Comments on: Sprint Discontinues the Samsung SPH-i500

>>>>One notable exception is the Palm OS 5 Samsung SCH-i539, which is currently being offered in mainland China...

A variation of the i550/i539 has also been released in the Mexican market as well fyi!!

Also, most of the statements claiming samsung has abandoned the palmos market come from posts in the forums over at pdaphonehome. While some of the sources there are reliable, it should NOT be considered as official imo...

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Gaurav

PalmSource statement this week:

"Outlook for fiscal year 2006: We anticipate revenue will be negatively impacted on a year-over-year basis by factors such as Sony’s exit from the PDA market, the pre-pay of one licensee’s royalty minimum, and the expiration of certain prepaid royalties that were being amortized on a quarterly basis."


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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
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The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038

That's OK. We still have treo. As long as there is no WM version treo, we should be safe. Even there is Samsung PALM version smartphone, the selling number won't be that rosy and has very little effect on the PALM OS future.

Who's next to leave?? More like...WHO'S LEFT?!?

Seriously, we have Symbol (who've been coasting along in neutral for years now) and Garmin set to "any day now" announce the "strategic consolidation" of their GPS PDA iQue line mode. LG is a non-starter. So you have Palm, GSPDA, Qool and a bunch of vaporour agreements on the PalmSource site. That's it.

LOL, well Neuron you caught Surer asleep. That is a rare treat to witness.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
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The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038

I was probably hallucinating last week when I saw LG had signed up as a licensee, right?

Or even hinted at any hardware. Right now LG's involvement with Palm OS amounts to an expression of interest, that's all.

>>Or even hinted at any hardware. Right now LG's involvement with Palm OS amounts to an expression of interest, that's all.

No - they are a 'licensee'. Correct me if I am wrong in my understanding, but that means they have signed a license agreement with palmsource to use and pay for the OS. The OS agreement that PS uses is not purely baed on a price 'per unit solds' - there is a minimum amount licensees must guarantee. That is my understanding based on several articles / interviews over the few years on the subject. If things have changed (i.e. PS is desperate and so they are willing to make terms better to attract companies) then i have heard.

Sam H said:
>>LG have obtained the right to see the Palm OS source. At this stage they haven't agreed to use Palm OS in any products.

>>LG have paid a notional sum to obtain technical information about Palm OS and haven't committed themselves to using it. Hence their current involvement amounts to an expression of interest.

'LG have paid a notional sum to obtain technical information ' - umkmm they are a licensee. All licensee are not forced to release devices - but they do pay out a set sum of $$$ regardless. LG is in exactly the same position (agreement-wise) that every Palm OS licensee who ever manufacturewd devices was in initally (Sony, taopwave, etc). You state they are not a licensee and that there are no plans for devices. Maybe you have inside information that contradicts the joint PalmSource LG press release:

LG Electronics Signs Agreement with PalmSource to License Palm OS

Company to develop Palm Powered smartphones

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 6, 2005 — LG Electronics, Inc., (Korea Stock Exchange: 06657.KS) and PalmSource Inc., (NASDAQ: PSRC) provider of Palm OS®, a leading operating system powering next generation phones and mobile devices today announced that LG Electronics has signed an agreement to license Palm OS worldwide. Under terms of the agreement, LG Electronics can develop and market smartphones based on Palm OS.

"LG Electronics is pleased to have entered into this agreement with PalmSource," said Skott Ahn, executive vice president of LG Electronics, Inc. "The flexible, open and powerful nature of Palm OS is an ideal match for our industry leading mobile handsets. We believe our customers will appreciate the new Palm Powered phones we will develop and distribute."

...notice the line "LG Electronics has signed an agreement to license Palm OS worldwide."

...and the quote from LG's VP of LG electronics: "We believe our customers will appreciate the new Palm Powered phones we will develop and distribute"

You state they are not a licensee and that there are no plans for devices.

Show me where I stated either of those things.

>What kind of retarded reasoning is that? How is that in any way responsible journalism for site like PIC?

I've never said that Samsung has pulled out of Palm and I don't suggest making false statements. PIC should be in the business of reporting the facts and they have done this properly. PIC and Ryan do a great job in reporting the facts not the rumors.

Listen to my true statements:
1.) Samsung is a Palm OS licensee today. Samsung has not announced departure.
2.) Samsung has not created or announced new product for some time.
3.) The absence of new product is not much different than departure--as far as the product is concerned.

Samsung IS a Palm OS licensee; this is legally true. But there is nothing new to buy at the store. While this information is unpleasant, it is true and applies to a number of Palm OS licensees.

Why are you so offended by my pointing this out?

Although Qualcom was first to market with a plam os phone (remember the pdq brick?) and they later sold that biz to kyocera who refined it further in the form of the QCP 6035, it was samsung who was the first to get it almost right (about as right as 90% of all smartphones today) with the SPH i300. By 'right' i mean they were the first to make a usable, reasonably ergonomic, half-decent looking smartphone that had a great design, interface, and features (first palm os phone with a color screen - and virtual graffiti no less) - all way back 4 yrs ago in 2001.

Samsungs naming conventions have always been insane - now they now have a SGH i300 running wretched windows mobile smartphone (if it doesn't have touchscreen - it ain't a smartphone in my books). craptastic.

IF this is true then it proves correct what I predicted back in June:

-First LD was for PAYING beta testers (ie early adopters) to snatch up and give Palm valuable feedback and part of a limited production run (intentionally so).

