[QUOTE=Lightnin’]
You know, this brings up one of my big pet peeves with the PalmOS. I had a Palm Pilot Pro, way back in the nineties… and if you compare it to the Treo650 I’m using right now, the OS really hasn’t improved. I mean, I’m sure there’s been tons of backstage technological improvement… but overall, the look and feel of the OS hasn’t changed.
You still can’t link contacts and calendar events, for example- things like birthdays and anniversaries. You can’t do internet shortcuts (icons which pull up a specific website when you click on them)- you have to use bookmarks through Blazer. There’s no “undelete” feature- if you delete something, it’s GONE.
Sure, you can buy third-party software which fixes all of those problems and more- Agendus links contacts and calendar events, Sharklinks does the shortcut thing, the various launchers can undelete… but that’s the problem- you have to BUY those solutions. I feel like I’m being nickel and dimed to death. I’ve made it a personal rule that I’m not going to buy any more software for my phone- if it’s not freeware, I’m not using it.
A shame, really- I’d love to have a better-looking launcher.
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Sony tried to do this, but it really only amounted to their own kind of launcher, and it wasn’t much better than the T5/TX/Zire72’s “favourites” panel.
This is one of the reasons I left the Palm platform as my main PDA platform: A tragic lack of innovation. While I understand they were bought out by Access and are currently turning into a Linux-based platform, I didn’t think there was really any excuse for allowing the OS to languish as much as they did. OS5 was a major step up in Palm operating systems, supporting the faster, newer Palms with the introduction of the Tungsten|T line, and while there were some new features, it really wasn’t much different than OS4, which wasn’t much different than OS3, and so on.
Palm have been infamous in letting third party developers take care of filling the gaps that Palm (and post-split PalmSource) considered outside its purview. As PDAs became used for far more than just utilitarian data, getting into games and multimedia – for all intents and purposes becoming handheld computers capable of doing just about everything your desktop does – Palm could have taken the initiative to update their OS with multimedia extensions and libraries. But they didn’t. Not even so much as a frame buffer. They just relied on third parties to create their own frameworks for their own applications. Palm just never broke out of the business hardware mentality by taking the OS where people wanted it to go. There were tons of really talented developers who pushed the envelope and made it do some really great things, but they could have been helped immensely if they had some support at the OS level.
Meanwhile WindowsCE, which really had a pretty good grounding in being it good all-round device with lots of support at the hardware level, gained all the ground that Palm was losing by sitting on its laurels, and as I discovered last Easter when I was given a PPC unit, it’s an amazingly capable device these days – a little 266MHz low-res unit was kicking my poor T5’s plastic ass all over the place.
The one thing I do like Palm for is that all of my most needed information is right at my fingertips, just a tap or two away – and it’s really fast at that. The lack of multitasking, a handicap in most other areas, is mitigated by instantaneous response to user input because it doesn’t have to tend to other threads, and I really like that. Windows-based units feel sluggish in that regard. And Palm’s alarms actually work. I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed the damn notification queue even in WM5.0. That’s just silly.
