Palm hating goes on…
It seems to be the time of palm hating! Does that mean the contrarian view will prevail and palm will actually pull out of it’s nose dive? Well, my hope springs eternal.
Here we have an article on palm’s irrelevance, that begins by referring to another article on the lack of any outrage at all when they posted that Palm OS development was grinding to a halt. You know that the interwebbing is good for nothing if not generating outrage at even imagined slights to a fanboy’s chosen. Not a peep on that front? That can not be a good sign. The article then goes on to talk about the growing lack of good game development. Palm can really be a great gaming platform, but as it’s developers watch it’s dominance erode with the company doing nothing about it, can you blame them for not wanting to invest the resources into developing killer games?
To add fire to that flame, Microsoft just came out with windows mobile 6. By many accounts this is a real improvment over 5. It also comes with a renaming scheme, which sounds less confusing if it isn’t actually less confusing. I don’t know why they need to have so many different tiers in all their stuff. Simple is good. From what I can tell, each tier (pro, standard and classic) is going to run on distinctly different hardware - you don’t get a choice. I.e. if you buy a phone with a touchscreen you are getting pro, if you buy a pda you are getting classic. So why do they need all these different terms?
But to get back to palm.. So, since 2003, Microsoft has come out with Windows Mobile 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 and now Windows Mobile 6.0. That’s three major releases - each one noticeably better than the last. Now palm in that time has had Palm OS 5.0, 5.2 and.. 5.4! Each one, marginally better than the last - changes reflected support for more modern hardware and not so much an increased feature set. Thank god Palm bought back Garnet from Access!
I still believe that Palm isn’t dead. They can come win back developers and consumers by really pushing out an actually innovative new treo or two and start doing something with the OS. I am a believer, but my hope has a good bit less spring to it with every passing day.
