Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Palm's last breath

I have been a fan of Palm for a long time. I currently have a T5, having previously owned a IIIx and a Zire 71. The greatest strength of Palm powered has always been it's simplicity. The applications were simple forms, to input your data and store information. But it's simplicity was the reason behind it's fall.
Things change, but Palm has found it hard to evolve... and the result is the loss of market. It had lot's of applications, but in recent years you had to pay for most of the useful stuff. And multimedia become an important usage for an handheld device. And the simple device, with the batteries lasting for 3 weeks, with 16 tone grayscale and 33MHz processor was a little on the low side...
They put a faster processor, more memory, a color screen, and all the advantages of Palm were gone... you had to struggle for you battery to last 1 whole week. This was the experience I had with my IIIx and Zire 71, respectively.
Nowadays I'm using my T5 to do everything an handheld can do. I can listen to MP3, I can watch movies, I can work with docs and excel. But the advantage over PocketPC is gone.

In the past weeks Palm has announced a new device, the Foleo. They call it a mobile companion, to boldly go where your laptop cannot go...
At around the same time, Asus showed a similar product, the Eee PC.
When you compare both, it's hard to imagine how can the Foleo survive. The screen is bigger, ok, but that also makes it larger. And the processor is ridiculous... and the memory is almost inexistent! The only real advantage is the great fault of the Eee, battery life.

To me, it looks like we are hearing Palm's swan song...

I hope i'm wrong...

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