Like I said at Brighthand
This is it for me. I have had it up to here with PalmOS just like I will never buy another Sony product after the way they lied to me over the Memory Stick format going to 1 GIG. It's over.
My next PDA will be a PPC. Probably a Dell Axim X50v, hopefully they will ad a camera model.
Brighthand has a piece on how PalmOne can't afford to lose it's focus again. Well, for me it is simply too late. They have already missed any chance of being a permanent dominant force in handhelds.
As I wrote there (some points match up with Ed Hansberry's point here which is why I re-registered here to post this.):
.....All the talk about what Palm can and must do to succeed is too late....
Apple is still here for just one reason. They have and have had $Billions to spend on products that hit a niche market above Wintel. They might be able to fritter away even that market if they go through with this latest plan to run on Intel hardware.
Palm has no such war treasury.
I think of myself as a fairly typical handheld user. I am almost certainly going to PPC for my next handheld. Why? well, I want real files, real font, multi-tasking, standard top flight hardware, and such.
This is almost exactly what PalmOne could have produced if they had stayed combined with PalmSource and delivered Cobalt. But, what did they do? Wasted $hundreds of millions, splintered their user base, and gave up their market share dominance and name recognition. Why? To line their own executive's pockets with my hard-earned cash. I have enjoyed the good features of POS models, stability, quickness, even guicker resets. The latest models from PalmOne take up to 4 minutes for a simple soft reset. FOUR MINUTES! I can't go that. And the OS needs resetting more and more often, while each version of WM needs the same or fewer and fewer resets.
Sorry Palm. You could have stayed together and kept your silly executive stock manipulation plans out of this and had a nice set of feature phones, PDAs, and multi-media models out that were selling like iPods. Instead you went for the cash behind door number 2 and a fantasy market of OEMs. But, Apple (when they tried to license their OS) has already proven such a set of manufacturers would never appear.
I don't think anything Palms are or will do can keep them afloat much longer. Ed Hardy's Brighthand article talks of PalmOne pulling in cash hand over fist. That is nonsense. They don't have the money they need to bring out models competitive with those of Dell. They simply don't have the money. The OS won't let them do it. It would take a whole new OS or $200 million in development patches (which again, would make FrankenGarnet even less stable and standard) and there is no way PalmOne is going to do it. No way.
It's sad, but it is what it is. I still have my reservations about WM OS, and still wish for a good Linux PDA in the US, but I will have to take the least bad option of the bad options. Right now, it looks like PalmOne and PalmSource have taken me out their possible market by not delivering anything near the OS that others are offering.
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