Colligan Talks About Next Generation Palm OS Progress

If he had said something like, "we hope to soon have all of the former Foleo programmers working on the next gen Palm OS too", would you be griping about how "stupid and wasteful Palm would be with human resources?"

^^ You're like a dog with a bone, SV..... is the strategy just to keep repeating the lie until people can no longer be bothered correcting it?

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

I really like the looks (and price) of the Centro, and I really want to believe it will be the Zire 21 of the smartphone industry, selling an astounding number of units.

But the thing is this: there are a lot more phones to compete with than PDAs. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

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I wish them the best of luck. I currently use a Nokia e61. While I like the Centro hardware, it will need a real multitasking OS before I would consider going back to Palm.

HKK,

Past performance is no guarantee of future expectations. Why would we expect the same pattern to emerge? Yes, Palm had it's heydey then, but the hay ran out quickly thereafter.

It seems like when Ed Colligan speaks in generalities, we dismiss the incredible history of mismanagement at Palm. Somehow, his breaking silence is supposed to make us confident that they have it together or something. Don't get me wrong here, I am really hoping that they get this thing right. I don't think they will, but I hope they prove me terribly wrong by 12/31/08.

15 month projections by Palm are akin to thinking we will know the prime rate in June, 2072. Maybe all the stars will align themselves and we'll actually see a Plinux device that can truly compete in the THEN marketplace. I'll buy a telescope for that day.

Pat Horne

12/31/08 is a very, very long time to wait in this industry. Surely they can continue to churn out new products using the Garnet O/S as well as WM6 until then. Might not be too hard to clean up the graphics on Garnet to at least bring more in line with the competition.

rpa
Palm Pilot >> Palm Tungsten E user

> ...I'd guess if they decide they can't miss the 2008
> deadline it'll ship Vista style...

No, no, no!

COBALT style!

I have my doubts that Palm can deliver on anything powerful like this. But, he is probably not talking about an "OS release to devs", then a 6-12 months product launch later. This is due to the fact that Palm is not going to shop the OS out to others. It is apparently for in house use only, and is allegedly already running on hardware around there.

I find it very difficult to put much in the way of their statements, but from what they "say" this seems to be the case. Those left at Palm see clearly what many saw in 2004, when the Palmsource spin-off announcement was made. They need to control their own OS and leverage it into integrated hardware+software products. RIM & Apple had enough sense not to get visions of grandeur like the PalmOne + Palmsource idea.

i would be interested to read someone's history of the Palmsource spin-off. Apparently, PalmOne knew it was disasterous immediately. They "say" that they began work on the in-house Plinux OS right after that event. That shows that they believed PSRC would not serve them long term. Boy, were they ever right about that.

Pat Horne

Despite the Fooleo follies, it still wouldn't amaze me TOO much if Palm were to "gently" launch their next-gen OS on a NON-SMARTPHONE device. While I think they've thrown in the towel PDA-wise (and sub-notebook wise), I could see them doing a LifeDrive 2.0 type device. Not resembling the original LD, of course, but maybe a UMPC or N800-sized tablet with a major emphasis on multimedia & web functionality. They could easily "push" updates to it without having to worry about breaking crucial voice functionality like on a smartphone and it'd all be done completely devoid of the carriers' stringest testing practices (Verizon in particluar).

Of course, something like this would already have to be in the works as we speak, and Palm's dropped nary a hint about it....but I think that if Palm hopes to debut the new OS on a smartphone, the carriers will (having been burned so badly on the 700p) take forever to certify the device. It wouldn't be wise of Colligan to pin his hopes of a year-from-now release date on the carriers, most of which are notorious laggards when it comes to certifying new devices.

On top of that, it'd give Palm a shot in the arm if Treo/Centro sales sag next year as many of us are anticipating.

Getting a stable, fast, and robust new OS out the door and on store shelves in ~12 months' timewould be a tremendous marketing/PR move for Palm even if it ships initially on only a single PDA/PMP/tablet device.

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

Oh, okay - I can believe THAT...but I truly think they're considerably outsourcing STILL the development of their software (and I think that's a good thing for PALM,BTW).

Oh definitely. I think they are outsourcing MOST of the software heavy lifting but probably have a smaller internal team concocting the "Palm Special Sauce" and doing the GUI enhacements, PIM app interfaces etc. And I never expected Palm to license ANYTHING to anyone. Heck, they don't like licensing stuff FROM people (Graffiti 1 libraries from Xerox, anyone?) so I wouldn't expect it to work in reverse.

