Comments on: Sony Demoing Palm OS 5 (Updated)

I want one, I want one, I want one!!!

I WANT IT!!!!

Im so happy i cant even think of something smart to say!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOW!

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The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

I understand that. However, as you can see, the reactions of these posts is favorable to the Nr70V formfactor with ARM and OS5. You better believe that Sony knows this and if they can fit all of the bells and whistles into the casing of the old NR70V, the form will be very close....probabbly better.

Also, with 320x480, Palm is in deep doo-doo if they release a 320x320.

hey, look at me!!! i'm an easily lead automiton....I LOOOOOOOVE SONY!!

give me a break! you guys are drooling over sony's scraps, this product is never going to see production. and when a product w/ os5 finally comes out its going to have crap that no one needs...i mean really, virtual graphity is all nice in theory, but you'd figure sony has engineer's smart enough that can get the entire screen from refreshing w/ the launch of any app.

...and before all you die-hard sony fans jump to some futile arguement, lemme save you the trouble - this problem isn't caused by the palm os.

yes you anonymous coward, its clearly not palm os's fault why its flickering, i was simply stating this so you morons wouldn't blame palm os.

Take it easy, troll!

Im guessing 600-700, probably simalar to the nr70 and nr70v when they came out

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The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

Sony is putting on in Tokyo this week a show called Dream World, designed to show off its latest technology. Included in this is a demonstration of a handheld running Palm OS 5.

I want one too, but this is a demonstration unit. It is as real as the Oslo was/is.

Until it hits retail channels we still don't have a released OS5 device - and still don't have a clear picture from Sony or Palm what they will look like.

Still, gotta love the rumours. who will be first to market Sony or Palm (or Toshiba ;).

"I thought "NR 90" is referring to a T665 form factor + Virtual Graffiti? This is a "NR 70v" with OS 5. Not sure what the name is."

There were two rumors about this.

One was that there would be a T665c running Palm OS 5 and with virtual graffiti, and another was a clamshell pda (like the NR70v) with a video camcorder, but not running Palm OS!

Weird... but if this thing ends up being an NR70v with OS 5.0 and a video camcorder, I'm all over it!

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I apologize for wasting 30 seconds of your life.

I hate to throw cold water on all this enthusiasm but, like I said in the article, this ISN'T a product announcement. I just talked with a Sony spokesperson who asked me to emphasize that his company is demonstrating the power of OS 5 and the ARM processor, NOT the hardware it runs on.

Unfortunately, you have to be there to see how great the video looks on the ARM-based processor; naturally, that doesn't come across in a static image.

So don't go off thinking that Sony has announced that its next handheld will be a NR70V with OS 5. It hasn't said anything of the sort.

But you don't have to go away empty handed. Sony has OS 5 running well on whatever ARM-based processor it chose. That includes hi-res+ support, and full-screen video. I know, it isn't an announcement that the model will be out next week, but it is at least good news.

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News Editor

"I'm going to buy this the day it comes out! What do you guys think the pricetag will be for this (suspecting this is the NR90)? I'm guessing $800, which is what I am willing to pay!"

$800?!?! I don't know what I'm more stunned about, that you think an OS 5 Clie would be $800 or that someone would be willing to pay that much for one. I think you need a cold shower.

I think $800 is unrealistic. While the OS 5 models are much faster, the hardware isn't significantly more expensive. Maybe I'm letting my optomistic side take control, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony release their first OS 5 model at $600 at the most, and that's only if it has the hi-res+ screen and the built-in camera. Keep in mind, this OS 5 model won't be a big improvement over the NR series, which already offers many of the new multimedia features in OS 5, like MP3 playback.

On the other hand, I expect Palm's first model to be more expensive than an m515 because it will be a big jump in features. It will add a hi-res screen, MP3 playback, and possibly even voice recording. Palm will be able to justify charging a premium for these new features, where Sony can not.

> Remember, for $200 extra dollars, you are getting a processor that is
> three times as fast as the NR70v's and a digital video camcorder.

abosco, you need to be realistic about this digital camcorder. For one thing, it is still a rumor. And for another, (if it is real) it will almost certainly have the same image quality as the camera on the NR70V. In short, it will be a fun toy but not something you are going to record your daughter's birthday party with and save for posterity.

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News Editor

they'll put a better camera in the new unit. I'd say 1 megapixel should be sufficient.

This is a demo. But it is a more real demo
than Sony's demo ( it probably can't be called a demo)
at PalmSource last Feb.

