4 ms·

PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly. Armlets? Extremely hard to writ

PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly. Armlets? Extremely hard to write simple native code or to port apps and games from other platforms. No file system, a custom and rather slow database instead… But they had tons of documents on how to follow their UI/UX guidelines. Basically, they had no real kernel upon which building an OS, they tried anyway and it was a mess of epic proportions.

lproven 4y ago
> PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. You're not wrong, but this skips over an even bigger mistake. Arguably 2 in fact. The kernel of the original 68K PalmOS was, I believe, bought in, just as Apple bought in a Pixo OS for the iPod: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Pixo https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Pixo PalmOS ran on top of the AMX 68000 RTOS kernel from Kadak: http://www.kadak.com/rtos/rtos.htm http://www.kadak.com/rtos/rtos.htm When Palm moved to ARM chips, it chose not to licence the Arm version of AMX from Kadak. It considered adopting the Symbian kernel: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/13/ms_out_in_cold_as/ https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/13/ms_out_in_cold_as/ ... but in the end the deal didn't happen. This was a huge mistake. Symbian was already the smartphone leader and supported multiprocessors, multimedia, and all sorts of fancy features, while being smaller and far less resource-hungry than contemporary rivals such as WinCE or the then-huge Linux. Symbian originally shipped on a circa 8MHz Arm device with 8MB of RAM and no swap: full GUI, full multitasking, Internet stack, etc. No Linux could run usefully on that level of kit. Symbian already supported GSM phone stacks, Bluetooth, Wifi, all that stuff. It also supported pluggable UI layers, and had about 3 or 4 on sale at its peak: UIQ, a stylus- or touchscreen-driven UI from Japan for keyboardless phones; Series 60, for keypad-driven phones; Series 80, for landscape-orientation touchscreen phones; Series 90, for QWERTY-keyboard-driven PDAs. Adding another for Palm, with a Palm UI and Graffiti, would not have been a stretch. It would have been a great fit. Palm decided to write its own instead. Probably it was cheaper. Probably as Palm was mainly American it didn't appreciate that there were tens of millions of happy European and Japanese users with Symbian smartphones that they loved. I was using 32-bit Arm-powered smart devices with the Symbian kernel a decade before the iPhone, and ones running the direct ancestor of Symbian in the early 1990s. This was commercial suicide #1. Palm had no multitasking, little media support, and a single-tasking 68000 OS ported to Arm. It was very uncompetitive, but it's all Palm owners knew so they thought it was fine and liked it. But it did have a comeback attempt. Palm ended up under the same ownership as Be and the core BeOS team, and it eventually came up with an in-house multitasking media-enabled networked PalmOS, based on BeOS tech, called Cobalt: https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html This was commercial suicide #2. Cobalt looked good but it was too little too late and as far as I know it never shipped on a single retail device.
brookst 4y ago
All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  Better than what? What was the competition back then?
  - jadinvt 4y ago
    Day planner, paper, hipster pda: https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster... [edit, another e.g.]
  - brookst 4y ago
    People have kept day planners and contact books since forever. Just being electronic isn’t enough of a value prop.
- muyuu 4y ago
  Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here. Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough. I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables. The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management. Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking. It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)
ubermonkey 4y ago
Palm was killed by their inability to evolve the platform in the face of quantum leaps from other players -- but that same thing caught out pretty much every other mobile platform of the era. In 2004, the Treo 650 was as good as it got. I LOVED mine, and there was really no other player in the market that could truly best it until Apple landed with the iPhone. (And I say this having sampled best-of-breed Windows Mobile stuff in that era -- the HTC hardware was slick, but WinMo was useless and incredibly dumb.)
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  RIM and Palm suffered the same kind of huge technical debt on the low-level kernel stuff. They basically started with something very crude that barely did the job, and built stacks on top. But they had nice frontends, nice hardware, especially the Sony Clié series was quite ahead of its time hardware wise.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    RIM's sins were much more serious. Their devices were designed in a time when having the horsepower to actually run a mail client on them wasn't possible, and so they were dependent on an intermediate server. Using a Blackberry in the absence of BES (and an Exchange server) was pretty weak sauce. Palm, OTOH, had a real platform that worked on its own. My Treo could talk directly to my ISP's IMAP server, something Blackberries of the era couldn't do. My Treo made it easy to separate work and personal mail. My Treo's PIM apps were superior to the Blackberry's. Also, you and I apparently had VERY different experiences with the Clie line. I had one. It was physically interesting but insanely fragile, and for SOME reason needed different sync software than Palm (or Handspring) branded Palms.
