sometimes I think you want to fail
Oh, Palm. We had such good times together. I still remember excitedly hot-syncing my beloved Palm III with my PowerMac 7500. I still remember squinting apologetically while reading cached AvantGo pages on the m505’s color-if-by-color-you-mean-colorful-shades-of-grey screen during my morning commute. I remember idly lusting after Jon Land’s Palm 700 wireless internet-enabled-sort-of-ok-not-really device.
I remember when I first got my Treo 600 — email everywhere! an idea which sounds great at first until you have it — and then after I melted it in a freak skiing accident, badgering my employer into replacing it with a lovely Treo 650.
To my eyes, it really doesn’t look like Palm devices are ever going to get much better than the Treo 650 — perhaps the upcoming Treo 700p might provide a nicer camera. I mean, check out their OS product roadmap! That’s a freakin’ mess. Check out the API overview — even if you don’t know what an API is, check it out. It’s retardedly complex, if there even can be such a thing.
They’ve scrapped their next OS, “Cobalt”. They’re still riding OS 5 (“Garnet”), even though it truly is the MacOS System 7.5.3 of the portable computing world. And now they’ve got the idea of grafting it all on top of linux.
Palm is lost. They used to make charming little devices that, at their essence, kept your contacts and calendars for you. Now my iPod does that, and Palm hasn’t figured out anything else to do well. Their web browser has always been workable but unsatistfying. Their email client VersaMail is really, really buggy. They had to license shareware music playing software for their uninspiring at best “LifeDrive” to get it to even play mp3s. And, as I mentioned above, their operating system is a mess.
What’s really amazing is the bizarro-world similarity between Palm today and Apple circa 1997; Palm today is an alternate-universe, Ghost of Christmas Future vision of what Apple would have been if they had chosen BeOS or continued on with Copland. As much as I loved Palm, I can’t imagine myself ever buying another one of their products.
~jeff
[...] However: primarily I suspect the reason for the “closed” nature is not because of reliability issues — even on the incredibly spindly and crashtastic Palm OS third-party apps are allowed — but instead because pretty much any gizmo that touches Apple’s DRM is going to be a closed hardware platform from now on. If you release an SDK, the first thing people try to do is crack your DRM. Apple is now (surprise surprise) the world’s leading producer of DRM encrypted media, and it’s not actually in their best interest to give the hacking community clues on how to strip off the FairPlay DRM. [...]