NewtonTalk.net July 2009 archive: Re: [NTLK] OT Palm Pre

From: <Reilly001os_at_aol.com>
Date: Sun Jul 19 2009 - 20:46:48 EDT

I'm very ambivalent about the software upgrade game too especially when upgrades are to manipulate users and when they slow down an older device/computer with useless whiz bang crap more then add new features (or worse cut out older devices because they can't support whiz bang uselessness, I'm look at you OS X 10.5). Palm was promising multimedia, wifi, etc and pushing their devices as modern, stable, cutting edge devices but they were not (arguably until winmo treos). I joined the palm user ranks based on these promises plus palm computings past reputation and solid pim apps but was disappointed on most counts except the original pim features, but of course pushing the old OS so hard caused bad stability issues which even affected these previously solid features. I believe its comparable to the way we push the newtons now to do new modern things they were never intended to do except we are a user community some-what blindly developing upgrades, patches, add ons, etc for an abandoned device without having a
ccess to the source code, original engineering documents, etc where palm had access to all that stuff and still couldn't deliver on their promises in a good, timely fashion and when palmsource finally delivered an improved palm OS cobalt they didn't use it.
I believe that Dennis was also right that palm splitting they operations didn't help them at all but I believe the problem started before that and maybe higher up in management then the SW/HW engineering departments. Basicly palm promised a lot and delivered little, and what they delivered (during my use of the very crap treo 600 which might be more handsprings fault but palm never fixed it and the nice but still limited tungsten T2) was buggy devices that pushed the limits, in a bad way, of the OS. The classic OS needed a rewrite (major update) worse than OS9 to do the things palm was trying to do with buggy add-on minor upgrades. Even the pace at which they delivered minor feature upgrades, which only appeared in new devices during that time to the best of my knowledge, was disappointing. They did deliver OS updates in the past which makes it even more baffling to me that they never delivered (to my knowledge) updates for their newer and more buggy devices. In retrospect they were trying to do what rim is
now doing with adding multimedia, BT, wifi, etc, except rim is doing it in a timely fashion with stable OS updates (even for older devices) that don't hurt the core pim features (even though most new BB devices are starting to look externally the same to me lol). That being said, I'm not totally blown away by my BB device but I'm at least satisfied with it and impressed that rim keeps improving and moving older devices forward even though I have to get an outside BB OS upgrade since tmobile seems unable to deliver 4.5 for my 8100 (tmo only offically supports 4.2.1 I think for the 8100). That BB OS 4.5 upgrade improved my BB an impressive amount actually and added nice new features like A2DP and folders for the home screen. Hopefully Palm sorts their game out and delivers more devices like the pre and OS upgrades to expand the existing 1st Gen pre features instead of being greedy and forcing people to buy new devices all the time to get new software features (when they could just charge a small OS upgrade fee
) as I felt they were doing with the treo 600 to 650 minor update. I've refrained from mentioning the iPhone/iPod touch until now but apple, like rim, has delivered constant upgrades for the older moble devices too and although I don't get as many new/improved features because of the hardware limits of my 1st Gen iPod touch I've been please with them too in the upgrade department even though i'm paying more for the fewer new/improved features I get versus an iphone 3g or iPod touch 2g owner. As a side note I'm expecting apple to leave out the iPod touch 1G if multi tasking is added in OS 3.5/4 as jailbroken multi tasking slows down my 1G UI a lot but I've had a good run with the 1G and a few useful feature upgrades so I'm happy with apple too in the mobile device space. Palm however has to prove themselves trust worthy again as a company before I even look at their new devices as the pre may be a one hit wonder before falling back into their old ways.
Joe Reilly
------Original Message------
From: Tony Kan
Sender: newtontalk-bounce@newtontalk.net
To: NewtonTalk
ReplyTo: NewtonTalk
Subject: Re: [NTLK] OT Palm Pre
Sent: Jul 18, 2009 20:44

Please bear with me but I've never used a Palm OS device before, but it is an
interesting discussion, even for a bystander.

If the OS works for its users, why does there have to be an endless treadmill of
upgrades and new versions? What was so wrong with Palm OS that it became a
"dead horse?" I thought the point of POS was that it was minimalist and simple.
Isn't that a recipe for upgrades to be few and far between?

Cheers

Tony

[snip]they put a lot of .x and .x.y numbers behind the dead horse that is palm
OS 5
(which they are STILL beating today) so I'll trust they have changed when I see
V2 and V3 in the same decade (they've been beating OS 5 for going on 6 years
after all).[snip]

====================================================================
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
====================================================================

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Jul 20 2009 - 05:30:00 EDT