    - stephc_int13 4y ago
      I was creating software (mostly games) for a wide range of handheld devices at the time. When you're doing that you can quite easily get an idea of the weaknesses and strengths of the platform, and I can tell you that PalmOS was quite weak but almost OK at the very beginning but it quickly deteriorated and at the end they could simply not push it forward at all. Sony did a good job considering, but they simply bet on the wrong horse. To be honest, Android also started in a very weak state, not the same kind of mess that PalmOS was, but it was riddled with over-engineering and absurd design choices, but with a huge effort they managed to fix the worst parts and still push it forward. I was surprised they could pull it off.
causality0 4y ago
Yet somehow using it was far more pleasurable than Pocket PC. I could certainly do more things with my beastly 640x480 624mhz ipaq, but everything about the UX was better on Palm. Apps saved state automatically. I didn't have to open a start menu to launch something and I didn't have to open two menus and manually close them because Windows Mobile doesn't close anything when you hit the X button. The buttons, d-pads, and styli all felt better, and the screen didn't waste 20% of its real estate with two giant useless buttons across the bottom of every app.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Yeah, it's a shame, Microsoft had the better kernel and SDK (by a long shot) but their UX was crude and relied too much on old Windows paradigms. They should have kept the kernel and ditched the Shell to build something tailored for the form factor and usage.
  - causality0 4y ago
    They're still addicted to marketing-first design. Imagine what users before 20110 would say if you told them every PC now comes with a splash screen that doesn't do anything that you have click past to then get to the login screen.
jacknews 4y ago
IMHO Palm was killed by endless M&A activity and other finance shenanigans, which resulted in a lack of long term focus and stability to migrate from the original cramped architecture. And then iphone's multitouch UI drove the final nail.
- indymike 4y ago
  I had three different palm phones (a Palm and two Kyoceras) and a WindowsCE based MDA before I got my first modern smartphone (A Tmobile G1). I think the final nail was simple hubris. Everyone thought their established market position and share would be enough to defend. The iPhone wasn't viewed as a PDA by most incumbents... it was a weird iPod phone targeting consumers. Android was starting at zero, and I think there was a lot of belief that Palm, RIM and Microsoft would have something way better once their touch screen options came out. A lot of that belief was fueled by the importance of enterprise groupware to corporate buyers at the time. I remember having developer reps from Palm and MS try to talk us (I owned a small dev shop at the time) out of looking at Android and iOS because the next version was going to kill them both. It turned out easier to use, cloud services (Google apps, iCloud), maps+GPS (G1 had it, iPhone had it soon after), and much better media player features were simply more desirable than enterprise groupware. It also turned out that as cell phone usage normalized, a lot of employers stopped providing cell phones to employees... mostly driven by unlimited talk+text+internet plans... which really favored the non-enterprise-y Androids and iPhones.
hedgehog 4y ago
Bad developer experience might have contributed but I think the primary cause was the same as what killed Windows Mobile and Symbian: The iPhone reset the bar for user experience and at the same time Apple changed handset + app distribution models, Palm failed to meet the situation. Google figured it out, scrapped the Android UX, and managed to be #2. With the high per-platform cost of mobile dev there's apparently not room for more than two so even Microsoft couldn't catch up.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched. In fact most players had divested the market at this stage. The PocketPC team was a skeleton and Symbian was being eaten from inside by competing internal projects. Apple had a highway.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago
    >PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched. It was declining but not dead. Palm's swan song, Palm Centro, released in 2007, was a big success. They sold at least 2 million units[1]. According to AdMob, in terms of web traffic, at some point it was the second most popular smartphone in the US (7th worldwide)[2]. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080805094357/http://blog.palm.com/palm/2008/07/over-2-million.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080805094357/http://blog.palm.... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080913073944/http://www.admob.com/marketing/pdf/mobile_metrics_aug_08.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20080913073944/http://www.admob....
    - hedgehog 4y ago
      Exactly, good brand and decent market position making the situation potentially salvageable with better strategy. Look at Apple around ten years earlier, classic MacOS and the beige boxes and a business bleeding cash. Palm has the Pre on the way, that was a really nice device but delivered too late and without a good enough app strategy.
wmf 4y ago
They copied all those mistakes from the Mac, even though by that time Apple already knew those decisions were mistakes.

