Category Archives: Palm

Palm Pixie: epic fail again

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You may recall that Palm Pre is kinda sucess, but, in fact, it’s sorta fail. Being in NYC, I usually see any new device being used at all time. Few years ago, Palm Treo was the one. Every time Palm released the new one; yeah, there were tons of them everywhere. For Palm Pre, I honestly say that I haven’t seen one being used yet. The sale figure is just too minimal, esp. when Sprint decided to stick Pre with Simply Everything Plan *only*skull_hero

Palm made news again! Palm Pixie, aka. stripped down version of Pre or Centro series of webOS. It looks badly similar to Palm Centro, but with webOS, it’s much much more interesting (or not?) At the very first, I was about to grab if Sprint doesn’t tie this tiny phone with any plan. Now I just see that it’s missing WiFi. WTH? My best bet would be like Sprint has something to do with it. They just want everyone to have this tying with data plan, so they can get $ more. No-go for me indeed. Why would I have to pay $30 for data while I’m paying $10 a month for data on my Treo and get the same thing. But if Palm won’t release either Pre or Pixie on GSM board + Wifi on board. Then PALM, this 4-letter, will fall out of the market pretty soon. Not to mention whether they are following App store’s policy from Apple or not.

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Palm PRE – Will I get it?

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I still work on this question after get my dirty hand on tireless Palm Pre at local Sprint Store. Yeah! Although most of Palm powered devices don’t have any much more attention than any other device on the shelf, Palm Pre is an exception. It, honestly, doesn’t seem like a product from the company with 4 characters like PALM that used to know. Almost all people would like to have hand on such a new flashy device like Palm Pre.

I won’t deny that it feels great in my hand. The rubberized texture on the back does help a lot, but I hate to say the qwerty keyboard is too small & too thin—like Centro which I couldn’t even type comfortably and correctly. When sliding the screen up, I almost lost how to control the device between keyboard and the screen. It’s like keyboard couldn’t do anything to control stuffs and screen is way too far. I wish Pre was taller, had larger screen and used only on-screen keyboard or make the keyboard like what we have on Treo! That would be much better, but with only $199, that’s tough decision! haha

On software side, webOS does give such a nice feeling. Although I hadn’t tried to get to know it much, I feel it has potential to be real successor for Palm OS day, but what I couldn’t figure out is where the zen of Palm. Ease of use? Well, let me tell you one thing, Calendar, and all PIM are only the reason why I still wait for Palm. However, when I made new event for calendar, I had no clue how to get out of that page to the day/week/month view. I have to get to main page, throw the card away and call calendar again. At least, one thing I can say is it’s not that intuitive like what I’m waiting for. Learning curve is definitely helping here, but it’s sad somehow losing all that feeling from this company. Other than not quite intuitive UI like what we have on iPhone, I don’t feel Palm Pre has the edge over iPhone much. Honestly, I don’t like iPhone much, but it still rule mobile’s world.

Time… is the factor here. This is only first time—10 mins perhaps. I might not know the OS and the phone enough to say that it’s worse than iPhone, but the smaller screen, below-par keyboard, not any notification besides screen doesn’t help Palm Pre cuts the edge over iPhone. We’ll see how 3rd generation of iPhone looks like. Then I definitely make a decision whether I will be Palm fanboy like old days or turn myself to be cool carrying iPhone.

I still wish webOS found the way to have PDA-style device on its own. I would buy it in matter of second for sure =)

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Rest In Peace – Palm OS

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Due to webOS and Palm’s laziness, they finally confirmed that there would not be any Palm OS powered anymore at an investor conference. I don’t know what you guys think of this, but for me it’s real sad. It’s the only OS I feel comfortable using it as PDA. Although I gave up on Palm OS after getting Treo, I couldn’t find any replacement so far. Windows Mobile? Too complicated. Apple iPhone? Still not the right one for me. Android? haven’t had a real chance to try—G1 is a phone. I just don’t want PDA phone. I don’t need phone to be smart. Phone is just for calling/answering the ring. Indeed, I doubt that webOS would satisfy my need. We’ll see. I hope Pandora could be the one.

Centro is the best Palm OS Phone ever, I can tell, and it IS the last Palm OS powered device. It’s fast like T|T3 or T|C which you couldn’t find from Treo 650/700p/755. It’s just damned too small and far too late to gain a market share. By all mean, Palm OS still has potential to serve all PDA’s need. Palm, however, just left it cold and was not even care die-hard PDA user. I hate you, Palm, Inc!!!

