Palm is finally getting ready to land its users onto a modern Palm-built OS. Ed Colligan, in his Investor Day keynote today, announced that Palm will be launching a homegrown Linux-based OS by the end of the year, with Opera for a browser and the recently acquired Chattermail for messaging.
Palm Prepping Its Own Linux-Based OS
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What the heck ever happened to OS6 Cobalt?
Edited 2007-04-10 17:09
Cobalt is a dead project altogether. And it was developed by Palmsource, not Palm. Palm never licensed it.
Yes, I knew that. But why? From what I remember of it, os6 was a good leap forward at the time.
Palm didn’t like it because it was not fully compatible with older Palm apps. However, I am sure that their new implementation is not 100% compatible either, I guess they learned that the hard way if they didn’t believe Palmsource.
Short of total hardware virtualization, there is no way they could run all old Palm apps. Programming for the classic palm was more like programming for Dos. Apps had very low-level access to things. Classic apps were written in C with our friends Malloc() and Free(). Pointers everywhere, low-level database record access. I think the same can be said for classic Dos apps running on Windows 3.1. Many could, but certains apps couldn’t because of their low-level access to system resources.
The market decided. Cobalt wasn’t what customers wanted when they wanted it.
Possible Cobalt customers cited a wide number of reasons for why they didn’t buy in, but mostly they seemed not to think that the new feature set was worth the risk.
By “the market” you must not mean actual PDA users, because Cobalt-based PDAs were never put into production. I used the Cobalt simulator, and I rather liked it. I’ve seen some apps on PalmGear.com that were developed for PalmOS 6, so the only PDA they have to run on is the simulator. I’ve read a lot of people’s excited comments about “Cobalt is ready! It’s cool! Alright!” and then “Where is a Cobalt device?” and then “There’s gonna be a Cobalt device in November!” (Garmin being the company that actually announced one) and finally, “It’s March and still no Cobalt device… what happened?!?”
Someone here explained to me in another thread some month ago that the problem with Cobalt is that only four people knew how to write a device driver for it, and they all worked at PalmSource. Someone else said that the problem was that PalmSource wanted a lot of money up front to license the OS. At this point I don’t think anyone really knows what happened, except the management at companies that decided not to implement it.
PalmSource wasn’t in the business of selling directly to consumers. Their market was companies like TapWave, Sony, and PalmOne.
Certainly the number of people who could write drivers for Cobalt, coupled with the silicon vendors being completely uninterested in supporting it contributed to its demise.
But so did Palm deciding they wanted a cell phone OS when Cobalt wasn’t yet ready to be one, Sony pulling out of the US handheld market, the general decline in PDA sales, PalmSource taking all those years to make Cobalt available, and so forth.
I don’t believe Garmin every announced a Cobalt device. The only company to have done that, and state a shipping date, was GSPDA, for a smartphone that they ended up using Savaje’s JavaOS on.
It’s not a simple story, but it’s a tale of failure to plan and execute on the part of PalmSource.
It went from Cobalt Blue to Cobalt Blew.
[Open Vent]
As a Palm developer, I can’t wait for this to all settle out. One of the reasons I targeted the PalmOS vs. CE was the simplicity of the platform. I hated the idea of making versions for SH3, Mips, Arm, etc. With the Palm, a simple PRC was all you needed. and you could use PRC-Tools if you wanted. Then came Palm 5, then Palm 6, then some possible Linux thing, etc.
Now that Microsoft has released Windows Mobile 5.0, you can now use .NET and target the CLR. One platform neutal executable. Microsoft is now easier to develop for. I’m not sure where the PalmOS stands, and even if it will survive.
Please, PalmOS, survive and settle down to something simple again. I want to target you and I want to use free tools like PRC-Tools.
Currently I use Orbforms by Orbworks, because it uses a VM technology allowing my PRC to run on whatever. But I’d rather use something with native access to the OS like Codewarrior or PRC-Tools had. And I want this native executable to run on all devices.
Stay lean, stay simple.
[Vent closed]
I’m done venting.
The simplicity of PalmOS came from running on a limited number of device types with a limited set of features.
There’s no going back there once the feature creep has set in.
PalmOS 5 is a horrible piece of crap right now. People praise its simplicity, but tend to forget that that simplicity only stems from the fact that you really can’t do a bloody thing with a PalmOS device when compared to a Windows-based device.
Other than that, since PalmOS 5.x is basically patch upon patch upon patch upon patch, it’s buggy as hell. My Tungsten E2 crashes a lot more often than my iPaq.
I can read my email
I can read, write office document
I can read pdf file
I can listen movie and video
I can play to many video game and emulator
I can browse the web
…….
…….
stop the fud
with around 25 000 palm application, i think we can do a lot
I wouldn’t call what was said FUD. I’ve had various levels of success with different versions of the PalmOS starting with my Handspring Visor. I’ve also seen some friends completely happy with Palm while others run for Windows Mobile.
What some consumers do, however, is blame the OS when sometimes it’s faulty hardware. My Treo650 was horrible when I first got it. It crashed constantly. It was recently replaced by insurance when it broke and my replacement works perfectly.
So, while your experience might be a pleasant one it isn’t always the case for every end-user.
I don’t think that anyone targets anything else other than ARM for the last 2 years in the MS CE environment. So, you could still target your app just for ARM and still be accessing 90% of the CE users.
Thanks, I did not know that. I have written a Windows Mobile App recently (for a companies internal use), but I used VB.Net and Windows Mobile 5.0 (the companies choice). I found it very easy to do. They even had an embedded web browser control that I used to give the user a simple file/upload screen to a web server (for further processing of data collected).
[Put on flame protective suite]
One thing Microsoft has always done right is treat their developer well. They provide powerful, easy-to-use tools. It sometimes seems like other platforms take a “see if you can do it” macho attitude towards development.
[Remove suit]
Nevertheless, I remain committed to the PalmOS. I honestly like the platform better. I believe the widgets are too heavy on Mobile Windows [The “everything is a window” paradigm]. In addition, IF Palm could deliver on an open Linux platform (and not the fragmented Linux platforms we see for current phones], I remain very interested. I also like the kernel-level support for running classic Palm apps. But the time is seriously running out for them. I hope it comes soon!
Palm’s “secret third business”?
I wonder how the intend to capitalize on being the last player entering the Linux smart phone market.
Er, I guess with Google still not in the market, they’re the next to last.
Will Palm OS5 apps run on this thing?
Not for all apps, but for many it will be.
PalmOS made everything dirt simple, and everything just worked.
WinCE has more features and apps. But, to me, that stuff was just clutter which made the basic functions more difficult to use.
Again, JMHO.