Comments on: Palm Appoints Bill Coleman to Board of Directors

Hi Guys,

Yeah - I still think there's mileage in Palm's third business comments.

Could it be that their third business is the development of lean, highly optimised Linux based platforms for mobile computing?

i.e.Where the Linux core is wrapped in a new bespoke user-interface, making the internal core truely insignificant and transparent. Additional layers provide backwards compatibility with Garnet and 68K apps, provide user-friendly networking, telephony, multimedia and Grafiti 1/2 support. Scalable fonts and multi-tasking are inherited from the underlying Linux GUI layers and the GhostScript engine is put to good use as a Palm OS helper app, to render PDFs for display.

Linux would also open the gates for Palm to incorporate USB-host capabilities in their devices, allowing their devices to easily access standard USB hardware classes - such as the Mass-storage devices and keyboards.

Palm once used a slogan along the lines of... "Palm... the really connected organisor" ; perhaps this is a way to take that compelling concept to a level that is desireable today.

KultiVator

SeldomVisitor wrote:
There is little utility to be backward compatible with any version of PalmOS.

There's a significant short-term utility of shepherding the faithful over to the new platform. Once they are there those that do install applications will want to get the best experience and install ones written against the new APIs so the backward compatibility will be less important.

That was my original thinking anyway. Now that we are faced with the prospect of Garnet emulation being a shared environment across ALP and Palm's Linux OS there's an interesting opportunity, though. Palm OS Garnet becomes a "cross-platform" API--one that is less powerful than a native Linux API, to be sure, but vastly more powerful than other cross-platform APIs like Java and Flash Lite. Don't forget about StyleTap, which has extended that API to Windows Mobile. It probably wouldn't be hard to port StyleTap to Symbian, too. Unlike the current situation where a bug in a 3rd party app can crash the whole system, Garnet running in emulated mode only crashes the emulator, so it can provides some sandboxing that the operators may appreciate. Garnet's limitations could be seen as acceptable if this emulation was deployed across enough devices (as seen by the popularity of Java MIDP, which is far more limiting than Garnet).

The critical thing (a problem that needs to be tackled with *any* mobile computing platform) is that ACCESS/PalmSource/Palm, etc need to greatly improve how people discover the third party software that supports the things they do. Right now I agree with Michael Mace that given a few minutes of time someone who knows the field well can talk to most people and show them apps that they would really want to use, but there needs to be a just-out-of-the-box discovery experience (on the device or maybe even the PC) that queries the user on the things they do and makes intelligent suggestions of stuff to try. Devices should come with coupons that allow free download of a certain number of applications to get new users hooked. These are the kind of things that will do the most to make mobile computing take off. The APIs are less important.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog

In a perverse way, Palm developers could almost benefit from the next version of Palm OS *not* being compatible with existing Palm applications--as long as the platform is good and they release it on some good devices. This will force a lot of the faithful who've had their Palm devices "stocked" for years to buy new software to replace the old.

I don't think that's where things will go, but it's not an unthinkable option for Palm.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog