iPod touch The Next Palm...

[billyboy73]

So the thought occurred to me that even though the iPod Touch was created to mostly function as an iPod but with that said it was positioned to be a better "Palm Type" device then a Palm Pilot ever was without even trying.

A Web Browser, a Contact Manager, a Music Player, a Photo Manager and an unofficial E-Mail Program. Think about that for a second.. The newest palm pilot has only 32 MB and here we are talking about 16GB on the Touch. If someone came out with a mobile version of Numbers, Pages, Keynote and some interface to iCal and they would have successfully destroyed the Palm pilot without breaking a sweat...

Any thoughts?

 

[dacreativeguy]

Yeah. Palm blew it. They haven't added any innovation to their products in a long time. And the hardware/software quality has taken a nose dive as well. I've owned a Palm III, Palm 505, and 2 TREOs. They didn't even come out with the original TREO, Handspring did. And in the 3-4 years since they bought Handspring Palm hasn't done much to improve the product. Before the iphone it was the best thing going for a complete PDA/phone package. But compared to the iphone it is a joke. As soon as V2 of the iphone comes out, I'll seriously consider dumping Palm forever.

 

[clevin]

So the thought occurred to me that even though the iPod Touch was created to mostly function as an iPod but with that said it was positioned to be a better "Palm Type" device then a Palm Pilot ever was without even trying.

A Web Browser, a Contact Manager, a Music Player, a Photo Manager and an unofficial E-Mail Program. Think about that for a second.. The newest palm pilot has only 32 MB and here we are talking about 16GB on the Touch. If someone came out with a mobile version of Numbers, Pages, Keynote and some interface to iCal and they would have successfully destroyed the Palm pilot without breaking a sweat...

Any thoughts?

You must live in the past

Palm T|X has been out for 2 years.

It has a web browser (sure not as good as iPod Touch's), support other browsers like opera mini.

it has contact manager, mutiple music players, email programs, 128MB on board, and SD expansion card so you can have unlimited capacity. and works like a external HDD, so you can transfer files without any need of installation of some apps on your computer(win/osx/lin)

Internet radio support, youtube.

free media player (TCPMP) plays all types of videos not only H.264

It also has document to go by default, which allows you to do simple edit/create of word/excel files.

PDF viewer for free.

thousands of 3rd party apps.

I have no doubt iPodTouch looks better and have a better browser. but at its current incarnation, it has no chance to be a successful PDA.

 

[jlanuez]

Agreed

...If someone came out with a mobile version of Numbers, Pages, Keynote and some interface to iCal and they would have successfully destroyed the Palm pilot without breaking a sweat...
Any thoughts?

Agreed, Apple needs to step things up and it would really dominate the market. They need to do this before someone else does.

I dumped my Palm Treo650 for the iPhone and am so happy!

 

[madmaxmedia]

The Palm Pilot was already destroyed by smartphones.

I think it's useful for Apple to add more functionality to the iPhone and Touch since the hardware and OS are already there. But going after the PDA market is not really a big deal, Apple is more concerned about making sure the Touch is still positioned as a multimedia player first and foremost.

 

[IntrinsicMac]

I think a lot of you forget that the PDA market is very important in certain fields like healthcare. That's millions of potential customers. And trust me, not everyone there is going to switch to AT&T esp when AT&Ts signal doesn't work well in many hospitals due to shielding! That's the reason the Palm Treos from Sprint and Verizon do so well in the hospitals. Runs the software and can actually get calls!

 

[IJ Reilly]

The PalmOS has always been clunky, at best a barely tolerable user experience. The Touch could be a major Palm-killer if only Apple hadn't hobbled it. I'm reading now that in addition to not being able to add calendar events, changes made to contacts on the Touch don't sync back to the desktop computer. So near, yet so far...

 

[madmaxmedia]

The PalmOS has always been clunky, at best a barely tolerable user experience. The Touch could be a major Palm-killer if only Apple hadn't hobbled it. I'm reading now that in addition to not being able to add calendar events, changes made to contacts on the Touch don't sync back to the desktop computer. So near, yet so far...

I think Palm OS was great, for the technology that was available at the time. Memory was much more expensive, and they used a black and white 160 x 160 screen.

But they never got beyond the basic UI in future versions, right now they are still stuck at version 5.4 (or whatever it is.) Meanwhile Apple started from scratch and came up with a great UI that is drawing raves (although not all the functionality is there yet.)

I think the Touch manual says that changes to Contacts made on the touch should get synced over. So if there's a software bug, I think that will be corrected soon enough. It would have been much worse if Apple simply decided to provide 2-way synchronization of Contacts.

There's an article at Roughlydrafted.com that speculates that when Leopard is released, there will be better integration between the Mac and iPhone/Touch (Notes, Tasks, etc.) But since Leopard was delayed a bit, they had to make do for the time being. We'll see...

 

[IJ Reilly]

I think Palm OS was great, for the technology that was available at the time. Memory was much more expensive, and they used a black and white 160 x 160 screen.

But they never got beyond the basic UI in future versions, right now they are still stuck at version 5.4 (or whatever it is.) Meanwhile Apple started from scratch and came up with a great UI that is drawing raves (although not all the functionality is there yet.)

I think the Touch manual says that changes to Contacts made on the touch should get synced over. So if there's a software bug, I think that will be corrected soon enough. It would have been much worse if Apple simply decided to provide 2-way synchronization of Contacts.

There's an article at Roughlydrafted.com that speculates that when Leopard is released, there will be better integration between the Mac and iPhone/Touch (Notes, Tasks, etc.) But since Leopard was delayed a bit, they had to make do for the time being. We'll see...

Maybe it is a bug, I have no idea. I know only that this is being reported today at macintouch.com, based on hands-on experience.

The PalmOS could only ever have been seen as better than merely tolerable to anyone who never owned a Newton. Compared to Newton, Palm always seemed like a stone axe. It was a sad day for me when I had to give up my Newton for a Palm device. I've been hoping for something better ever since. I thought the Touch might be it.

I can't buy the Leopard theory. The Touch is not supposed to be a Mac-only device, and this functionality already appears on the iPhone. It was left out deliberately. Why is what we don't know.