You hit Engadget or Gizmodo, and I swear, whenever someone brings up “Palm”, it’s almost as if they really want Palm to go out of business. It’s a visceral hate for a small company that has innovated so much in the market and has really been a great player in the mobile market for much longer than most. They were the ones with the vision 14 years ago, when Apple and Microsoft had given up on the mobile space. When phones were getting smarter, they gave you the first Treo. They have a long history of really taking great care of their developers and delivering a real personal touch, instead of hiding behind a mass of “MVPs” or “Apple Geniuses” or “constant beta programs” that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have always utilized to keep an arms length from developers.
When I was coding my first app, I actually had an email discussion with the top engineer on the PalmOS. He encouraged me to really integrate my app in a way I wouldn’t have tried on Apple or Microsoft, or even Google. They were way cool to me for such a long time and I owe a big chunk of my career to them because I can honestly say they helped me get my start in this field over 10 years go.
Now today, I look at the different hot operating systems out there…and I shake my head. The sorts of things that Apple uses to explain why the iPhone single tasks reminds me of the same things Palm said were the reason why the old PalmOS single tasked…except Palm’s excuse actually made sense. Their event driven operating system ran on 8-16 MHz processors early on. Microsoft recently decided that their new Windows Phone 7 would be “single tasking” but would “preserve the state” each time. PalmOS apps had a built in database that stored each applications state within the executable (well, prc file) itself. So if you backed it up, it had its settings baked in. If you beamed it to someone, it was already configured. It was ultra simple and worked really well…provided developers actually saved state. All of them had lists of application icons you had to search through. How many different names must you have for a launcher? And look at how many mobile devices out there that had those little buttons at the bottom of the phone. Because that design just worked. Just from basic concepts, Palm had PalmOS flogged to death for doing basically what all these modern OS’s do.
But that wasn’t the end of the flogging from the geek community…oh no. There was this thing that Palm’s spinoff, Palmsource, made called Cobalt. PalmOS 6. Never got onto any devices. Utilized a microkernel based operating system running multithreaded C++ apps in different threads, all managed by their own kernel in each thread. The geeks mocked it and called it a joke without even working with it. I actually DID write some apps for the emulator. Now, a couple years ago, Google bought this little company called Android that made an OS that has gotten some headlines recently. Apparently, their OS runs multiple apps in java virtual machines. Which basically is a way clunkier and overheady architecture than Cobalt was. But it’s basically the same concept. Who got flogged, and who got the headlines and fanboys?
There’s a reason why I have a Palm Pre, and not an iPhone or a Droid. I’ve been there, done that, for both the iPhone and Droid. And I was there 8 years ago for the iPhone with oldschool Palm OS and the Treo, and I was there 5 years ago for Android with Cobalt (which I never was able to have a phone for, sadly). I’m past all that. iPhone and Android are old architectures that have had lipstick applied to them and a big corporation’s name stamped on ’em (in some capacity).
The Pre and webOS do something different and new. They make extensive use of server side processing power and storage to make the device work “better” for less. Of course, too many people can’t see that far ahead and can’t get their heads wrapped around how cool this will be. They’re still living in 2005 and their expectations for an operating system on a smartphone are out of date. Palm always finds a way to stay a step ahead of the game, but they always get spanked for it by the PR and marketing forces that surround their competitors.
However, since we can see how your favorite non-Palm smartphone basically copies Palm…if Palm were to “go away”, I guess you’ll have to settle for less innovation, huh?
The irony, though, is that Palm can’t “go away” anymore. They played a card that no one noticed…webOS is an open technology. It’s infinitely modable and improvable outside of Palm. If Palm were to go under, because the core of webOS is essentially linux, it can continue to grow as a result of the already thriving webOS internals community that has grown up around it. Think those people are making money on it? Nope. They do it because they like it. It’s a fun hobby and they think it’s really cool. It’ll live on no matter how people who analyze stocks for a living feel about it’s technical aspects. And guess what? If Palm as a company folded, you can bet those guys would find a way to load webOS on all sorts of hardware.