PDA Performance Announces Its Closure

Posted By: Kris Keilhack Thursday, February 28, 2008 8:54:35 AM

The ever-constricting Palm-conomy has just claimed another victim. PDAPerformance, developers of the "OS within an OS" Saguaro as well as the LineUp widget platform, has just announced their immediate closure. No specific reason other than unfortunate financial circumstances and the dire straits around the entire Palm OS ecosystem are given.

Their entire website has been replaced with a polite goodbye letter, thanking their many fans and customers throughout their six years of years of business. No archived media, downloads, or additional contact information is available on the site.

The much-hyped Saguaro environment was promised to bring about a revolution in Palm OS functionality and aesthetics, offering "multi-tasking" widgets from a variety of content providers. Saguaro was certainly up to par on an cosmetic and UI level, offering plenty of eye candy and windowed visual UI elements right out of OS X Aqua or Windows Vista Aero. A nice overview by Ryan of the work in progress that was Saguaro circa April 2007 can be found here.

This announcement comes just a few short months after the assimilation of PalmGear by PocketGear. And earlier we covered Michael Mace's analysis of the struggles facing so many mobile app developers. PDA Performance’s unfortunate announcement makes the predictions of doom and gloom found in the Mobile Opportunity report all the more chillingly prescient.

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Funny

PacManFoo @ 2/28/2008 12:39:13 PM #

The death of Vaporware?

PDA's Past and Present:
Palm TX (Number 2)
Palm - IIIxe, Vx, M500, M505, Tungsten T, TX
Handspring - Edge, Platinum, Deluxe
Sony - SJ22, UX50
Casio-EM500
Apple - MP110, MP2000, MP2100

The Palm Kiss Of Death

mikecane @ 2/28/2008 12:48:42 PM #

Don't let Colligan ever kiss you on the cheek!

The Palm Ecosystem has rotted.

The Palm Economy is bankrupt.

Next!

So, does anyone still think...

SeldomVisitor @ 2/28/2008 2:40:41 PM #

...Palm is gonna have PalmOS compatibility with Nova?

RE: So, does anyone still think...

freakout @ 2/28/2008 3:58:31 PM #

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

RE: So, does anyone still think...

BaalthazaaR @ 2/28/2008 4:31:24 PM #

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.

RE: So, does anyone still think...

hkklife @ 2/28/2008 5:07:48 PM #

At THIS stage of the game, I've resigned myself to the fact that if Nova ever even ships at all, it'll lack backwards compatibility. I'll just be happy to port all of my PIM data over and be done with it. Besides, it'd be refreshing to see a lot of the stuff that requires add-ons (Audio Gateway, PhotosHQ, Phone Technician) rendered unnecessary or coming as a standard feature on the new OS.

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

RE: So, does anyone still think...

Poopie @ 2/28/2008 5:52:59 PM #

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

It had better run all of my BeOS and Cobalt apps too!

bit rich

freakout @ 2/28/2008 3:49:22 PM #

LineUp was nothing but a glorified RSS reader and I think it's a bit rich to blame Palm for the failure. It was next-to-useless, even if it was graphically impressive.

RE: bit rich

hkklife @ 2/28/2008 4:39:24 PM #

Tim;

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

Yeah BUT!

madmaxmedia @ 2/29/2008 3:37:57 PM #

How are you gonna sell vaporware if there are no potential customers to buy it?

Thus, it's Palm's fault.

GOTCHA!!!

RE: bit rich

TreoAnon @ 2/29/2008 3:59:39 PM #

There were plenty of potential customers.

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.

RE: bit rich

mikecane @ 3/1/2008 2:14:55 PM #

I didn't even bother with it after someone said they tried it on their LifeDrive and all it did was crash.

Still available?

cstamper @ 2/29/2008 3:47:10 PM #

I don't think I ever used it. Wonder where I could get it...

http://tinyurl.com/39h3eg

Another One Bites The Dust

PacManFoo @ 2/29/2008 8:25:32 PM #

http://www.mootjelitt.se/

And guess which platform he seems to be going towards next.

PDA's Past and Present:
Palm TX (Number 2)
Palm - IIIxe, Vx, M500, M505, Tungsten T, TX
Handspring - Edge, Platinum, Deluxe
Sony - SJ22, UX50
Casio-EM500
Apple - MP110, MP2000, MP2100

RE: Another One Bites The Dust

Gekko @ 2/29/2008 8:54:07 PM #

>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.