-A slightly refreshed model will arrive this fall ("Palm" branding, a 5 or 6gb Microdrive, probably a larger battery, and OS 5.4.9) and will provide at least a decently better experience than the first LD.

-Yet another LifeDrive--this one with a 6 or 8gb Microdrive will arrive sometime in '06 running WinMob and/or Cobalt. It will have vastly superior hardware to the FrankenGarnet LifeDrives but will be totally shunned by the marketplace as nearly everyone will be on the smartphone market by that point.

Original LifeDrives are probably indeed already out of production but plenty of units remain in the channel to last through Christmas. I've been surprised to see how many large brick & mortar US retail chains just have one or two LDs in stock at any given time----vs. scores of Zire 31s, T|E2s etc. It's like the LD was never indended to sell in any considerable numbers--recall the delayed/late rollout and lack of widespread retail availability upon its announceent.

It could theoretically make sense:

A DRASTIC paring down of the Palm-powered line to a Treo, a LifeDrive, and a cheap Zire or Tungsten. Remember those rumors that the Zire line was being discontinued a few months back?

Or Palm might end up doing the two-OS shuffle:

Cheap Zire: Garnet
Cheap Tungsten: Garnet
Treo(s): WinMob & Garnet flavors
LifeDrive: WinMob & Garnet (assuming the LifeDrive concept stays in production--I feel they are determined to push it at least through one or two more model revisions)

Like many others, I am profoundly disappointed with Palm's latest release, the Life Drive Mobile Manager. There are many positive reviews posted here, but the majority of them are from users who are relatively new to the Palm PDA line.

As a power user, and having owned nearly every model they released, I can say with confidence that if you are a power user, you will be returning this unit within two weeks. The majority of the third party apps that I used to use are not compatible with it and that causes fatal errors and random soft resets. When the app is uninstalled, the error stops, but because the unit boots off of the hard drive memory and not flash memory as all previous models did, a soft reset takes approximately TWO MINUTES 16 SECONDS from start to being ready to use again. It is unbelievable. You should really drive down to play with one to look at the lag time BEFORE you order it here at Amazon. I promise you - it will be time well spent.

The power switch on the top of it is a slider that is made of plastic, looks very cheap and I'm guessing will last maybe 3 or 4 months tops before it needs to be replaced.

If you are thinking of buying this for watching videos and playing MP3s or as a replacement for your iPOD, keep your iPOD. Sometimes I wish Apple would buy Palm. Maybe then we'd start seeing some quality.

No cradle - a flimsy breakaway plugin to charge it.
The hard case looks sexy and sleek, but you will soon tire of having to pry it open several times a day with your thumbnail. And if you don't have any thumbnails, you're out of luck. Don't get the hard case or you'll never be able to open it.

Overall a big disappointment for me. I made the mistake of selling my T3 and putting the proceeds toward the LifeDrive. I still have time to return it - and I likely will - but am having a huge problem trying to decide what to downgrade to from the LifeDrive. T5 didn't get much better reviews and T3 is a few years old now...

If you absolutely MUST buy this unit, please wait until the LifeDrive 2 and LifeDrive 3 come out later this year or in early 2006. Remember the T, T2 and T3? My guess is the same thing is going to happen to this one. They would have saved themselves a lot of headaches if they waited until it was ready to be released as a quality product.

Now I don't know what the heck to buy to replace it. T5 maybe, but still nothing compares to the T3 thus far.

The only good thing the LifeDrive has going for it is a lot of storage and internal WiFi; HOWEVER, the version of wifi they chose to install is the slow version - it crawls; and I have no idea what all the fuss is about people being able to use this as a 4GB USB drive.

Yes, it works as an external drive. It's slow but it works. Big Hooey. Go down and get yourself a 1 GB USB flash RAM drive (tiny) if you want that level of portability. For me as a longtime Palm user, the ability to use this as an external drive is NOT a huge deal. I've been using USB flash drives for years to do what this does.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance - and primarily the reason why I am returning the unit - is the lag time switching between apps. You click the stylus on an app and since it is no longer booting from the flash drive, there is a two second noticable lag time before the app launches. It's ridiculous. They say that putting a hard drive in a PDA is an achievement that will allow for a great deal of things to come.

It would be. If they had left the unit booting to flash ram and used the 4 GB for storage only. Big mistake. Bad Developer. No cookie for you.

This crashes as often as a PocketPC, but it is much slower. That's the best way I can describe it.

Hope this helps!

Adam Boettiger

With reviews like this on the Amazon sales page, and if this is indicative of the real return rate, P1 may have been forced to discontinue, due to the fundamental design error of using a HDD as main memory.

Surur

Big mistake. Bad Developer. No cookie for you.

Despite being a cliche, this line just cracked me up. I can't figure why.

Anyway, Palm is now saying that the Amazon listing is in error, and that the LD isn't being discontinued.

The Amazon listing is an error.

Darn. I had gotten all worked up about nothin'.

I'm still waiting for the mythical "color HandEra."

WOW! 2 years later, an update on a topic. Honestly, I'd thought Palm had already discontinued the LifeDrive. Talk about a device with a huge amount of potential, but poor execution.

Oh well, goodbye!

All good things...

So, I wonder where Palm buried all the left over Lifedrives?

... maybe next to all the millions of E.T. Atari 2600 in the New Mexico desert?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rt_3_bQVJU

I saw my last LD at retail back in March or February or so.

The closest Compusa had an open box clearance one for quite a while.

I knew it was doomed when Palm rebranded the last batch of Treo 650s last year alongside the Tungsten E2. When the LD was still wearing the old PalmOne clothes months later, I knew it was a goner.

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