Palm and Handhelds: The Writing Is on the Wall

I totally agree with your article. Palm is way too behind in the race to make up for it. It will be a forgotten name, and even perhaps swallowed up by bigger companies such as Nokia here. I would not be surprised.

The bigger surprise is why Palm has kept its mouth so shut re: its progress on their new OS. Perhaps it's b/c there isn't much? On their palm blog site, all they do is talk about useless stuff.

 

Thanks for a great article. You have at least given the Palm community something to think about, so that they don't keep wishing for a standalone PDA to come out. Like I've said many times before, these guys are so stuck in their narrowmindedness that they fail to understand their loyal users. Being stuck only making smartphones is a mistake. It's not like their smartphones are at the top anymore. So many others are in that space already and making better ones that I often wonder what they are seriously thinking.

They've lost precious time coming up with their innovative (insert sarcasm here) Foleo and then canned it. Now the new Palm OS II isn't coming out until 2009 at the earliest and yet they expect that they can keep coming out with Centros that offer very little upgrade if any from their Treos. Okay, I guess, they can come up with different special color versions of the Centro the entire 2008, like a banana version, a peach version, a blackcurrant version.... Hey, that's a great idea! Heh.

I have given up on Palm coming up with anything in the next few years. This is very sad for Palm loyalists.

Here's to hoping that the "other guys" will come out with the standalones or alternatives that will "wake" Palm up. Sheesh.

 

I am completely lost.
I recall going into a cell phone place every week (I deliver mail there) and seeing that there were no color screen camera phones that did anything like my Clie NR70V. Now they all match the phone and other capabilities of most old Palms like say the Zire 71.
Now last week my wife got me a Tracphone with a nice tiny color screen for $13.50. If Palm had just made a nice competitor to the Sony TH55 it might be the current Zire $99 model. It is all about volume production.
But, Palm never released a single full featured model. Not even close. So the bottom end is a weak selling poor competitor to my daughters $50 Motorola (also Tracphone) camera phone.
The $99 Palm Centro. What a laugh. If it was a pay as you go Tracphone it would cost $300. That is iPod Touch price.
I guess Palm will try to play the phone consumer for a sucker until they get swamped by far superior HTC, Motorola, Nokia, and Apple products....the way they suckered millions of Palm users to pay for under-featured broken OS models for the last 3 years. I am guessing it won't take long for most users to look elsewhere.

My most hoped for model would be a TX sized iPod Touch. If my Axim dies I might get an N810. I await a review of how WordSmith runs on it.

 

Finally! I think most of us have assumed this for some time now. I can't imagine going back to Palm, but that Nokia N810 is really sweet. Can most Palm software take advantage that 800x480 screen?

 

No. Garnet software isn't even mapped for VGA, let alone WVGA. Instead, it displays in a 320 x 480 stripe in the middle of the display. PalmInfoCenter has a photo which shows pretty well how this works.

http://www.palminfocenter.com/images/palm-garnet-vm-4.jpg

 

I would add after reading the latest reviews of new devices for all the various O/S types, now is a good time to remind everybody to try to buy your next unit from the advertisers at Brighthand! I was sort of waiting for the Nokia 810, but I already have GPS and I like the handwriting recognition of the N800.
I picking up an N800 from our sponsors right away. Thanks for the helpful information everybody.

 

Palm slipped as far back as July of 2005. That is when I bought a PPC to replace my T3. Had Palm come out with the TX then, rather than the LifeDrive and the T5, their momentum might have been maintainable.

Fast forward to the present.

Palm has the TX, the E2, and a handful of Treo models. None of which multitask, have VGA graphics, or provide the choice of keyboard/no keyboard.

HP seems to understand that there is still a market for traditional non-phone PDAs at least with the introduction of their model 11x/21x Windows Mobile PDAs.

Other manufacturers are coming out with VGA PDA/Phones that will work on the two US GSM cellular networks, but are unlikely to be picked up by either telco.

The converged (PDA/Phone) choices from the telcos is even more dismal. The AT&T 8925 is the apparent best of show with only a 240x320 (qvga) screen.

This is what happens when there is no real competition.

 

As far as I know, no Palm software can. The Garnet VM runs in a 320x480 window, and so do the apps that run under it. (It's not clear whether apps that use the full screen and collapse the DIA work.)
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Dennis