Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale 240
leetrout writes with this excerpt from a story at Bloomberg News "Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation."
BeOS! (Score:5, Interesting)
AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.
Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.
Re:Google should buy them (Score:5, Interesting)
To expand on your point; Google lacks a great deal of intellectual property that puts them at legal risk from competitors such as RIM and Apple when it comes to their Android OS. A Google acquisition would spell a quick end to the HTC vs. Apple suit. On the other hand, if RIM, Apple, or Nokia acquires Palm, we can say hello to a torrent of lawsuits directed at every aspect of their respective smartphone manufacturing competitors.
As an aside, I don't think it would be bad if Microsoft purchased Palm, since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best. I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up that could cut it with iPhone OS or Android, and I don't think that WM 7 is going to do it.
Re:BeOS! (Score:2, Interesting)
No, Palm sold BeOS when they sold Palmsource. Besides, BeOS is dead. Everyone will just have to accept that.
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Palm was actually doing good until one day some pinheads in the management decided that sales is more important than technology advancement. It's amazing to see history repeated itself over and over again in tech world.
Another good line of products ruined by great management decision. Sad, really sad.
Damn it! (Score:1, Interesting)
I just picked up a Palm Pre for Verizon *yesterday*. I was wondering why Verizon was basically giving these away... Now I know.
I (speculate/hope/hope-not) Apple might scoop in and buy them under HTC at the last minute. Palm has a nice portfolio of mobile technology patents, and letting HTC have them (besides making Apple-HTC lawsuit difficult) could be very damaging for them.
WebOS actually looks great (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say it looks better than iPhone OS, and that says something. I hope HTC (or Lenovo, or someone else competent) buys them (and their substantial patent portfolio) and makes an iPad competitor based on WebOS, just to piss off Apple. Steve Jobs will be livid -- any lawsuit will only bring an equal and opposite countersuit, and the software is Apple quality (indeed, much of it was written by ex-Apple engineers and designed by ex-Apple designers), which makes it twice as painful.
Re:No surprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have the Pixi Plus with Verizon service. Other than battery life (which is a well-documented issue that has several acceptable solutions), I cannot find a SINGLE thing I don't love about it.
It's a shame the app store isn't on par with Apple's. As devices go, it's not only one of the most technically capable phones on the market, it's also the ONLY real smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans. For someone who doesn't carry a purse, that is a huge factor.
One of the problems is that in all the side-by-side reviews, the Pre always beats out the Pixi because...wait for it...it can't run as many apps at once. (Note: the iPhone presently can't run more than one, and reviewers worship it.) So people buy the Pre, and then aren't happy with it because the form factor is annoying and the keyboard is unusable (and because they expect their battery to last three days while they watch videos over Wi-Fi). And Palm gets a bad rap, even though they make a device that people would fall in love en masse with if they weren't talked out of giving it half a chance.
To each his own, but for me Palm offers a product that nothing else today can compete with. I really hope the market gives them a fair shake before letting their technology fade away.
Re:Google should buy them (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is there is nothing Google really needs at Palm. The patents would just be used for defense against really crappy patents that should never have been issued in the first place to Apple. As for Android, i personally prefer it over both iPhone, Symbian and WebOS. Palm wouldnt bring anything to the table.
Nokia on the other hand, they would benefit greatly.
Re:BeOS! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think BeOS stil has a relevance today, as it beats the pants off any current OS in respnsiveness to The User: any command/mouseclick has the highest priority, file copy be damned. I have tested with many current OSes (even OS X fails this test) start copying a huge file, and see if responsiveness is affected at all. With BeOS, it wasn't - not even the slightest. The file would get copied a few secconds later, if I interact a lot with the UI, but so fucking what?
What a pleasure it was to use BeOS. For whatever reason, programmers just refuse to create such pleasant-to-use operating systems.
(I won't relay the often mentioned smoothness of displaying videos and playing MP3s. It's not that important. But it sure is impressive when you can play 30 MP3s at the same time, and some even backwards. Is there ever been an OS that dominated all the others so blatantly? The things BeOS was able to do were simply ridiculous.)
more than 3 is chaos (Score:2, Interesting)
the one in the /. icon (Score:2, Interesting)
i have never used the pre because its cdma, there's no decent cdma network here. and of course palm did not launch it outside the us.
I thought U2 had a stake (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the band U2 had a stake in Palm?
Re:BeOS! (Score:5, Interesting)
I do think that current OS's really suffer from the "give me my damn mouse back, let me click that button, don't make me wait for seven thousand services to start up before you let me click the start button that appeared in the first second" syndrome. But that doesn't make an OS, that makes a GUI on top of an OS. The problem is "easily" solved (for a definition of easily) by queueing user events and handling mouse motion / keyboard input in a separate thread (not at all a performance problem with modern machines).