I decided to resurrect my old Palm powered device list and comparison matrix. It didn’t cover all Palm powered device out there—esp. newer than T|T5, I guess. But it should have plenty more than you can imagine–you will see how much I love Palm OS! If the mood is right, I will update one last time. You may check it out below:-

Good bye, Palm OS!

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Palm Pre: worth waiting this long?

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Eventually Palm folks could be sort of exciting of what it will be releasing tomorrow like what we always had long long time ago. Palm PRE! newest release device from Palm, Inc.

It’s a PHONE. DAMN! I still want PDA-only device, but will watch this closely how they deal with Zen of Palm.

Only 2 things I am so anxious to try out are PIM–I still want easy and intuitive calendar like the old day–and e-mail–which is supposed to be as great as Chatteremail. Stay tuned!

Check the Pre out at Palm.com

No word on price, but as expected it should be up as high as Palm could do–$599 probably?? You know? Palm just needs money to run damn bad business.

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Well there are tons of features which they claimed:

- GPS navigation software (made by Palm, really? I just don’t think it’s Garmin or Tomtom)
- Full Web experience (Well, no words on real engine yet–Webkit? Gecko? well hope it’s not what Palm cook themselves :-P ) [it's Webkit with no flash support, according to pocketables.net]
- The rest is what you can expect from every phone these days.
- Oh I miss another one, fat design device. Palm just wants to differentiate itself from today’s trend I guess and be like what it was all the time.

Personally I don’t like glossy finish of this device that much, but would love to try if this WebOS (can they think of better name? Nova is much better, dude) is good as we are expecting. I’m just afraid that Palm couldn’t reach our old Palm OS folks’ expectation because its web, Palm Pre’s web, still is broken somehow–so unprofessional. Could you think of Apple’s site broken like this? Never..

broken Palm Pre web site on Firefox

All we have is “hope” to have more than 2 great mobile OS besides iPhone’s one and andriod.

Well head over jkOntheRun, for some info about WebOS. I found out that all apps are natively running on browser. In other words, they all are just HTML, CSS, and javascript. We’ll see if that’s the only thing they got.

Still no exact words on PDN about SDK. If it’s really only a “Web” OS, I’m not jumping on this board for sure!!!

Added[Jan 09, 2009]: Pocketables.net has such a nice detail in Palm Pre Lounge; Pre’s feature makes me think of G1 indeed–no on-screen keyboard, small battery capacity. Also no memory slot with that fat design??

Look like the world responds to Palm Pre pretty well–about 40% stock price up. Wait and see if it’s real or just a hype.

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Hurting developer’s heart? STUPID MOVE from P*lm

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All P*lm developers should be aware, P*lm will follow you guys and ask you “politely and forcibly by the power of the law” to drop off “p” word you are using as your trademark or whatsoever.

This is what Dmitry, one of the most talented P*lm OS developers, had faced. As a result, he had to move his web site from http://palmpowerups.com [06/07/2005] to http://PlmPowerups.com to avoid such a confusion (perhaps because P*lm couldn’t do any better than him?) and change the SDHC driver to “PlmSDHC” since it has no relation or approval from P*lm [of course, since they DON'T EVEN CARE all predecessors' product]

here is the first post of palmpowerups.com:-

Palm Powerups opens

Palm Powerups opens today. This website will offer to you the software needed to make your palm more powerful, usable, interesting, and exciting. The currently available products include UDMH, warpSpeed, skinUI, Picsel Accelerator, and SysNfo. Of course you can expect many more great programs from Palm Powerups in the future, and your ideas are always welcome in the forums

Posted by dmitrygr on Tuesday, June 07 @ 16:50:43 MST (15 reads)
(Read More… | Score: 5)

I haven’t seen anything telling he worked at P*lm, just one developer that wanted to make Palm device more powerful! [which is a good thing for them, right? I'm not so sure if P*lm thought the same way]

P*lmRevolt [1/4/2006] and P*lmInsiderPro [03/20/2006] also got a notice and changed the names to pRevolt and ZInsider respectively. I don’t know what P*lm think really since all these programs and names has been up *PUBLICLY* for many years ; why now?

“The letters P-A-L-M reflect a prized brand with significant customer awareness and earned loyalty,” said Ed Colligan, palmOne president and chief executive officer. “Innovation, power, ease of use, and elegance all are attributes of the brand, and we intend to invest to turn what is a strong name today into a household word synonymous with leadership in mobile computing.”

