Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Palm and their Treo(s)...Zzzzzzzzz

There was a time when Palm was the innovator in the PDA field. I lusted after the Palm V when it was first introduced. It was so tiny (for the time) and felt like it was on the cutting edge back in 1999. Then they got bought out, and then got bought out again. People had gotten used to them being the de facto standard for PDAs and Palm just started resting on its laurels. They stopped innovating and just started evolving. They gave the people what they wanted but then didn't know where to go from there. Today, I see the tech blogs touting the next cool Treo when really, the technology on most of these phones are 2 years old. (ok, bad reference since this one has HSPDA but its supposedly very unstable) Yes, Palm was innovative enough to buy out Handspring and develop the first widely used phone with a QWERTY keyboard, but with most phones coming with megapixel cameras (albeit crappy ones), they're stuck using a VGA one? They couldn't innovate their antiquated operating system so now they're just co-opting Microsoft's operating system? Maybe Palm has changed their business plan from tech innovator to lowest common denominator mass produced business tools and there shouldn't be any expectations from them anymore. What makes me shudder is to see Apple (once a supposed innovator) taking the same steps toward the path that Palm has walked.

1 comment:

April said...

Palm (palmOne? Handspring? Visor? whatever.) sucks now. I agree with you, they used to be king of PDAs, but now, it's just...why bother. And using Windows Mobile 5? That's just plain sad. PalmOS wasn't really that great, anyways.

Internet on a platter!