Comments on: PDA Performance Announces Its Closure

Since they have a perpetual Palm OS license, it'd be a waste of money for them not to include a Garnet VM.

Porting it to their flavor of Linux (considering it is a custom stack it might need some work) as well as associated QA (don't laugh) and Support tasks also costs money. When it comes down it, a cost-benefit analysis might show that it is not worth it especially given the shrinking number of native Palm OS developers. If Access' Garnet VM works without any work, it might be feasible.

Palm would probably just be best-served to jettison Garnet compatibility with Nova for several reasons and just keep maybe pair of Garnet PDAs and a Garnet smartphone in production for a year or two while the market transitions to Nova.

Besides, I've lost so many purchased apps and games over the past couples of years has made me very cautious about spending my hard-earned $ on products from developers without a history of solid support policies. Just looking at stuff I bought in 2003/2004 that worked on my T|T but does not work or has major issues on my 755p is sickening-and they BOTH run OS 5.x!

And now the growing trend of using hardware ID (instead of Hotsync ID) strings to activate apps has really made me hesitant. I've had three 700p's and a 755p in less than two years' time. And it's not like I go around abusing these things! I have no problems repurchasing an app if I go from, say, Palm OS to WinMob or if I were to go from Garnet to Nova. But I don't expect to have to repurchase a title 3 times in a row just because I get a few dud Treos in a row and my carrier would rather swap out devices!

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Verizon Treo 700P-->Verizon 755p

Since they have a perpetual Palm OS license, it'd be a waste of money for them not to include a Garnet VM.

I agree with you 100% on that one. We can point the finger at Palm for many, MANY issues, but to lay the blame at Palm's feet for the failure of an underwhelming piece of vaporware fluff seems quite silly. I mean, Saguaro was practically touted in some circles as the second coming of the Garnet OS when all it really turned out to be was a very flashy widget manager that was trying to do too much on the constantly shrinking small square screens (SSS) of Palm's smartphone lineup. That (underperforming hardware & no improvements to an antiquated OS) are really that only areas where PDA Performance can have any beef with Palm, Inc. And, as far as we know, PDA Performance and Palm never had any kind of secret agreement to cooperatively overhaul the Garnet UI or anything like that.

As always, there's probably more to this story than meets the eye but the decline in the Palm-conomy is not JUST Palm's fault. Varing amounts of culpability can be blaimed by the former PalmSource, the developer community, the user base, the carriers, and, of course, former Palm management/staff over the years etc etc. The PIC faithful know who the usual culprits are!

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Verizon Treo 700P-->Verizon 755p

Thus, it's Palm's fault.

GOTCHA!!!

This does look like a typical VC-led shuttering. Some magic number wasn't met or viewed as meetable and the VC shut it down. A non-VC company would have scaled back and possibly just faded away, but wouldn't have just shut the doors and turned off the website.

>I don't own a Palm anymore, and the interest of my program has declined steadily over the last three-four years. I personally consider the Palm platform dead.
>The development environment I used for creating JFile Companion and MPC has evolved in a direction that I don't like and I don't enjoy using it anymore.

ouch.