Palm vs other smart phones/PDAs

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Fri May 9 14:18:30 EDT 2008


On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Brian Chabot <brian at datasquire.net> wrote:
> Palm dropped the ball IMO when they split their hardware and software
> groups apart.

  I don't know if that was a cause, or just a symptom of their lack of
direction, but Palm has certainly been sinking for years and years
now.  It used to be all the interesting stuff was getting done on or
with the Palm platform, and then it just kind of... stalled out.  The
Handspring acquisition has only hurt both groups.  Then they really
started to come apart, when from one month to the next they were
either keeping the classic Palm OS, switching to Linux, or switching
to Windows CE.  Most recently, there has been basically no software
development from Palm in years.  They're still essentially shipping
the same code they were in 2004, with only very minor updates.  Their
"Palm Desktop" software still isn't "enterprise friendly", and also
has issues with Vista.  As near as I can tell, Palm is dead, they just
seem to be really slow to realize it.

  I think this is a shame, since the best PDA software I've used has
been on the Palm.  I just paid to update to DateBk6.  I've got a Sony
Clie PEG-TG50, which has some of the best design in a handheld I've
ever encountered.  I'm actually on my second unit, which I bought
new-old-stock via eBay.  But try and find a decent web browser or SSH
client.  (There's stuff out there, but it's old, slow, crashes a lot
(and on Palm, crash == reboot), and (for the browsers) has trouble
with modern sites.)

  :-(

-- Ben


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