We’ve been wondering for a while what is up with Palm.com domain, and it’s looking more and more certain that HP sold the brand and trademarks to Alcatel Onetouch.
Looks like they’re going to put the Palm name on cheap-ass Android crap.
Like wiping your ass with the Mona Lisa.
They may have bought it to form a “luxury” division. This would make sense. FWIW wasting money on Palm brand just to bury it by placing “Palm” logo on crap hardware does not make any sense at all.
Lenovo’s acquisitions come to mind, and while quality of ThinkPads degraded quite significant lately, they are still better then average laptops on the market.
Edited 2014-12-31 10:07 UTC
C’mon, they dared to put the Nokia brand on Windows Phones…
This reminds me a lot of the Amiga situation, where the trademark comes up once in a while with absolutely no relevance to what it originally was.
Palm had a great name, now being devalued and diluted through buyouts. What is the point, though? Who remembers Palm as anything, but a has-been?
Perhaps they are buying it not for the history (which not many people remember one way or the other these days), but because of the potential it has as a new brand.
It is a lovely logo, a nice sounding brand, and a four letter domain name. History may have nothing to do with it.
“Looks like they’re going to put the Palm name on cheap-ass Android crap.”
(Warning: anecdotal evidence) Though the Alcatel phones are relatively cheap, in my experience, they aren’t crap. Sure, they don’t have the quality of the higher-end phones, but the ones I’ve seen used by some relatives and friends are decent compared to the usual low-price stuff. I have an Acer Android phone that is much worse (and more expensive), for example.
Thom, seriously, where did you find all these funky anal-orgies ?
Edited 2014-12-31 12:25 UTC
For years I was hoping that the palm software would be open sourced under GPL, APL or BSD like license so we could have a play or even attempt to further it in some sort of project.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme where companies* buy a brand, but, apart from protecting the IP, have no idea what to do with technology, BEOS and RISCOS seems to be other examples where open sourcing may have been helpful.
*Well there are examples of where takeovers have been done relatively well like openSUSE /SUSE and Attachmate Group.
https://news.opensuse.org/2014/09/17/statement-on-the-recent-merger-…
Open sourcing superior products is baaaad for the business.
See how Linux is a threat to closed source softwares and how it has spread everywhere. See the market share of embedded and smart-phones running on Android.
Even Apple took some liberties to pick some open sourced elements from the BSD world, either because superior and/or future proof by ensuring compatibility.
I agree with you up to a point, but now it has been years it will take a lot of work to make it usable on current hardware. I guess to summarise my view, in the event that the software does not seem usable to the company that has bought the rights it would be great to open it up rather than letting it fade away.
If the community brought it up to date they could use it for their products.
Then open a kickstarter to buy the source code. After all HP paid a lot to get it, expecting to be able to do something out of it. Currently it’s plain loss, so why should they just ‘release’ it for geeks’ sake ?
But, as always, OSSing the software may not be practical, or even possible. Who knows what IP agreements are intertwined in to the software. Consider the effort that Sun had to take to OSS Solaris and Java originally. It wasn’t just a drag and drop of source code to github, there was a lot of auditing, T crossing, and I dotting to get that done.
All that effort takes money, time, and resources. Most companies don’t get value from that effort.
It’s not necessarily that they’re against the concept, or that they actually care about it enough to keep it proprietary. But they simply don’t care enough to invest whats necessary to OSS it. It’s cheaper to just leave it to rot on the vine.
But you can grab the source of RISCOS (not that it would do you any good, being written in asm…)
Even if I were to accept that Palm represented some kind of apex for digital devices —which I personally do not accept — comparing the Palm to the Mona Lisa is just an insult to the Mona Lisa…
And Nokia with The Creation of Adam (Sistine Chapel ceiling) ?
It strikes me that Nokia used the Sistine imagery as an example of connection, not as a direct comparison of their digital platform being on par with the artwork.
You may have a different opinion. Either way I stick to my comment about the Mona Lisa and Thom’s hyperbole…
Yes, Thom’s hyperboles are rather fun and poetic
Like a roman painting.
Just keep swinging, I am sure sooner or later you will get near the plate…
Edited 2015-01-01 18:44 UTC
Never liked the Mona Lisa that much.
Quite an ordinary painting : No outstanding subject, technique, not an original composition… Just a plain portrait.
Heretic ! Buuurn !
And of course you are entitled to your own opinion. You will, I presume, grant that yours isn’t the common opinion in the art world.
http://philinthewhaaat.com/blog/2012/03/01/print-anything-on-toilet…
Kochise just seems to be trying to get a rise out of me and failing because I don’t think he really gets what I am saying.
Thom has said that the felt the Palm was the best platform at the time. I reject this, even allowing for different criteria I think there were better platforms. But even if we assume that Palm was the apex of digital platform for the time; it is still nowhere near the Mona Lisa.
Not because the Mona Lisa is an example of the greatest art in the world, but because — in my opinion — digital platforms haven’t evolved enough to be put in the same category as any work in the Louvre. We are still drawing stick figures in the sand. We haven’t even gotten to cave painting IMHO.
So comparing Palm (or S60, or Windows Mobile, or iOS, or …) to any painting that meets the standard of a great gallery, is to insult the painting, not praise the platform. Let alone rise to Thom’s scatalogical analogy.
PS: Thank you Nico57 for that link. I am going to have to remember that technique. Though I am not sure how fit for purpose the toilet paper would be afterwards…
You definitively have a higher opinion about yourself. Self esteem is good, not when it outreach your ego. I was just pulling your leg because I like you. But now if you have another personal interpretation of my inputs, that’s up to you… Consult the Oracle !
I doubt that 1% of people know anything at all about Palm’s history or gives a shit.
It may have some traction in the business community (I honestly don’t know). If Alcatel are going to use it for an upmarket brand, then it may garner more attention from the press (any semi-decent journalist will be familiar with Palm).
As a consumer brand, I mostly agree – I don’t think Palm means anything to the majority of the public these days.
As for those who remember Palm with rose-tinted glasses, will they count for much?
I had a PalmOne Treo 600 which was quite simply a brilliant phone until it developed orange pixel disease. Palm’s response to that left a lot to be desired.
I had several of Palm’s products, good stuff. Palm and Apple were the only ones I remember toying around with a mobile future before Blackberry showed up.
I still have an orange palm pilot, one of the last models, around. It runs on AA batteries so I bet it would fire up. I also have a few long-dead Treo’s.
Respect your elders! I was smartphoning, what, 16 years ago now?
Damn.
What you all don’t seem to know is that Alcatel OneTouch was a french brand, owned by Alcatel, now part of Altatel-Lucent.
Alcatel produced sucessful mobile phones for 10-15 years.
What they did with Alcatel — try and penatrate the french (and european) market with a known and respected brand — and mostly failed at, they’re going to do again with the US market.