lproven 4y ago

> PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. You're not wrong, but this skips over an even bigger mistake. Arguably 2 in fact. The kernel of the original 68K PalmOS was, I believe, bought in, just as Apple bought in a Pixo OS for the iPod: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Pixo https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Pixo PalmOS ran on top of the AMX 68000 RTOS kernel from Kadak: http://www.kadak.com/rtos/rtos.htm http://www.kadak.com/rtos/rtos.htm When Palm moved to ARM chips, it chose not to licence the Arm version of AMX from Kadak. It considered adopting the Symbian kernel: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/13/ms_out_in_cold_as/ https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/13/ms_out_in_cold_as/ ... but in the end the deal didn't happen. This was a huge mistake. Symbian was already the smartphone leader and supported multiprocessors, multimedia, and all sorts of fancy features, while being smaller and far less resource-hungry than contemporary rivals such as WinCE or the then-huge Linux. Symbian originally shipped on a circa 8MHz Arm device with 8MB of RAM and no swap: full GUI, full multitasking, Internet stack, etc. No Linux could run usefully on that level of kit. Symbian already supported GSM phone stacks, Bluetooth, Wifi, all that stuff. It also supported pluggable UI layers, and had about 3 or 4 on sale at its peak: UIQ, a stylus- or touchscreen-driven UI from Japan for keyboardless phones; Series 60, for keypad-driven phones; Series 80, for landscape-orientation touchscreen phones; Series 90, for QWERTY-keyboard-driven PDAs. Adding another for Palm, with a Palm UI and Graffiti, would not have been a stretch. It would have been a great fit. Palm decided to write its own instead. Probably it was cheaper. Probably as Palm was mainly American it didn't appreciate that there were tens of millions of happy European and Japanese users with Symbian smartphones that they loved. I was using 32-bit Arm-powered smart devices with the Symbian kernel a decade before the iPhone, and ones running the direct ancestor of Symbian in the early 1990s. This was commercial suicide #1. Palm had no multitasking, little media support, and a single-tasking 68000 OS ported to Arm. It was very uncompetitive, but it's all Palm owners knew so they thought it was fine and liked it. But it did have a comeback attempt. Palm ended up under the same ownership as Be and the core BeOS team, and it eventually came up with an in-house multitasking media-enabled networked PalmOS, based on BeOS tech, called Cobalt: https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html This was commercial suicide #2. Cobalt looked good but it was too little too late and as far as I know it never shipped on a single retail device.

brookst 4y ago

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.

canadianfella 4y ago
Better than what? What was the competition back then?
- jadinvt 4y ago
  Day planner, paper, hipster pda: https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster... [edit, another e.g.]
- brookst 4y ago
  People have kept day planners and contact books since forever. Just being electronic isn’t enough of a value prop.
muyuu 4y ago
Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here. Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough. I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables. The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management. Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking. It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)

ubermonkey 4y ago

Palm was killed by their inability to evolve the platform in the face of quantum leaps from other players -- but that same thing caught out pretty much every other mobile platform of the era. In 2004, the Treo 650 was as good as it got. I LOVED mine, and there was really no other player in the market that could truly best it until Apple landed with the iPhone. (And I say this having sampled best-of-breed Windows Mobile stuff in that era -- the HTC hardware was slick, but WinMo was useless and incredibly dumb.)

stephc_int13 4y ago
RIM and Palm suffered the same kind of huge technical debt on the low-level kernel stuff. They basically started with something very crude that barely did the job, and built stacks on top. But they had nice frontends, nice hardware, especially the Sony Clié series was quite ahead of its time hardware wise.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  RIM's sins were much more serious. Their devices were designed in a time when having the horsepower to actually run a mail client on them wasn't possible, and so they were dependent on an intermediate server. Using a Blackberry in the absence of BES (and an Exchange server) was pretty weak sauce. Palm, OTOH, had a real platform that worked on its own. My Treo could talk directly to my ISP's IMAP server, something Blackberries of the era couldn't do. My Treo made it easy to separate work and personal mail. My Treo's PIM apps were superior to the Blackberry's. Also, you and I apparently had VERY different experiences with the Clie line. I had one. It was physically interesting but insanely fragile, and for SOME reason needed different sync software than Palm (or Handspring) branded Palms.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    I was creating software (mostly games) for a wide range of handheld devices at the time. When you're doing that you can quite easily get an idea of the weaknesses and strengths of the platform, and I can tell you that PalmOS was quite weak but almost OK at the very beginning but it quickly deteriorated and at the end they could simply not push it forward at all. Sony did a good job considering, but they simply bet on the wrong horse. To be honest, Android also started in a very weak state, not the same kind of mess that PalmOS was, but it was riddled with over-engineering and absurd design choices, but with a huge effort they managed to fix the worst parts and still push it forward. I was surprised they could pull it off.

