got rid of my Treo 755p for those same stability reasons. I’ve always liked PalmOS at its most basic level, but now it’s falling behind on modern features and has serious stability problems.
Time has passed, a lot of it, hasn’t it?
They could recover, in a similar way to Apple, but they really need a visionary instead of a committee.
I have a Handspring Visor Deluxe here but I haven’t used it for years. It ate batteries and by the time I restored from the Springboard backup module, the batteries (with some exaggeration) were about dead again.
Too bad that they didn’t figure out how to make BeOS work for them because I believe we’d have some nice devices out of it. Patching PalmOS is like trying to get Mac OS 9 to run and that wasn’t a pleasant experience.
I’ve been having luck with the Access PalmOS VM they released. Except for briding the VM and physical bluetooth radios, it supports all my old PalmOS apps that didn’t have a native replacement. Hopefully Access will release newer versions; I hope that project didn’t die to save someone’s budget..
The only problem with Palm’s new OS is the time line, we are talking internet time here, when Colligan talks ‘the next few years’ thats centuries in internet time. The world will have passed by Palm yet again.
Does anybody really care what Palm is doing? They practically owned the PDA market, and it seemed like a natural segue into phones, but they never made it work. Now, they’re little more than a bit player and, unless they DEMONSTRATE something truly visionary, they’re headed for the dustbin of computing history.
My advice to Palm: Don’t talk about what you’re doing next, MAKE IT HAPPEN!
Edited 2008-05-30 02:03 UTC