Palm Cobalt and Mac OS X

[flyfish29]

Originally posted by Poff
I do hope Apple will provide full iSync support for it then. If so, this is a good thing, imo.

I tend to disagree...the bad press the Apple Mac will get from this could be very devestating...even though there are third part apps avail to sync, it many eyes, all they will hear on the news or hear at the store is Palm doesn't make OS for the mac anymore! Very negative press and couuld really hurt apple with "professionals" who use Palm OS and want to use mac or already use a mac.

 

[stoid]

Well, after SJ announced to the press that he saw absolutely no future in the PDA market, and basically said that making an Apple PDA would be jumping into an already sinking ship, I really can't blame Palm for being a little miffed.

 

[deejemon]

*

 

[Photorun]

let 'em die

Palm's earnings have stunk up the joint and overall they've lost a lot of market. With this move I hope they crash and burn, I feel sorry for all the employees who lose their jobs, but hey, it was likely a management decision. Bye Palm, I'll laugh at your funeral.

 

[peterjhill]

Steve Jobs is smart to stay out of the PDA business. I have a palm. I never use it. Sure it is instant on, but in the summer, I don't want to carry my iPod, my Laptop, and a palm pilot. My iPod is great for contacts and calendar information. And serious things can go right into my laptop.

I would buy an iPaq way before I would buy another Palm. But, hey, that's me, YMMV

 

[MikeAtari]

UnProfessional

The true mark of an unprofessional CTO, is to give away 20 million users, simply because he's too lazy to find a cross platform coding solution.

There is Java, Basic, and C++ cross platform solutions out there. I wonder how he justifies these lost future sales to the CEO or the Board of Directors.

 

[jrothman]

Wow -- a lot of irrelevant pie-in-the-sky nonesense in this forum. This is bad, and 'screw you, Palm, I want my imaginary Apple iSlate' is not a meaningful response. On the macro level, this is really bad for Apple in the enterprise, where people really do use PDAs. The idea that 'nobody uses them' that Steve seems to have comes, IMO, from the fact that he doesn't think in the business space, where everybody uses them -- and where PocketPCs serve as big arguments for using PCs. This makes every heavy PDA user locked-in to the PC platform until they give up their PDA.
<p>
The iPod will never be a PDA: where's the input? the external devices? the third-party software? Parachute is a far cry from Documents-To-Go. And though the P900 is a very cool device, it is hugely expensive. A Palm is $100; Symbian phones and Treos are way more expensive. You can't really blame Palm -- the reason there are so many apparently active users in their forums is that Palm sync has never worked well under OS X, is my guess. Apple has failed to facilitate them and has never taken iSync seriously for PDAs.
<p>
I hope this is a wake-up call to Apple to seriously develop iSync and the iPIM applications, and to make them robust alternative to Palm desktop. Improvements have been needed for a long while now, and lack of a Microsofot Exchange-like app is a large part of what keeps companies from adopting Mac OS. Let's see some changes in software.

 

[clonenode]

Maybe Palm knows something we don't... like an Apple branded Palm device in the works that will use Apple specific software.

 

[luiss]

No Palm Desktop? But what about iSync?

Do mac users even care about the 'Desktop' in Palm desktop. All I care about is the HotSync Manager.
Hopefully Apple can supply the sync functionality with iSync in the future.

 

[BwanaZulia]

It is not about the Palm Desktop, it is about hotsyncing. Apple made iSync but it still needs to have the Hotsynce manager of Palms in order to run.

Palm should move to SyncML and make it an open standard so they can get out of the conduit business (which has no money). If they open it up, there will be Linux drivers, OSX drivers, etc.

If you think about the data that is sycning, why can't it just be open standards.

- Contacts should be Vcards
- Memos should be XML based
- Calendars events should be iCal (forgot the open standard for that, know it is XML based)
- Todos should be built into the calendar or some other XML based standard. vToDo or ToDoML.

Right now, all of my extra data in vCard standard that AddressBook uses goes nowhere on my Palm.

BZ

 

[jshea]

Originally posted by BwanaZulia
Don't forget to drop Palm a note... I just gave them a little of my mind.

BZ

http://www.palmone.com/us/support/contact/email_support.html

This address is actually for PalmOne, which is the hardware side of the business. I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the Palm Desktop software is made by PalmSource. I filed this as a bug:

Palm One Developer Bug Report

I also complained to PalmOne, as I own one of their devices.

