Three years ago (has it really been that long?), I published a quite detailed (and at times, mildly emotional) retrospective article on the history of Palm and the Palm OS, which I still think is a pretty decent read. For a different perspective on the matter, there’s now an excellent article series at LowEndMac.
Palm Computing was largely the creation and vision of one man, Jeff Hawkins. Palm first brought tablet computing to consumers in the form of PDAs (but was beaten by Apple and its scions). The later – and more momentous – goal was to bring consumers to PDAs through simple and very fast user interfaces. This second goal brought us the original Pilot and an entirely new form-factor that millions embraced.
It was only until the introduction of multimedia-rich smartphones that Palm stumbled, though it was one of the leading manufacturers.
An excellent different and detailed perspective on the history of Palm.
I’ve owned several palm PDAs throughout the years.
They started out as simply brilliant, excellent little devices. Easy to use thanks to an amazingly consistent and clear cut user interface. I loved them.
However …
At the end of it’s lifespan (palmos 5), things weren’t at all nice and positive anymore.
The lack of memory protection was a big issue, as was the shoddy multitasking.
Last palm devices i’ve owned were a zire 72 and a tungsten T.
The zire’s coating came off pretty much immediately, and the tungsten had reboot issues.
Both were pretty disappointing from a stability point of view, and palmos 6 never really materialized.
Palm were doing crazy things like splitting the company in two, promising palmos 6 for ages, not maintaining the sync software as they should … etc etc …
Shame really.
Edited 2016-08-18 11:28 UTC
No, Psion were somebody else entirely.
(ba-dum, tss!)
I still have a 5mx … love it.
perfection,
I loved my Psions had the 3mx, 5 and then the 5mx.
Wish someone would take the hardware and put on a lightweight up to date version of the EPOC OS/Sympian.
Owned pretty much all the PDA’s PocketPC, Palm and i loved using the Palms, very reliable and pretty quick.
The PocketPC’s won out on Multimedia and graphics though.
Looks like Blackberry’s story…
In my opinion WebOS killed palm. Especially with it directly trying to pick a fight with Apple and advertising iTunes compatibility via a hack, where it began a patch war between Apple and Palm.
I think Palm may had made it, if they kept their OS and just modernized it a bit more. The PDA and Palm Phones were the closest thing to the iPhone before the iPhone was released.
In my head, Apple and iOS has done one thing correctly that in the article is listed as a deficit – one App at a time. This is why Palm was so fast. It could run on a 16Mhz computer and outperform CE on 133Mhz computers.
To this day, when I use an iOS device, I don’t have to think much about background app and memory. It’s also why my iOS devices seem to do so well on battery usage. On my iPhone 6 or iPad Mini 4, I can chat for a while in the morning, do online stuff on the train to work, and arrive at my desk with the battery at 96%. On my Nexus 6P, I might be at 78%. On the Nexus 5X it was even worse.
On Android I’m always having to watch what background apps are doing, how much memory they are sucking and battery they are draining. And inevitably, I’ll have stuttering when the memory gets to a certain point. No matter how intelligent the OS management of memory and apps is supposed to me, it never quite makes it there on Android (and previously on CE). Stop the insanity, Android. Stop letting every app run services in the background for updating data. Provide a simple subscription OS service for app to receive updates from the single OS service that does this. Let those apps sleep. The 6P especially was supposed to be better at this, but it isn’t. I have to wade through menus and pare down notifications and background updating and “optimize app for battery” etc. How about just working out of the box. :/O
Android has a similar approach and can kill background apps at any time. I think it actually originates from the PALM idea (there was an article on OSAlert once…).
However, as a developer it is a bit of a pain to implement this, i.e. you have to handle the cases were your app is asked to shutdown and resume at a later point. This means you have to store and restore your application state.
Having written a classic palm app, I know this. When the user hit the home button, or other app button, my app was given a chance to save itself, which I did. When the user came back, they were right where they left off. It’s not a big deal, as all apps need this anyway, since they can be whacked at any time. Besides music apps, there main reason apps have services running is for updates (long database or web calls being others). Giving this over to the OS would save a lot of misery.
Facebook for palm, otherwise known as Facepalm.