Another Palm OS Developer Goes Freeware

Aside from Dmitry's SkinUI, most of the developers going freeware (at least, in the last few announcements) seem to be game developers. What this tells me is that they've decided the Palm OS isn't a lucrative gaming platform. I can't say I blame them much, on that score. I've seen maybe 4 games for Palm that I thought were worth paying for, and two of those came from Astraware. As a gaming platform, Palm has always been substandard. (It's never even made a serious attempt to be a gaming platform, really.)

I don't think this necessarily is another nail in the coffin. In fact, I think people are often attracted to platforms with lots of freeware. What I'd be looking for is if one of the major productivity vendors went freeware. (DataViz, anyone?) That, I would take as the end of Palm as a platform.

And in this particular case, the developer has gone freeware on all software, both for Palm and PocketPC, so it's not necessarily about Palm this time.

SV, I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone but I don't think that there's much point in reading between the lines and staring at the tea leaves on this one.

As bhartman said, most of these are small-time and/or hobbyist developers, not a major software publisher such as Astraware/Handmark or DataViz, or even one of the "name" developers like Kinoma, SplashData or Normsoft etc.

Companies such as SlashData or Dataviz have essentially cut their POS development back to minimal levels (if not just milking the same POS versions for years), so as long as they have solid bundling deals in place with Palm, I wouldn't expect anything to happen at least through the rest of this year. If anything, the success of the Centro will probably convince some developers to release their stuff as freeware to keep their name in the spotlight and others to keep selling their current wares or releasing minor updates.

I highly doubt Palm'll EOL Garnet anytime soon. IF Palm sticks around and IF Palm releases a Nova device, they'll probably keep at least one POS smartphone and/or handheld in production for a while longer to help ease the transition.

P.S. Palm really missed the boat by not pushing gaming as a secondary function of the platform years ago. Nearly a decade before Nintendo's DS, I looked at the original Pilot's large touchscreen and thought it'd make a nifty gaming device if it had a proper d-pad, a backlight and audio capabilities. By the time all of that appeared (2002) in a Palm Inc. device, the GBA had ruled the market and the PSP & DS were waiting in the wings.

Palm could have simply released a Zire 31 with a tapered lower body, moved the d-pad to the left side (ala the old Zoomer) and clustered the hard buttons on the right side and made a pretty decent budget gaming device. Palm still could have picked up the remnants of Tapwave for pennies on the dollar and made a strong push into PMP/gaming handhelds as a complimentary line to their smartphones.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

Did any of you bother to GO there and click around? Even the PalmOS *utilities* and games for the - ahem! - *POCKET PC* are free.

Well, good for them. Better than just packing up and taking it all away from everyone.

> ...There is no threat to the original developers' business
> model or income, either...

If a developer wants to release the same program under a different OS, then releasing the source code would indeed impact them business-wise. By releasing ONLY the binary version they do not have to worry about the OTHER OS implementation.

There is a difference between being in hibernation and being in a vegetative coma waiting for the plug to be pulled. Right now Palm appears to be in the latter. Of course, there are the occasional miracles where one wakes up from this state. There is a slight possibility that Palm might wake up if they make no mistakes with Nova. I'm not holding my breath.