Palm Kills Foleo

[mikelove]

http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html

Not a decision I disagree with, they have a hard enough time convincing people to support even one Palm OS platform, but wow, even someone like myself with a relatively optimistic view of Palm's future has to admit that they are looking pretty seriously dysfunctional now.

And since this is now the second time in their history they've completely canceled a platform after people already started writing software for it (the first time of course being Palm OS Cobalt), how do they ever expect developers to trust them again? From my perspective there's no way Pleco is even writing one line of code for their new Linux-based platform until it's actually on shipping devices, and even then we'd probably wait until said devices made up the majority of their product line and there was no going back before getting on board.

 

[gato]

Good decision to cut their losses on a crazy idea. I think the success of the iPhone has made Palm realize that they can't waste any more time. The iPhone is no Windows Mobile.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home
Apple's IPhone Topped Smartphones in July, Firm Says (Update2)
By Crayton Harrison

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc.'s iPhone, the wireless handset that doubles as a music player, became the best-selling advanced U.S. mobile phone in its first full month of sales, research firm iSuppli Inc. said.

Apple sold 220,000 units in July, 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile-phone sales, El Segundo, California-based iSuppli said today. The firm estimates that customers in 2007 will buy 4.5 million of the phones, which went on sale June 29.

The iPhone topped July sales of Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, Palm Inc.'s Treo handsets and advanced phones from Motorola, Nokia Oyj and Samsung Electronics Co., iSuppli said. Advanced phones, also known as ``smartphones,'' are designed to send and receive e-mail, browse the Web and, in some instances, run software.

 

[frances]

Mike- You might want to add a note about the situation to your Which Palm / Pocket PC Should I Buy to Run PlecoDict? page. Since it will cost users to switch their licenses across OSes, you might want to warn them that the continuance of the Palm implementation for future devices may be delayed or threatened.

 

[mikelove]

Well no, because that new Linux OS will still be able to run older Palm applications quite well; this has been not only promised but actually demonstrated by both Palm and ACCESS. And of course we'd certainly want to fix any compatibility problems that came up with our current Palm software running in that emulation environment. All I'm saying is that we're not likely to do a completely rewritten native Linux version for Palm's new platform until they actually start shipping a decent number of devices that use it.

 

[sfrrr]

How can the make the same huge, public mistake yet again? Dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe the problem.

Sandra