Better optis are now readily available. take a look at the plethora of micro digital cameras making thier way to the market. In particular the Casio Exilim S1 and M1 and the soon to be released S2/M2 these models support 1.3 and 2.1 mega pixels. in a tremendously small form factor. they are both only slightly larger than a stack of 5 credit cards (or was it 7? eh either way thats tiny) he point is the technology to implement a 1 megapixle camera into the body of a palm device is out there they ust need to use it and find it at the right prce point to make it worth thier while. Im not saying it is gunna happen but it could and it definatly would be great. right now all these built in digital cameras are just doodads without much use (yes tiny 640x480 snaps are nice to put a face with a name in your phone book but they print the size of postage stamps), hopefully they will soon reach the 2megapixle level where normal 4x5 prints are reasonable. btu i dont see that happening for another 1.5-2 years. but hey thats the thign about technology if u can wait there is always something better around the corner :o)

Why would you say that? The ARM doesn't take much (if any) more space than the dragonball. I'd expect similar thin and small device forms from Sony.

BTW, I'll take one!!!

where is your cpu-problem?

look at the ARM based Toshiba Pocket PC e310.
nearly the same form factor like the Palm m5xx-Series!

so:
it works... ;-)

Thomas W. Geuting

lol

http://www.oqo.com/

you may be right.....this thing is amazing and will only get thinner/lighter/better battery life as time goes on and technology gets better.

The OQO will have a limited success in some enterprise markets but will never be a big part of the handheld market. It will appeal to the same groups who buy Pocket PCs: enterprise buyers and other people who value cramming the largest feature set into a device, without caring whether the device is practical.

It is too big, too heavy, Windows XP isn't very easy to use a VGA, and other shortcomings will keep this from being very successful.

The OQO is intriguing and quite desirable from a new tech toy point of view (which I cannot absolve myself of), but its utility seems to be quite limited at this point. It reminds me of GridPad, from Jeff's pre-Palm days. It could find a niche market in meter readers, shipping and the like, but not outside of the commercial world. Why would a consumer need a tablet? The XP UI does not lend itself well to non-keyboard/mouse setups, and even with my 19-inch CRT I sometimes find my taskbar a bit cluttered. Are you going to play Doom III on it? Modify spreadsheets? Check your calendar? Write a quick e-mail? Soon enough the Palm platform will have enough power and diversity to run Quake, Quake II, a la Pocket PC. DTG, QuickOffice, etc fill in for Office XP. Calendar intergrated PIM, e-mail via third-party. And probably for a bit less than the OQO. OQO does have a larger screen, more storage space, etc, but will consumers be willing to pay hundreds more when a Palm can do it with more convenience? Unless the OQO costs $700 or less to bring it into line with Pocket PC devices, which would then be cannibalized, I think UPS and the electric company will be its only customers.

> Winows CE will be the first to go.

Good grief! Windows XP is even worse than CE for a PDA OS.

The goal here is being able to do as much software-wise with the minimum power possible. Seeing how much hardware you can pack into a tiny box to run bloatware is not the answer.

OQO is something straight out of a Gibson novel or Star Trek tv show and that is where it is going to stay. It is one of those products where ultra chic industrial designers got too much of an upper hand and the execs were at WAY too many South of Market art parties up in the City during this planning stages.

The design is totally void of any personal feel as it is reminding me of a mathematical model -- it alienates any high volume customer base. At least they could have done some good silkscreeing on the box.

If they want to salvage their effort, trash the WinTel design and place PalmOS 5 in this device on top of an ARM processor. That would give it some market velocity. The bottom line is no one wants Windows on a screen smaller than 5" x 5".

Last of all, someone paid WAY too much for a name as unpronounceable and forgettable as OQO. This whole company image is ultra chic at its worst. The web site might as well be playing Duran Duran songs.

In 2008, OQO is going to be in the list of failed portable PCs making the same fatality list as GRiDpad and Momenta.

...wait 5 minutes for my PDA to boot up to see my calendar or look up my address? Not really.

I think OQO will be a great machine, but not for the same reasons that makes Palm or even Pocket PC great. Until we have a complete package that I can use at a moment's notice, I think I will stick with my PDA. Computers like the OQO, while certainly a step forward, will not be there for some time to come.

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/projects.php

Check this out and then tell me you don't want augmented reality.

retinal scanning displays should turn pretty much invisible by 2008.

power density from fuel cell tech will enable tiny supercomputers.

Oh, and read this: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/dartmouth.html

to see what life will be like in a few years...

I would like to add the in fact, I believe that MS is create several variants of it's XP family, most being task oriented. There is one version being designed for tablet PCs.. and I think another is designed to run on handheld devices. Perhaps one of these variants will be well suited to compete with PalmOS

Personally, I'll stick with PalmOS (or perhaps linux...), as I believe that a mobile device need not do everything a desktop machine can. My PDA is used to contacts, maps, and other information I need on the go, not to write a book in Word or work on my budget... i'd get a laptop for that. Want an MP3 player? get an MP3 player, not a PDA. Bt then again, I don't like the PalmPhones they have...

just my humble opinion.