causality0 4y ago

Yet somehow using it was far more pleasurable than Pocket PC. I could certainly do more things with my beastly 640x480 624mhz ipaq, but everything about the UX was better on Palm. Apps saved state automatically. I didn't have to open a start menu to launch something and I didn't have to open two menus and manually close them because Windows Mobile doesn't close anything when you hit the X button. The buttons, d-pads, and styli all felt better, and the screen didn't waste 20% of its real estate with two giant useless buttons across the bottom of every app.

stephc_int13 4y ago
Yeah, it's a shame, Microsoft had the better kernel and SDK (by a long shot) but their UX was crude and relied too much on old Windows paradigms. They should have kept the kernel and ditched the Shell to build something tailored for the form factor and usage.
- causality0 4y ago
  They're still addicted to marketing-first design. Imagine what users before 20110 would say if you told them every PC now comes with a splash screen that doesn't do anything that you have click past to then get to the login screen.

jacknews 4y ago

IMHO Palm was killed by endless M&A activity and other finance shenanigans, which resulted in a lack of long term focus and stability to migrate from the original cramped architecture. And then iphone's multitouch UI drove the final nail.

indymike 4y ago
I had three different palm phones (a Palm and two Kyoceras) and a WindowsCE based MDA before I got my first modern smartphone (A Tmobile G1). I think the final nail was simple hubris. Everyone thought their established market position and share would be enough to defend. The iPhone wasn't viewed as a PDA by most incumbents... it was a weird iPod phone targeting consumers. Android was starting at zero, and I think there was a lot of belief that Palm, RIM and Microsoft would have something way better once their touch screen options came out. A lot of that belief was fueled by the importance of enterprise groupware to corporate buyers at the time. I remember having developer reps from Palm and MS try to talk us (I owned a small dev shop at the time) out of looking at Android and iOS because the next version was going to kill them both. It turned out easier to use, cloud services (Google apps, iCloud), maps+GPS (G1 had it, iPhone had it soon after), and much better media player features were simply more desirable than enterprise groupware. It also turned out that as cell phone usage normalized, a lot of employers stopped providing cell phones to employees... mostly driven by unlimited talk+text+internet plans... which really favored the non-enterprise-y Androids and iPhones.

hedgehog 4y ago

Bad developer experience might have contributed but I think the primary cause was the same as what killed Windows Mobile and Symbian: The iPhone reset the bar for user experience and at the same time Apple changed handset + app distribution models, Palm failed to meet the situation. Google figured it out, scrapped the Android UX, and managed to be #2. With the high per-platform cost of mobile dev there's apparently not room for more than two so even Microsoft couldn't catch up.

stephc_int13 4y ago
PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched. In fact most players had divested the market at this stage. The PocketPC team was a skeleton and Symbian was being eaten from inside by competing internal projects. Apple had a highway.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago
  >PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched. It was declining but not dead. Palm's swan song, Palm Centro, released in 2007, was a big success. They sold at least 2 million units[1]. According to AdMob, in terms of web traffic, at some point it was the second most popular smartphone in the US (7th worldwide)[2]. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080805094357/http://blog.palm.com/palm/2008/07/over-2-million.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080805094357/http://blog.palm.... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080913073944/http://www.admob.com/marketing/pdf/mobile_metrics_aug_08.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20080913073944/http://www.admob....
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    Exactly, good brand and decent market position making the situation potentially salvageable with better strategy. Look at Apple around ten years earlier, classic MacOS and the beige boxes and a business bleeding cash. Palm has the Pre on the way, that was a really nice device but delivered too late and without a good enough app strategy.

wmf 4y ago

They copied all those mistakes from the Mac, even though by that time Apple already knew those decisions were mistakes.