Palm Before the PalmPilot 143
Gammu writes "SiliconUser has an in-depth history of the Palm, starting with its humble roots. The Pilot (later PalmPilot and finally just Palm) saved Palm Computing. Before the release of the Pilot, the company was subsisting (barely) on revenue from connectivity packages for HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti for the Newton. This was because its first PDA hardware product had failed under the weight of feature creep and design by committee. The first article in a series follows the early days of this company-reforming product."
Re:I miss Visor (Score:1, Informative)
Downsides: Fragile LCD (broke 1) and crummy copper sync contacts that would corrode and interfere with syncing. A tad bulky, but at least it fits a shirt pocket.
Re:I miss Visor (Score:4, Informative)
It involves changing the touch screen's refresh frequency.
Apparently it works well.
Dont know about the noise from the amplifier. My Lifedrive has great audio.
Re:I miss Visor (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. To my mind, the Tungsten is a giant step backward. It's particularly stupid that Graffiti is what made the pilot in the first place but in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2, which is slow, unreliable and hyper-sensitive to small timing variations. I really hope they fired the idiot who thought that was a good idea.
With the Visor and Graffiti, I could take notes continuously without looking at the screen (great for meetings). With the Tungsten and Graffiti 2, I have to keep checking that it read what I wrote or that it hasn't interpreted an "i" as "l." or vice versa. I've never figured out how to get it to consistently read an "r" or an "h". The original Graffiti was fast and sure. Graffiti 2 is so bad that I'll probably be looking for something with one of those moronic little keyboards as my next PDA. I know that is really slumming in technological backwaters, but I don't see much choice.
Your Men Are Already Dead ... (Score:4, Informative)
if palm allows apple to start releasing third-party apps ...
And what exactly can Palm do to prevent this?
Palm has been dead for awhile. All that's left is for someone to unplug the life support system.
SteveM
Re:Lookout! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I miss Visor (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If Palm isn't careful (Score:3, Informative)
The original Pilot (and later the Palm Pilot) was made by US Robotics and was eventually spun-off into an independent company. Jeff Hawkins and the original Palm team left to start Handspring where they eventually produced the Treo -- the first PalmOS smartphone. Meanwhile a "Palm ecosystem" of companies which licensed the PalmOS had blossomed and Palm split into two companies: PalmOne which continued to make PDAs and PalmSource which was tasked with creating and selling the next generation PalmOS. PalmSource failed. Their next generation OS code-named Cobalt was rejected by all of its licensees including PalmOne. The Palm ecosystem dried up and PalmOne and PalmSource started drifting apart. Both companies looked to Linux in hopes of using it to create the next generation PalmOS. This was supposed to solve the problems which had doomed Cobalt -- high resource requirements and lack of hardware drivers.
At some point during this whole mess -- before Cobalt was released but apparently too late to make a difference -- PalmSource bought the Be software team for its talent and did absolutely nothing with the software. As far as anyone knows, the Be team was put to work on PalmSource's Linux project. Whether or not any of BeOS code has made it into PalmSource's Linux project is anyone's guess. My guess is no. Eventually, the BeOS code appears to have been sold to yet another company which has done nothing with it other than sue projects designed to create a BeOS successor. If you want an argument for the importance of Open Source software, the fate of the brilliant but proprietary BeOS is it.
Since then, PalmSource has bought by Access, a Japanese mobile software company and their Linux project has been named the Access Linux Platform (ALP) and is supposed to be an smartphone OS which is backwards compatible with the vast catalog of existing PalmOS apps. While ALP appears to be coming along nicely, don't expect to see an ALP smartphone outside of the far east as Access has set its sights firmly on the burgeoning Chinese market. After PalmSource was bought by Access, PalmOne bought back the rights to the Palm name and a perpetual license to the current PalmOS and is now just Palm again. Palm is unlikely to use ALP as it has been quietly working on its own Linux-based next generation PalmOS for some time.