Palm OS was one of platforms that has very large community behind its success. No matter how many limited it has; there is a will, there'll always be a way to work around. Yep, that was true. Sadly, now it's definitely not.Palm OS was one of platforms that has very large community behind its success. No matter how many limited it has; there is a will, there'll always be a way to work around. Yep, that was true. Sadly, now it's definitely not.
First, Dmitry talented Palm OS developer decided to release his famous work--skinUI--as a freeware and not to code Palm OS program for good. In addition, he won't continue supporting Palm OS Nova as well.
Next, PDAMill high quality game coder also quitted developing for Palm OS platform. If you do remember Snails, you know how good they were. PDAMill did follow the same path by releasing all Palm OS softwares for free.
Yet Ellams Software long time Palm OS developer went in a wild too.
What I'm pretty sure of is there will be a lot of developers go away from Palm OS platform. This is such a terribly huge sign of the death of Palm, both Palm OS itself and Palm, Inc. Doesn't Palm Inc feel anything so far? I don't know if it's because the limit of OS itself or darned bad Palm Company. IMHO, the latter factor is more significant to me since Palm OS is working just fine to me as a PDA, may be not a decent web browser though. This seem to be a result of choosing worse choices in every steps in last few years--releasing under-powered Treo 700p while it could do such a great performance with Centro 2 years later with the same core platform (but too late of course), canceling Foleo which had such a potential of success if you look at Asus Eee PC as an example, and the worst decision ever--deciding to discontinue its own strength--PDA line. I think Palm might think that Treo could do everything Palm PDA can do, so there is no reason to keep that. But what can I say is Treo is a big plus of Palm PDA, not a substitution. It's like the reason why we still have a laptop while tablet PC could do much more. Palm itself just chose to fight in a league it's not used to with many powerful rivals and opt out of where they are good at.
What's next? Palm OS Nova based on Linux? Then what? Apple already proved that the best-selling device doesn't have to be the best really, just have its own strength and that's it. It's like the great Palm Pilot or the last Palm TX or Treo that have such a great PIM,
but instead of promoting & improving it, they decide to leave it behind and promote the weaknesses--multimedia or whatsoever.
Dude, that's no imagination at all.
Good bye, Palm, Inc. I do hope I would be able to find you in stores in next few years. But honestly I don't think you will be there. That's truly sad.