Palm steps up to the gallows

We all knew it was coming. The Palm Pre - while a stunning entry into the smartphone market - could not compete with the twin juggernauts of the Apple iPhone and Google Android. Palm, Inc. simply could not reverse a decade of complacency with a single great product. Now, the venerable father of the successful PDA is up for sale. Apple got there first with the Newton, but Palm put millions of PDAs into the hands of businessmen and changed portable computing. They will be missed.

Rumored buyers include HTC (maker of smartphones), Motorola, Nokia, and Apple.

Palm announces its Next Generation phone

Palm has been working a LONG time to produce a next-generation operating systems. First, we heard about Palm 5. It was originally going to be a revolutionary upgrade to the PalmOS but wound up being a simple evolutionary change called Garnet. Then we heard about Palm 6... but that fizzled out without making it onto a single device. Then we heard about the new Linux-based OS called ACCESS... but eventually Palm passed on that entirely. Now, finally, Palm has announced their "real" Next Geneation O/S called "webOS" and actually has a product that runs it, called the Palm PRE. The new webOS is webkit based (same as Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome) and is based around the idea of building Apps using web tools like HTML, JavaScript, and XML. The built-in apps are made to automatically and wirelessly sync with Facebook, Google, etc. to keep your contacts always in sync.

One interesting omissions, sure to raise the ire of Palm's few remaining supporters, appears to be PalmOS backwards compatibility. It appears from the press release that existing PalmOS apps do not work with the new system. This was probably necessary to bring about the radical changes needed for webOS (and probably why it is NOT called PalmOS 6 or 7). But if I had invested hundreeds or thousands of dollars in Palm software, I'd be put out to learn it was all throw-away.

Here is hoping this gives Palm a chance to survive in a future where Apple's iPhone and Google's Android increasingly dominate the landscape.

R.I.P. PalmOS

Palm was once the juggernaut of the handheld world. It held nearly the entire PDA space in its iron grip, and only a few surviving Apple Newtons and Windows CE devices were out there to challenge it. Now, however, it is a much different world. Windows Mobile owns much of the American market, Blackberry owns most of the rest, and the PalmOS is being quietly retired in favor of some kind of Linux which Palm will use on future handhelds.

The beginning of the end for PalmOS was when Palm split into two companies - one to handle Palm-branded hardware and another to handle Palm-branded operating systems and software. Ostensibly, this was to foster innovation on both sides. Instead, it institutionalized the tendency toward tunnel vision. Here is hoping devices like the iPhone can return competition to the space, and foster true innovation.