Recently, Garmin announced that the i3000 was going to be delayed. A few PalmInfoCenter commentators announced that they beleive that Garmin now shuts off their PalmOS development department.
Many people discuss if Garnet will still cut it in 3g handsets. Personally, I dare to say that I am not sure if Garnet will cut it. It may cut it with a bit of tweaking(remember, it was a RTOS core);but no promises. But Garnet will for sure cut it in a different arena-in the arena of lowcost/mediaplayer/game/data-only handhelds and organizers.
But why? If you look at the devices named above, you will see immediately that the users of those machines are OS agnostic. They don’t care about what runs their games or videos, they just want performance. Did you ever see a ‘regular’ person asking for the Ipod’s or the Nintendo DS’s operating system?
PalmOS 5 would do a perfect job in such an arena. Gang it up with NetFront, an image viewer, a PIM/email suite and a multimedia player with a unified UI. What comes out is a nice, reliable core for a portable box. It may not be excessively cool, but it works reliably; and this is what users want!
The LifeDrive we currently bicker about actually is a great box-if it were a plain media player box without third party apps. The things that made and still make problems are third party applications.
Overall, the future for Garnet will change. It does not have the power to compete in highend markets for a long time(unless someone rewrites it a bit, the RTOS is there(!!!!!!)). However, Garnet still has loads of meat and beef to keep alive in different market sectors. The future for PalmOS developers may not look excessively great; but Garnet will cut it for sure.
How do you feel about the future of the Palm OS?
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