 

[MikeL]

Re: We need the iSlate NOW!

Originally posted by lajocaab
Device Size:
8” x 5.0” x .65” (±15oz)
± 1/2 size of a 17” PowerBook
± 2x size of a Palm T3 or an iPod
± size of a DVD movie case
small enough to hold with one hand by the bezel (.5” bezel on the sides)

You wrote all that up and didn't even pay attention to the one single most obvious lesson there was to be learned from Newton?!

It doesn't matter what a PDA does if it doesn't fit in your pocket!

 

[G4scott]

This just goes to show how stupid Palm really is. You can't just ignore the Mac platform these days like you could in the 90's. You should at least offer basic Mac support for your products. Heck, even Canon points out that the FireWire port on their newest printer is specifically designed for Mac users. Palm needs to seriously reconsider this move, because they'll for sure get tons of complaints about it.

 

[iJed]

Its time for an Apple PDA now. If you look at the alternatives you realise just how terrible they are...

 

[hughdogg]

Originally posted by deejemon
Why should any Mac user ever buy a Palm device ever again?

Because unfortunately some of us Mac users also have to (are chained to) work on PC's at the office. And as much as I'd like to buy an Apple PDA, or Super iPod with PDA functions, or the iSlate as mentioned earlier, I don't think it would work with both my home Mac, and my work PC, like my Tungsten T2 does very nicely. (See iPod - one or the other, but not both - and if by some chance the device did work with both, the Mac community would be screaming about how stupid it was for Apple to do that, because it doesn't drive Mac computer sales). And I don't want to buy a PocketPC, for a multitide of reason - sync problems, Office docs losing formatting, wmv, etc.

I agree with the general concensus that it is really unfortunate that PalmOne doesn't want to continue Mac development. Maybe they could release their existing Mac software to the open source community, and let them continue development. Would seem like a good fit given Apple's committment to open source software.

Cheers,
hughdogg

 

[AirUncleP]

Hey Palm...er excuse me...PalmOne...Nice stock price. I believe the IPO price went up to $130 and now it's at $10.

 

[Awimoway]

Originally posted by jrothman
Wow -- a lot of irrelevant pie-in-the-sky nonesense in this forum. This is bad, and 'screw you, Palm, I want my imaginary Apple iSlate' is not a meaningful response. On the macro level, this is really bad for Apple in the enterprise, where people really do use PDAs. The idea that 'nobody uses them' that Steve seems to have comes, IMO, from the fact that he doesn't think in the business space, where everybody uses them -- and where PocketPCs serve as big arguments for using PCs. This makes every heavy PDA user locked-in to the PC platform until they give up their PDA.
<p>
The iPod will never be a PDA: where's the input? the external devices? the third-party software? Parachute is a far cry from Documents-To-Go. And though the P900 is a very cool device, it is hugely expensive. A Palm is $100; Symbian phones and Treos are way more expensive. You can't really blame Palm -- the reason there are so many apparently active users in their forums is that Palm sync has never worked well under OS X, is my guess. Apple has failed to facilitate them and has never taken iSync seriously for PDAs.
<p>
I hope this is a wake-up call to Apple to seriously develop iSync and the iPIM applications, and to make them robust alternative to Palm desktop. Improvements have been needed for a long while now, and lack of a Microsofot Exchange-like app is a large part of what keeps companies from adopting Mac OS. Let's see some changes in software.

Thank you for the well-stated dose of reality.

The really sad thing is that most of Palm's original employees and creators were former Apple employees and shared in the Silicon Valley-based battle for alternatives to the Redmond monolith.

But once again Apple's too-small market share gets it in trouble as another major developer decides it's not worth the expense of developing for it. Although iSync does support syncing to Palm PDAs, it requires Palm Desktop, and although Apple is often content to let third-party companies provide necessary enterprise solutions (consider how they let Virtual PC slip through their fingers), my hope is that in order to maintain iSync's functionality, Apple itself will provide a solution. Because telling prospective enterprise customers that they have to pay $40 more to use the company PDA is really unacceptable.

I, for one, will probably continue to use Palm OS devices because it's still the best PDA out there. But it's just one more reason why I feel like I pay an almost unreasonably high premium for the privilege of using a Mac.

 

[rpkrajewski]

Some people are jumping to conclusions

Gee, if Apple is going to stay out of the Palm-like PDA business, that doesn't mean they wouldn't support Palm Synching. In fact, I think that they'd want to still support Palm synching, just like they don't make mobile phones but strongly support them in iSync (and Address Book even, where you can send and received SMSes).

