|
|
03/18/2009, 07:44 PM
#432
Nobody seems to factor in that the Palm OS has been around since 1996 and has been the same core OS ever since. It has seen amazing progression from the Pilot 1000/5000 days. A lot of it due to the progress of technology. Bad 160x160 monochrome screens, no media capability, no IR, no flash memory and no backlight. 2.0 brought about the Personal and Professional. The OS was tweaked and the screen had a backlight. Palm III showed real evolution. IR, flash memory and a backlight. People were beaming info to one another all the time. No one feared their battery dying as you had a 10-15 minute window to change your batteries. When's the last time you saw a PDA run on AAA's. Cool thing with the Palm III series is that Palm offered an upgrade module to allow the Pilot series to become Palm III's. So how about a little FU to the upgrade winers out there? Can I mention they also had a whopping 2mb of memory.
With the 3com purchase the Palm originals broke off and created Handspring which gave us the Visor. The Visor had a hardware expansion slot for upgrading.
OS3.1 brought about 4mb IIIx and a svelte 2mb V and 8mb Vx. The V series kicking off the internal rechargeable battery.
OS3.2 brought about the VII, their first foray into wireless connectivity.
OS3.5 brought about the IIIc, the first color screen for Palm.
The progression continued. Sony was on board with the Clie. Down the road Tapwave came out with a really cool gaming handheld with the Palm OS. The OS and devices continued to evolve. Memory slots, hard drives, MSC support, media capability, wireless connectivity, improved resolution, larger screens, thumboards and so on. Palm was bought, sold, spunoff, reacquired
and so on. All this happened in six plus years. Not a bad evolution from the Pilot 1000/5000 and that same base OS.
It wasn't until 02' (6yrs later mind you) that convergence arrived and Palm became a phone in the Treo 180. Now we're taking that same core OS and adapting it to a cell phone. Oh yeah, so easy to do. We're talking about an OS that was originally designed around a simple dragonball processor, monochrome screen, 128kb of memory and a serial port. Now we're putting it into a modern cell phone that is light years ahead of the original pilot with the same OS. Seems a bit similar to RIM taking their non touchscreen based OS and trying to put it into the Storm.
Now we have people whining about Palm's BT issues, no push mail and why can't they do x, y or z. Because it's too damn hard to tweak and update the OS to do it all well. It ran its course and evolved greatly during that run and also considering what it started as. I'm sure you have quite a few Palm newbs that couldn't begin to tell you about the Newton. How well did Apple do with that? They didn't. It was a failure that was dragged out way too long. They didn't even develop their ipod interface. They bought it. USR was trying to develop a handwriting interface and just put 2 & 2 together about turning it into hardware. Apple did zilch to support their ipod issues. Planned obsolescence. Why fix current models when we get create new models that solve some of the problems and force people to upgrade. The only time Palm left current users hanging was when the hardware couldn't support the new OS version. To make that Palm OS more robust it needed newer guts and the OS just wouldn't be compatible with the old guts. Since the advent of the Treo nobody seems to remember all the old palm evolution. Just like apple people fail to see how Apple almost completely failed and never considered all these tweaks and fixes until the iphone came out.
Why is the iphone great? Because it was a brand new OS made for today's modern phone developed around today's tech which is leaps and bounds better than what was around 13yrs ago. Much easier to make an evolutionary device from the ground up compared to just tweaking something old. Palm realizing hardware upgrades and OS tweaks just won't take them any further needed to start from scratch in order to survive. They also needed a lot of cash. So that's what they did. They're looking to get reborn with a new infrastructure, a new OS and a sleek new device. So before you start judging based on the extremely limited time frame most are going off of, why don't we sit back, STFU, and see what happens. Then after the dust settles a bit can we begin to make the comparisons people are throwing around with a little more accuracy.
|
|
|
Posting Permissions
Originally Posted by mikah912
