Week in Review: Dec.16 -- 22

Posted By: Ed on Sunday, December 23, 2001 9:51:06 AM

Palm Inc. was the top news-maker this week, announcing its quarterly earnings, losing a court case with Xerox, and being removed from the Nasdaq-100. They also chose Texas Instruments to make the processors for their OS 5-based wireless handhelds. There was even a bit of news on OS 5 itself and the i705.

Not to be overlooked, Handspring got a $10 million investment from Qualcomm and donated cash and handhelds to various charities.

Bump Attack Pinball is a new game announced this week and Acrobat Reader 1.1 was out, too. BugMe! Office is a new version that offers more professional notes.

Not a lot of new hardware, just the SD/MMC Card Holder for carrying memory cards in a wallet. There was a review of the SmarterCase, though.

In the Market Place, there's an almost-new Sony N760C for sale with tons of software for $465. There's also a N710C upgraded to OS 4.1 on sale for $365, with lots of extras. And a m505 up for just $300 and lots of other stuff, too. The Market Place is the way to list for free handheld-related items that you got replacements for as gifts.

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Palm emulation in the works?

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/24/2001 2:46:00 AM #

One of my buddies works as a (don't laugh) WinCE developer at Microsoft. Since I just bought a used Vx a few weeks back, we got to talking about handhelds and he casually mentioned that Microsoft is developing a way to provide the PalmOS API through a new DLL for WinCE. This has some serious implications:

- will Microsoft be able to do this without using any Palm code? How about software patents?

- will Microsoft provide a fast, simple PalmOS-style interface to help transition ex-Palm users over to their own platform?

- will this spell the death of Palm, as all existing Palm applications will be available on WinCE devices in the near future?

- if it ever goes to court, does Palm/3Com have the resources they need to stand up to Microsoft (which has billions of dollars in the bank)?

I love my Vx, but I'm thinking about selling it on eBay now before the stuff hits the fan. What do you folks think about this?

Bill

RE: Palm emulation in the works?

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/24/2001 9:57:36 AM #

I think that if Microsoft could do emulation of the PalmOS without using the PalmOS, I'd actually be quite impressed. I might actually look into a PocketPC if that happens.

Honestly, the only way I could see Microsoft succeeding at this is by running the PalmOS on top of their PocketPC OS. There's no way Palm would license it out to MS.

RE: Palm emulation in the works?

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/25/2001 2:25:12 AM #

MS will have absolutly no trouble providing a total Palm emulation package. The only possible problem would be if Palm releases a new product which had a good CPU (MS will need to emulate the CPU too unless Palm used the Pocket PC's CPU). Lucky for MS the chances of Palm releasing a product with a good CPU are about nil.

Anyway, simple APIs like the Palm's are very easy to emulate. Look at all the emulators for older game systems writen by one guy in his spare time. Look at Wine. MS can kill Palm with this if they want.

As a side note, I do not know why anyone would buy a Palm these days since the PocketPC can play quake. As wearables approach the raw computing power of hand helds will be a bigger and bigger factor.

To All:

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/24/2001 8:34:51 AM #

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AND MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!

Nasdaq-100

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/25/2001 2:17:38 AM #

Good! They need to pull more trash companies off the Nasdaq-100. Nasdaq bubble vision created this crash and recession. Palm is one of many companies that just do not have any buisness being on a general purpose stock market index. S&P 500 shure. Wilshire 5000. Shure any fool company can get on those. Nasdaq 100. No freeking way unless they want the Nasdaq 100 to be totally worthless as a measure of the market. I'd like to see the Nasdaq get down to 25% tech with about 5% of that being biotech. Try including B&N and no Amazon for one thing. MSFT's WinCE gives the merket a sufficent impression of hand held sales.. ditching Palm is a very good move.

Palm Software on sale