My wife is using iSync with her Handspring Visor, and it is pain to set up because of the need to install the Palm desktop which is showing its age and is only really there for synching purposes. It works just fine though.

Apple might as well take over the whole assembly on the PC side if Palm isn't going to support it. These things would help:

- Palm moving to SyncML
- Palm giving access Apple access to the Mac Palm Desktop source code so they can do standard synching, and keep support for 3rd parry conduits as well.

 

[Lord Bodak]

I upgraded from an m100 to a Tungsten T last year, and now I'm glad I did, since it looks like my future options are pretty slim.

Palm Desktop for Mac was really a piece of junk anyway. But throwing away a whole class of users is stupid, especially when your primary competition in the market is Microsoft and you KNOW they aren't gonna do us any favors.

 

[johnpaul191]

iSync works fine on my Mac

but iSync still currently requires palm desktop/conduit manager to set up the hotsyncing and to upload files to the palm, right? i have to be honest, i barely use my palm these days.... having all my phone numbers in my phone and i have been using the phone's calendar. if bitPim could isync i would be set i guess.
then again there is a reason i never upgraded my Palm past my IIIxe. i bought that as my 4th palm pilot when it first came out. since then i have felt like there was less need for me to have one, since it always seems a decent (palm?) smart phone was right around the corner. i guess since my phone can store an address book, calendar, memopad (to do list, shopping list), web browse, check email, bla bla bla i am finding less and less need for my Palm as a device that's always in my pocket/bag. Text entry through T9 is not grafitti, but it's not so bad. there are a lot of fun Palm apps i miss having on board 24/7 but i guess at some point i'll have a better phone and people will start writing apps for it. i would LOVE to see the Palm OS and it's developers get into more cell phones, but i think the carriers still think that they can make money by selling users a small selection of ringtones and crappy applications. wow, maybe i really do miss my palm? too bad Verizon dumped Palm-OS phones (the kyocera one) for the M$ ones.

 

[johnpaul191]

palm desktop app

oh yeah, i will say till iCal came out and address book got up to speed, the Palm desktop was a great free application for handling that stuff on your Mac. let alone the fact that it could sync with the Palm pilot, Palm made a good choice when they bought that app. their old inhouse version wasn't as clean, but that was back in the OS 9 days and i can't even remember who the current desktop was initially made by. Palm desktop is still not bad, i just favor the onboard Apple apps.

 

[scat999999]

Same with my Tungsten C.

Originally posted by Poff
iSync works flawlessly on my Palm, but I´ve only got a zire.

 

[jacobweber]

The only good part of this is that Missing Sync will soon support Palms. Since HotSync no longer works on my OS 10.3.2 machine, and Palm doesn't seem to care, this might be the only way I can get my Palm to sync again.

 

[micvog]

Originally posted by jrothman
I hope this is a wake-up call to Apple to seriously develop iSync and the iPIM applications

I totally agree. It would seem to me that being able to share your PIM data across phones, PDAs, etc. is an integral part of the "digital hub" and Apple has dropped the ball in supporting new devices. I recently bought a new phone from Verizon and they didn't offer a single one on Apple's list of compatible phones (I ended up with the LG VX6000) and many of the new Palms (e.g. Tungsten E) are not fully supported.

 

[snahabed]

Ugh! I am not going to say iPhone, but

This is exactly why I wish Apple would release a next-generation smartphone. I agree with Jobs that standalone PDA's are over. If I remember his quote, he merely stated that all of the functionality is moving to phones.

But after many attempts, smartphones are STILL really inadequate. I would say the Treo 600 is the best of the bunch, but it is still based on the atrocious (and apparently anti-Mac) Palm OS.

I know, I am the millionth person to wish for this, and there is no indication that it will ever happen. But, like the iPod was to portable music, I really think there is a huge gap in this market. A stylish, hard drive based phone unit that iSyncs to iCal, Address, Mail, Safari Bookmarks... Bluetooth, etc. it just seems all in place. Maybe it could stream that mobile quicktime standard... I guess none of this is revolutionary, but I think Apple could do it so much better than Palm and MS. Now with number portability, there isn't even a huge problem if Apple can only partner with one provider. As a matter of fact, I think it would be a huge boon for a service provider, which would get tons of switches from us devoted insane Apple people

Wishful thinking, but I am over PalmOne. Awful support, and AWFUL operating system.