The last few months have been turbulent for the Palm OS world, with licencees leaving, OS versions not shipping, sellouts, Palm OS development houses closing down,.. – many developers(including me) have been thinking about the future of the Palm OS. Resco’s Jan Slodicka shared his opinion with us – here we go!
Cobalt
Resco did not to any Cobalt development beforehand as it considered it too risky. The company had very little losses(read:none) due to the “great Palm OS Cobalt debacle”.
Palm OS 4 vs. Palm OS 5
Resco slowly gives up the support of Palm OS4. Palm OS4 versions are used inhouse because of simpler testing on simulators, but the OS4 support is stripped off in the release versions. This has a positive effect on the application size.
In a few cases Resco offers separate Palm OS4 versions. These products participate on the sales much less than 5%.
Developer communications
Resco considers Palm’s developer communication average, but he says that it has significantly improved after Palm’s NVFS catastrophy on the Palm Tungsten T5. However, he thinks that Palm should hire more developers for developer/developer relations!
Palm ignores Palm Developer Forum that could provide valuable feedback.
ESD’s
Resco cooperates with many ESD’s, however, only four of them bring significant sales(top one has most sales):
- Handango(mostly PocketPC, though)
- PDAssi
- PalmGear
- MobiHand
This is interesting, as I have been the happiest with MobiHand so far. No problems were reported with PDAssi, probably because Resco was a “launch partner” of the portal and has very good connections to the executive board.
Future outlook
Jan is very positive on the Palm Treo 680’s future – he thinks that it will do really well and will also reach out into new markets significantly. Palm OS software sales are expected to rise with increased market penetration of the Palm Treo 680.
Resco is not sure about the future of the classic PDA; Jan feels that the future of the Palm OS device is in the Treo series. For him, the end of the “classic high-end PDA” is not a mayor problem – I will not miss them much. Treo line provides more than adequate replacement.
Localization
To cut a long story short, only German localized versions sell well. French versions unexpectedly sold very badly, Jan thinks that the lack of a dedicated french ESD is the source of the problem here. The same is true for Spanish versions and a few additional localizations were meant more as a service to the users without any commercial expectations.
So far so good – what do you think? Tune in soon to get more information on platform sales numbers and device rankings…
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interesting, but i almost agree. only i think that treo serie will eventually get features of ‘real’ handhelds… treo si smarter phone, but i wouldn’t be able to live without my t5 now
and i won’t put it away until i won’t get treo with big screen, internal vfs storage and ability to connect as usb disk….
Hmm, and 3rd party apps cant let Treo connect to pc as a usb drive? There are at least 2 paid ones (Card Export and Card Reader: both Russian
) plus a free solution through TotalCommander plugins (filespc2pda)
What I would love to see in treos however are the better connectivity options (WIFI GPS) and one of those mythical Palm Color/Monochrome screens (one major shortcomming of all of newer Palms/PPC is not being able to read the creens very well in direct sunlight) or at least an OLED display.
) would be nice (wishful thinking)
Also, 3G support and full SDHC support (imagine a 32 gig treo