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RePalm

dmitry.gr

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Re: RePalm

#91

Post by indymike »

jacknews wrote: post #44
stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

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,…

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.

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.

Re: RePalm

#92

Post by Lammy »

tgmatt wrote: post #31
ckz wrote: post #7

Side note: Dmitry (creator of RePalm) is a treasure and his impact on the Palm community cannot be understated. He has a world-class depth of knowledge of the inner workings of these things and is one of the key players in extending PalmOS device capabilities today (patching ROMs, new hardware, etc.). He also contributes regularly to apps the community is developing, teaching us hobby devs new tricks. :) As someone w…

Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did but better?

They don’t spy on you

Re: RePalm

#93

Post by ubermonkey »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #33
ubermonkey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mobi…

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.

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.

Re: RePalm

#94

Post by ubermonkey »

deergomoo wrote: post #74
ubermonkey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mobi…

> the HTC hardware was slick, but WinMo was useless and incredibly dumb You’re not kidding. I had a HTC HD2 and the hardware was very futuristic-feeling (one of the first phones with the original Qualcomm Snapdragon, and a “huge” 4.3” screen that my friends gently mocked for being ridiculously large), but the software experience was leagues behind iOS and Android, despite they themselves being in relative infancy. It…

My HTC was branded an 8525 by AT&T. I think that means it was a Tytn in other markets.

When it was introduced, there was no iOS yet. And even so, it sucked out loud compared to the 800 pound gorillas of the era, Palm and (in full deployments) Blackberry. WinMo was SO DUMB. I remember discovering the hard way that if you left the browser in the foreground, on-page refresh directives (like CNN used to use) would still be honored even if the device's screen was off. Result? Dead battery in no time.

WinMo also had no way to deal with IMAP mail natively. It was Exchange or POP unless you bought an aftermarket mail client.

True fact: I actually didn't text much until I got an iPhone, so I can't speak to texting on the 8525. I think lots of people my age only came to texting later, whereas if you're like 10 years younger than I am (say, born in 1980 instead of 1970) you probably texted on flip phones in high school or whatever.

Re: RePalm

#95

Post by tgmatt »

ckz wrote: post #55
tgmatt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did but better?

A totally valid question! I did adopt the smartphone for many, many years. My father had a gen-1 iPhone which captured my imagination. At the same time, I've also never really let them run my life. I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it. I do own some, but they don't get used for much (browser-on-the-go, mostly).…

That seems reasonable. I did pick up an old colour screen CompaQ a number of years ago for nostalgia reasons but haven't really fiddled with it much yet. I really should..

Re: RePalm

#98

Post by dmitrygr »

muyuu wrote: post #84
squarefoot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As much as I love retro stuff I see no point in reviving Palm. I see a big opportunity should rePalm be ported to generic low cost embedded hardware. ESP32(|ARM|Risc-V) board+LCD+LTE module, all costing a dozen bucks each or less, would make the basis for a powerful dumbphone for when manufacturers will cease any production of them. I would personally love to have such a device. Broadly speaking, PalmOS had filesys…

why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-compatible though? at most, an emulation subsystem might make sense, but having all things including new development run in a Palm-compatible system right now makes no sense. Note that it wouldn't even be a dumbphone by definition if it has an OS running arbitrarily installed software on it.

> why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-compatible though

Not having to design and explain API is a plus

Re: RePalm

#99

Post by dmitrygr »

muyuu wrote: post #68
selfhoster11 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeDOS brought MS-DOS back from the dead. Was it useless? In my opinion, far from it. Yes, Palm is useless and archaic of networked features are your #1 use case for a PDA (smartphone) and there’s little use reviving it. However, if you care about old Palm games, or about efficiently organising your life with minimum distractions, then IMO not many modern devices will beat a Palm OS device. Analogously to MS-DOS, th…

FreeDOS is exactly what I was describing. Makes sense to use that old software, but not to actually develop for these days. Because you'd be imposing weird anachronistic restrictions on yourself for no good reason.

> Because you'd be imposing weird anachronistic restrictions on yourself for no good reason.

Learning to count every byte has value today too, and this is practice in that skill

Re: RePalm

#100

Post by dmitrygr »

e-_pusher wrote: post #88
dmitrygr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working on it. Standby. Sadly might be months. Hobby project takes back seat to job and life…

What a teaser! Can't wait to see it. Anything you can share right now about what you are building?

I wired up higher density screen support into the OS's blitter, so a modern very-hi-dpi screen with smooth fonts works. Utf8 support is a work in progress (palm did not have it). Modern wifi is easily provided by an ESP32, and a modern-ish browser engine is being ported (slowly)
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