Palm OS- reports of its demise are greatly accurate

We've mentioned the lingering passing of the Palm OS more than once here on jkOnTheRun.  The Palm OS has been left largely unchanged for years and with Palm jumping on the Windows Mobile bandwagon it's no secret the OS is not going anywhere.  ComputerWorld has published a review of what is likely the last device to be released with the Palm OS, the Treo 755p.  They find the 755p to be like the Treos that came before it and find the worst part of the user experience to be, you guessed it, the aging Palm OS.  Palm needs to get away from the Treo format, sure it's been successful for them but they are beginning to stagnate on the hardware front like they did on the OS front.  Will Palm be around much longer?

Comments

[Oliver]

Basically unchanged? Well, I wish that my Treo 700p's version of PalmOS was as stable as the one in the 650 or other earlier PalmOS devices I had. But in fact the device randomly crashes about once or twice a day, even without me doing anything (when it's just idly sitting on my desk). Hopefully the maintenance release that's due out next week will finally address this, but this experience has certainly not made me want to get the 755p.

On the flipside, my co-workers with Windows Mobile phones (whether Palm or otherwise) are seeing similar problems, so the grass isn't really greener on the other side of the fence. It's amazing how unreliable these devices have become.

[Dave Haupert]

Oliver, if the 700p is _less_ stable than the 650, they are really heading down the wrong street! I switched from a 650 to a 700wx because I couldn't take the stability problems. All this is because of their lousy implementation of NVFS. None of these problems would have happened if they instead of switching to flash just put a bigger capacitor or some reserve section of the battery to protect from data loss.

Before they did the NVFS they had the most stable OS around, and now it's the least. As a developer for Palm and others, we have found so many issues on the developer boards all related to the same thing and it's sickening that almost none have been addressed even in the latest devices.

It's very hard to feel sorry for a company that is digging it's own grave and ignored warnings coming from all ends.