Garmin was a very popular Palm OS licensee – their innovative GPS-Palm OS-combos were very popular among many users. However, Garmin has now more-less withdrawn silently from the Palm OS market, leaving analysts wondering about what happened. I tracked a high Garmin guy down – and here is what he told me:
All PDA’s are discontinued
The reason for this is that Garmin plans(and has executed) a position shift away from combo navigators to standalone units and smartphone navigation software. This position shift is done because Garmin feels that the GPS market will move this way - not because of technical difficulties.
Garmins PDA based offerings sold satisfactorily well and made it into stores well too – in fact, the manager told me that the company was happy with the sales. The stability of the Palm OS was not a problem either – we were very satisfied with the stability of the Palm OS platform(sic).
The problems Garmin faced was support for third party apps – Garmin Germany alone hired 10 extra support staff to make the Palm OS and PocketPC work for the users…navigation was working all the time.
Garmin stays active in the Palm OS market with its MobileXT software and Mobile10 bluetooth GPS dongle. Last but not least, retailers are said to still have a bit of remaining stock on most of their machines…
An interesting tidbit about Garmin that not many people know: they ported Palm OS Garnet to their own realtime kernel in order to add the GPS features to it.
Did the Garmin person say anything about support for ACCESS? I am very interested in whether their OS is truly going to appear in an actual marketed product, preferably a handheld device or smartphone.
Hi,
yes. He said that his company is not interested in creating another PDA GPS system of _ANY KIND_(sic). So no ALP love from here…and none from Qool either(more on that soon)!
Best regards
Tam Hanna
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