What they are proud of when getting it back from palmsource [$30M -- 3.5 years installments from 5/24/2005]  — I just realized they haven’t paid off it yet! [few more months left =)]

Just putting a note ” *** is not affiliated with or endorsed by P*lm Inc in anyway” isn’t enough? They support you & they do everything to help you get better product but you just want to destroy that, what a shame! although you have all right to do so. How come you haven’t chose more mature way, e.g. releasing policy will effect the software released after this day or something or mentioned this at the first place. Oops I just realize that they probably use Garnet for a long long time without releasing newer OS, so they have to think of such a dated software as well.

It’s just plain STUPID. I think the doom day is closer than you think.

Go back to work, P*LM.

update [2 weeks later]: Palm seemed to react to this issue as they should do firstly which is letting PalmPowerups.com continues its name. However, all product names which has this-4-letter-word still need  to abandon their name. I think they ain’t busy working Nova enough.

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Centro down to fight with less buck

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AT&T might think that all folks aim to buy only iPhone 3G, then they need to lower Centro price a bit, $70, since monthly charge is more important in this game. I wonder if Palm would get less from dropping this subsidized price or not. It’s just such a pain in the ass to compare cheap centro to Zire 21 which costs $20 more.

Damn, I can’t believe PDA is dead, but MID is coming; ain’t they the same? Why PDA just evolves to MID instead of dying like this?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Oops! July 11th, iPhone 3G has a company!

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Centro Blue never looked better, bla bla bla

I do understand that Palm has no creativity anymore, but to release new Color [Electric Blue, Wow!!] of Best-selling device, Centro, in Palm’s world on the iPhone 3G day is such a bad idea of all time. Not only does no one care, but no one mentions that there is NEW color of Centro also.

From this price point, $99 w/ 2yr contract, I bet you can guess that this NEW color is tied to ONLY AT&T again. Why bother advertise this? Since you–Palm, Inc.–have Unlocked version for sell, then make it available for all color to boost your little margin, please.

Advertisement: No matter how bad Palm, Inc. is, I think Centro is the fastest smartphone available from Palm. It’s really impressive for what they have done comparing to Treo700 and so on. It’s just way tooooooo late, IMHO.

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developers were gone, don’t you feel anything, Palm, Inc?

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imagePalm OS was one of platforms that has very large community behind its success. No matter how many limited it has; there is a will, there’ll always be a way to work around. Yep, that was true. Sadly, now it’s definitely not.

First, Dmitry talented Palm OS developer decided to release his famous work–skinUI–as a freeware and not to code Palm OS program for good. In addition, he won’t continue supporting Palm OS Nova as well.

Next, PDAMill high quality game coder also quitted developing for Palm OS platform. If you do remember Snails, you know how good they were. PDAMill did follow the same path by releasing all Palm OS softwares for free.

Yet Ellams Software long time Palm OS developer went in a wild too.

What I’m pretty sure of is there will be a lot of developers go away from Palm OS platform. This is such a terribly huge sign of the death of Palm, both Palm OS itself and Palm, Inc. Doesn’t Palm Inc feel anything so far? I don’t know if it’s because the limit of OS itself or darned bad Palm Company. IMHO, the latter factor is more significant to me since Palm OS is working just fine to me as a PDA, may be not a decent web browser though. This seem to be a result of choosing worse choices in every steps in last few years–releasing under-powered Treo 700p while it could do such a great performance with Centro 2 years later with the same core platform (but too late of course), canceling Foleo which had such a potential of success if you look at Asus Eee PC as an example, and the worst decision ever–deciding to discontinue its own strength–PDA line. I think Palm might think that Treo could do everything Palm PDA can do, so there is no reason to keep that. But what can I say is Treo is a big plus of Palm PDA, not a substitution. It’s like the reason why we still have a laptop while tablet PC could do much more. Palm itself just chose to fight in a league it’s not used to with many powerful rivals and opt out of where they are good at.

What’s next? Palm OS Nova based on Linux? Then what? Apple already proved that the best-selling device doesn’t have to be the best really, just have its own strength and that’s it. It’s like the great Palm Pilot or the last Palm TX or Treo that have such a great PIM,image but instead of promoting & improving it, they decide to leave it behind and promote the weaknesses–multimedia or whatsoever.

Dude, that’s no imagination at all.

Good bye, Palm, Inc. I do hope I would be able to find you in stores in next few years. But honestly I don’t think you will be there. That’s truly sad.

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