As in "Here, let the outsourcing guys do the stuff that we've traditionally not been good with and let our guys focus on the things Palm is known for." (ease of use, nice icon design, anything involving the "tap counter" etc.)

I wonder if the PLinux interface will be mostly d-pad oriented, stylus tap-based, fingertip tap-based (I HOPE NOT!), keystroke-based (I hope not), or something else (scroll wheel, trackball etc)?

And will it even INCLUDE Graffiti 1/2 or any other kind of stylus-based single or unistroke character input methods? I could really see them droppping it entirely unless they wanted to keep it out of concern for legacy app compatibility (but then again, most Treo-specific or Treo-friendly apps of the past 3 years haven't had to worry about Graffiti area strokes, so...)

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

I think that both of those OSes (WinMob & Palm OS Garnet) are "necessary evils". Traditionally, Palm hasn't really been too much in favor of licensing bits & pieces that are not absolutely necessary. I still maintain that had they just sucked it up and licensed the Graffiti 1 libraries from Xerox alongside a facelifted version of TCMP a few years ago they'd be in a better position nowadays. All of this stuff doesn't amount to much individually but it just slowly but surely erodes the remaining user goodwill towards Palm & the OS.

Those of us who were here in the previous millennium will remember MultiMail when it was a pretty nifty but barebones 3rd party app from Actual Software. Then Palm bought Actual Software outright right on the heels of Anyday (remember the mypalm.net mess that followed?) and started turning the nifty little MultiMail into the hugely bloated VersaMail that it is today...and now the hiring of Mark Blanc earlier this year, accoring to the TreoCentral rumor mill, is building up have a VersaMail/ChatterMail hybrid on the Plinux Treos...7.5 years and counting and we'll still waiting on Palm to produce a rock solid in-house e-mail client. Doesn't it seem like it would've made more sense to just license ChatterMail in the first place?

And nearly 6 years after the i705 & the MyPalm mess, Palm's still trying to get get somethng out of the MyPalm branding and get that beta portal to offer some useful service to users.

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

Drew,

I respectfully disagree. Linux is a rock solid OS and it is open source. They would need help with drivers and stacks as well as integrated applications. The GUI could be proprietary as well as some applications they add to their devices.

Gnome and XGL/Compiz is pretty nice on Linux. The Open source community has done pretty well with the GUI (with a little design help from Novell and others). I really don't think this is a stretch at all.

Wowsers Surer. Nice revelation. BTW, is that the new Phone app too? Maybe it's just a GSM thang? No CDMA phones ever get the new phone app.

Pat Horne

Unfortunately Palm is already dead! Beginning of 2009 is a ridiculous time for releasing something that should have been releaed years ago. They are years behind the schedule. A few loyal costumers might stay with Palm waiting for Palm 09 OS (which will eventually switch if they are reasonable). Microsoft won the race. Handheld computer concept as Jeff Hawkings created it was an excellent invention. He is indeed the father of PDAs and handheld computers. I really *love* the wooden-block story by the way. Every aspect of the device was right on spot! Form factor, key arrangments, Graffiti area, size, weight, price, and Graffiti One's (unistroke!!) speed and accuracy and of course the simplicity of the experience. Even the cpu and operating system was a great choice back then. Microsoft had mobile computing in mind too but they couldn't get it right. They tried different things with other form factors, with small keyboards, without small keyboards :) different text entry systems, but they failed. Palm's design was the solution. So after years of changing things and trying different things they end up with Hawkin's design (for pdas) which was the most excellent, practical and simple one. The same form-factor, key arrangement, size, and 'block recognizer' (unistroke). So actually they learned to take the positive aspects of Palm design and alongside it they continued to develope and change their OS which was their expertise*. Jeff Hawkings changed the way a lot of people deal with daily information. Palm should have started to work on a multi-tasking OS in 1999 envisioning the future. It's too late now.

* By the way, someone else has asked this before, and I'm really interested to know too:
- Palm's Global-Find is a wonderful feature. One tap, entering text, and you can see the results in contacts, memos, expenses, appointments, daily journal entries... Is there such a feature on Windows Mobile devices? (which could search through all the programs, not just built in ones)?
Is it something missed by the developers or is it a Windows Mobile problem (lack of feature)? There are still things that Microsoft can learn from the original Palm design ;)