User reponsiveness is vital, that much I can agree on. I can't wait for the OS that can properly remember and queue user events from the first second so that I can send a list of keystrokes and have it get on with them - I hate when Windows chugs and your button clicks are completely ignored (programmatically, graphically, etc.) and then there's a burst of activity once it's idle again. Ideally, such interaction would be per-application (so non-busy apps would still respond as fast no matter what else was chugging away) - incidentally, window-focus-steals are the worst idea ever invented, whether by the OS or the applications themselves.
But that's a GUI issue, for the most part. Yes, the OS shouldn't chug that badly in the first place but when it does, the underlying GUI still has millions of cycles in which to respond. It doesn't, because of deep-level order dependencies and other things. The main problem, though, is programs and OS's drawing themselves before they are actually able to respond - I've seen Windows desktop, start bar, etc. appear sometimes MINUTES before the start button can actually be clicked in any useful manner, and that's *completely* pointless and just makes me think that the computer is much slower than it actually is. It's a pain in the arse and all programs should be made to draw to a back-buffer until they are actually ready to respond to user input, and any that don't within 0.5 of a second should be terminated in the style of Windows' "This program has stopped responding".
The problem is not the OS (though some OS queueing techniques can help desktop interactivity), it's mainly the application side... programs that draw too early, set themselves up piece-meal and serially, draw the user into clicking them before they can respond (what's wrong with greying out any buttons/menus until you *are* ready to respond to them?), don't queue events properly and aren't allocated a high-enough event priority when they are the main-focus app.
That's not worth an obsolete (sorry, but it is) OS, when it can be fixed by a simple event model and some slightly stricter application requirements. You can't hold an OS responsible if the programs draw themselves, then go through a serial setup and ignore all button presses in between, or when they are busy, etc. Proper multithread use is the main factor. The OS is not.
Re:BeOS! (Score:2, Interesting)
(I won't relay the often mentioned smoothness of displaying videos and playing MP3s. It's not that important. But it sure is impressive when you can play 30 MP3s at the same time, and some even backwards. Is there ever been an OS that dominated all the others so blatantly? The things BeOS was able to do were simply ridiculous.)
Ah yes.. the first time I ever tried it I managed to open _all_ my MP3s at once (I wasn't very smart back then) and sat there for several minutes - jaw dropped to the floor as all of them (or most, I couln't really make out individual sounds) played at once, my desktop piled up with windows each playing one file.
And I could still navigate around without getting stuck somewhere... one of the more amazing moments of my (probably too boring) life..
Re:BeOS! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yup, it was missing a lot of the bloat that's forced down our throats with other OSes and that's why it was so fast and elegant.
But what was really missing was better driver support and applications.
Off course, it didn't help that the Be Inc never had the balls to try and compete with Microsoft. First they wanted to make computers (BeBox) then they thought they were going to be bought by Apple. After that, they tried the niche market of audio. In Japan they managed to get BeOS pre-installed on a few machines but Microsoft quickly reacted and made sure those manufacturers "reconsidered their decision".
The only thing that might have saved BeOS at this point would have been to open source it, but apparently they couldn't due to some licensed code.
Obituary for BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Re:It's dead for a reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
BeOS is dead for a reason.
Yes, and the reason is: Microsoft bullied PC makers so they would not sell computers with any other OS. See here. [theregister.co.uk]
People hate Microsoft for a reason.
Not an application problem (Score:2, Interesting)
You are wrong.
The problem is that the disk I/O priority in Windows is done in a (presumably) FIFO kind of way, regardless of which application and thread is performing the request. So when Explorer requests 5 x 10 KB files (the icons for the start menu items) from disk, it has to wait 5-10 seconds before Windows finally delivers because 10 other services currently booting are loading DLLs.
Suggesting that Explorer should instead have already loaded the icons into memory will not work simply because the user STILL has to wait 10 seconds extra before he can click his start menu. Not to mention the problem of how deep you want to load icons in the start menu tree. Even if it loaded them all it would still not help you because when you then selected your application to boot, that process would now need to load 10 megabytes of executable data and that too would be delayed by the other processes doing disk I/O.
Sadly when faced with this problem Microsoft chose to first ignore it for 10 years. Then they made the hack called Superfetch in Windows Vista. It attempts to solve the problem by actively loading all DLLs into memory and thereby reducing the amount of I/O requests that require actual disk access, hiding the problem somewhat in certain situations. Unfortunately that tactic still doesn't work when you start your file copy or when Windows Search decides to start scanning your disk in the background or if you do a simple file copy.
I have an USB disk that can stall Windows 7's I/O so badly that if I start copying large movie files to it, any other I/O request can end up being delayed for over 30 seconds! And these other requests were not even intended for the USB drive but my primary Velociraptor SATA disk. Clearly there is something in kernel space that could benefit from some serious improvements. But hey, at least we got ribbons in MS Paint in this release. ;)
I do agree that resurrecting BeOS for this feature alone is fairly pointless when one could simply just improve the I/O code in the kernels used today. Too bad it requires someone at Microsoft to do it.