Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Palm, not dead, innovating!
I have been a Palm device owner since 1998. I have owned 4 different models and I am now on my 5th, a Palm T|X. However, I have to admit, I haven't used it much lately as it has no phone capabilities and most of the other functionality is in my ordinary GSM phone.
I have tried to develop for the device, but failed misserably as I don't like programming in C and the available J2ME version for Palm OS was misserable.
It has been quite quiet about Palm the last years or so. They tried to introduce the netbook like phone-extension / laptop, which wasn't a hit in any way. The market they where aiming at was way to narrow. Since then nothing has happened, until now.
At CES they introduced "Palm Pre". Pressrelease here, product info here, demo here, good coverage article from Engadget here.
It's a complete game changer. iPhone looks cool, but Apple has a terrible attitude towars developers and their customers I think. Google Android is also interesting but they don't have the experience of mobile devices, although they are aiming at the same future as Palm: the web OS.
Everything in their new OS is based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the kind of vision Google has with Chrome. But they also have hooks into the raw OS from these web applications. It will be very interesting to build GWT applications for this platform! 3D graphics aren't possible in this first version, but I guess it will come later.
Palm has also proved their experience in building mobile devices from scratch. The device is faster than anything else on the market according to what I have seen and read. And it has all those things you want it to have: GPS, 802.11 b/g WiFi, slide out keyboard, SMS, MMS, 3.5 mm headphone jack, USB 2.0, bluethooth, 3 MP camera.
Do I have to say that I want one?
I have tried to develop for the device, but failed misserably as I don't like programming in C and the available J2ME version for Palm OS was misserable.
It has been quite quiet about Palm the last years or so. They tried to introduce the netbook like phone-extension / laptop, which wasn't a hit in any way. The market they where aiming at was way to narrow. Since then nothing has happened, until now.
At CES they introduced "Palm Pre". Pressrelease here, product info here, demo here, good coverage article from Engadget here.
It's a complete game changer. iPhone looks cool, but Apple has a terrible attitude towars developers and their customers I think. Google Android is also interesting but they don't have the experience of mobile devices, although they are aiming at the same future as Palm: the web OS.
Everything in their new OS is based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the kind of vision Google has with Chrome. But they also have hooks into the raw OS from these web applications. It will be very interesting to build GWT applications for this platform! 3D graphics aren't possible in this first version, but I guess it will come later.
Palm has also proved their experience in building mobile devices from scratch. The device is faster than anything else on the market according to what I have seen and read. And it has all those things you want it to have: GPS, 802.11 b/g WiFi, slide out keyboard, SMS, MMS, 3.5 mm headphone jack, USB 2.0, bluethooth, 3 MP camera.
Do I have to say that I want one?
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