If everyone will be using this OQO, or whatever, the world would be forced to move at a slower pace becuase of boot times. And for Augmented reality, to show you where this is going, just watch the Jetsons. The 1960's view of the 21st century. But wait, where are the robot maids or capsulized food, or even video phones? Virtual reality was predicted to be so popular back in the early 90's. I haven't even heard about it for a while now. The OQO will be a predicted fad in the same way as the Segway scooter (The dumbest vehicle ever designed, even the Model T is better) or rocket packs. No value minded people would ever buy this OQO. Long live Palm!

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Crack-smash! Splatter: The sound of the MLB using Pocket PC's instead of Baseballs.

Why should it be any more expensive? I don't think ARM processors are substantially more expensive than Dragonballs, and the rest of the PDA is the same.

http://www.antelopetech.com/apps.html

When the OQO or this thing can boot in 1 second, and run a palm emulator as easily as my laptop. Fugetabout it. Palm is toast. Really TOAST.

lol.

Well put. When dealing with Sony you must throw all common logic out of the window.

There are two reasons why it won't be a Pocket PC:

1) Sony hates Microsoft. They have to put Windows on thir PCs and laptops because Microsoft has a monopoly but the two companies hate each other. During the DOJ monopoly trial against Microsoft, the only PC maker willing to testify against Microsoft was Sony.

2) Better reason. Palm has the dominant handheld OS. Sony likes to win and make money. The way to be the biggest handheld maker in the world is NOT to go with the second best operating system.

I was under the impression that the ARM used in Palm OS 5 devices was different than StrongARMs currently used in most Pocket PC devices. Therefore, PPC, which is tied in so intimately with device that you won't see a speed increase between the SA1110 (ARM v.4) at 206MHz and the PXA250 (V.5TE) at 400MHz, won't know what it's looking at when using an ARM and not an ARM-based XScale. Maybe when Pocket PC 2003/4 is released.

Dual boot handhelds will appeal to the same people who have dual boot PCs: a very, very small percentage of users, all hard core geeks. Not a consumer product.

>No, Pocket PC is tied to ARM in general.

No - PPC IS TIED TO StrongARM. It runs on XScale through emulation of StrongARM instructions. I should clarify - emulation of SOME instructions because both StrongARM and XScale are similar in that they are both ARM type cpus. Anyway - it is optimized for StrongARM only - which is why there are no big performance gains on XScale. Palm did a much smarter thing with OS 5 (and is the basis for all future Palm OS version tied to ARM) - they came up with the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) - a layer that CPU manufacturers write to provide the tie-in to their specific CPU. MS didnt do this - they 'hardcoded' support for one CPU (StrongARM) into the OS. That is why - probably by early/mid next year - Palm OS devices running OS 6 will take the lead over PPC in terms of performance. MS has already said that they will not release an XScale optimized version of PPC2002 OR CE.Net. In fact, it will likely be a couple of years before they have an OS optimized for anything other then StrongARM. Software developers can - of course - get around that by writting XScale optimizations into their code - but thats not a long term solution and means more work that - in all likelyhood - will only be done by some game and multi-media app developers.

>No - PPC IS TIED TO StrongARM.

You can keep repeating that if you like, it doesn't make it true. StrongARM is an ARM V4 architecture and that is what the Pocket PC is optimized for. See
http://makeashorterlink.com/?C4C5516C1 (PDF) from ARM Holdings. X-Scale uses ARM V5 architecture. Optimizing for X-Scale/V5 will hurt V4 compatibility. MS has been supporting ARM V4 in their CE based devices since at least 1998 when the original HPC with the 90MHz ARM chip shipped. Palm may be V5 optimized - I don't know. Would make sense since they waited 4-5 years after MS to jump on something other than the anemic Dragonball.

>Palm did a much smarter thing with OS 5 (and is the basis for all future Palm OS version tied to ARM) - they came up with the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) - a layer that CPU manufacturers write to provide the tie-in to their specific CPU.

LOL! MS has forgotten more about a HAL than PalmSource has ever known. They have used a HAL since the Windows NT 3.1 days which began work in the late 80's and CE has had a HAL since 1996, the day it shipped Version 1.0. It is sometimes referred to as the OAL, or OEM Abstraction Layer, since a HAL is very broad and generally used in PCs to support a wide array of devices. In a PDA, you can be more specific since you know what the MoBo is, the chip, etc. PC HALs in XP for example, have to contend with Intel and AMD processors of various flavors. HP, on the otherhand, can develop a much smaller narrower OAL for the iPAQ.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?J3B5126C1 for more information.

>That is why - probably by early/mid next year - Palm OS devices running OS 6 will take the lead over PPC in terms of performance.

Good one. You are on the Palm bandwagon full steam. Forget OS5. Lets talk about OS6! We don't even have OS5 devices yet.

>MS has already said that they will not release an XScale optimized version of PPC2002 OR CE.Net.

>Duh. They are already working on the next releases.

>In fact, it will likely be a couple of years before they have an OS optimized for anything other then StrongARM.

Don't count on it taking that long. They already run on the TI OMAP processor in the HP Pocket PC PHone - the Jornada 928.

>You can keep repeating that if you like, it doesn't make it true. StrongARM is an ARM V4 architecture and that is what the Pocket PC is optimized for. See
http://makeashorterlink.com/?C4C5516C1 (PDF) from ARM Holdings. X-Scale uses ARM V5 architecture.

You seem to be re-inforcing my point here. OK - PPC has 'hardcoded' optimization for v4 ARM - which included StrongARM. But - as you point out - this does not included XScale or other version of ARM. Im not sure of yr point here, but i am sure of my original one: Palm was smart and didn't tie the OS to 'v4' or 'v5' - if the cpu manufacturer makes there cpu OS compliant (ie: write a HAL layer for it) then OS 5 is optimized for it.

>They have used a HAL since the Windows NT 3.1 days which began work in the late 80's and CE has had a HAL since 1996, the day it shipped Version 1.0. It is sometimes referred to as the OAL, or OEM Abstraction Layer, since a HAL is very broad and generally used in PCs to support a wide array of devices.

I don't believe i said they didn't - just that they didn't do such a thing for PocketPC - and my point still stands. Don't change the subject - PPC has no equivalent to HAL - IT IS 'HARDCODED'!

>Don't count on it taking that long. They already run on the TI OMAP processor in the HP Pocket PC PHone - the Jornada 928.

Yes - just like they do with XScale. Optimization?

Why are you arguing this? PPC is TIED to a very specific architecture (v4 - which includes StrongARm and... what else?). Palm OS will be able to run optimized on cureent AND future ARM designs. And so will PPC - in 2-3 yrs.

Is OS 5.0 using anything else beyond ARM v4.1? (ie. Xscale media extension, Omap DSP, etc?)

Start here for Xscale and Omap in PalmOS Ready program
www.palmsource.com/about/os_ready.html

And then check the archive here for the snips and bits that have snuck through referring to multimedia stuff shown or talked about in PalmOS 5 and various ARM setups.

i never said it was an OS restriction, but i just want to know if they upgraded it, especially since its video capable now, so if not, im perfectly fine, and i would still get one, but it would be a nice addition.

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God bless the USA!

God bless Japan! That's where the innovations come from.

Wish it will be at least double the resolution of the old one. I know megapixel is too much to ask but 640 X 480 is pretty much standard on most cheap digital cameras nowadays.320 X 240 is just not very usable.

How can this be a conspiracy theory when Sony has /said/ this isn't a real handheld, its a way to show off OS 5. I'm sure it's a mock-up of some kind. There probably is a breadboard behind that screen with the ARM processor.

None of you are listening to ED. Sony isn't demonstrating its new handheld. It is showing off how good OS 5 plays video.

Why do people think that it would be difficult to get a new device into the same factor as the current Sony devices. Are these Arm Processors really big or something. Do they require way more power to operate than the current processor.

If not, then I fail to see what the issue is. This may be a mockup or whatever, but it should be practical to get a new device into the current form factors. The only reason why the size may be increased, would be if they wanted to make room for a CF slot for expansion (as per another rumour) or squeeze in bluetooth (would be nice, leaving the MS slot free).

Zuber

> Why do people think that it would be difficult to get a new device into the same factor as the current Sony devices.

Because it's taken Sony several years to get Dragonball devices that small? Remember that most of the first-generation Sony PDAs were the almost the same size as the PalmOS ones (With similar-sized electronics, and a thinner shell, mainly.)

You can't 'one off' (IE: Build from scratch in an electronics shop) something as highly integrated/optomized/compressed as a current generation handheld (Be it NR70, HE330 or m515) and get it as physically small as a production model. The methods for small-run-construction are too bulky for that.

The only way they could build a ARM based PDA that small would be if they already had an entire production line tooled up and running. And if they did, don't you think they'd be saying something a little more encouraging? Or that they'd at least have released something in Japan?

No, they haven't really done this. The Oslo is probably not going to be released. So maybe Sony will be faster w/ releasing a OS 5 device. But, as for Palm, they haven't so far.

You're expectations are way too high.
you forget that the Palm OS became famous for simplicity.
PPC will now dominate this market.
The Toshiba E310, is probably almost the exact same price of the Palm M515.

Well, for $3 I would buy it ;)))))))