Why palm insists on using dated hardware…
So we all know, or at least should know, that palm uses nothing but old obsolete hardware since the treo 650’s release. While the 650 sported a fairly new cpu, the pxa-27x series, every device released since (nov 2004) has been equipped with the SAME cpu, SAME SPEED! This is almost 2 years later and palm refuses to update it’s hardware for the release of their newest devices (680 and 750v). With the other vendors increasing clock speeds at a minimum to show the “good faith” improvments to their customers, palm sits back and does nothing but re-vamp the style a bit and throw a bone out in the form of 32 megs additional ram and/or flash.
This comes as no suprise to people like Spymongoose who have been seeing the prime examples of palm’s loyalties to it’s customers since day one. Why do they do it? My opinion is we made them too “big” with the success of the 650 and everyone buying it up. There was no room left for real improvements in the design, yet their buisness practices state to improve what works. So they did, barely.
The real question is when are we going to see a major improvement in palm’s design team? To have a treo come out with a standard 240×320 or 320×480 screen (based on OS) should be trivial, the software is already written. To have one with wifi is a no brainer, yet they don’t. To have one with a realistic amount of memory seems completely straight forward. Doing all this while keeping the same size is trivial and a minor engineering project at best. Not doing all that and minimizing the size is also possible as a minor engineering feat. Yet they don’t do it. Releasing a CDMA device with no external antenna would be simple, but still no dice.
The reasoning I believe is they don’t care about their customers at all. They want to use yesterday’s parts, at yesterday’s prices in order to reap the profits at today’s market prices for a new device.
We will just have to wait and see if they release any truely “new” device which pushes the envelope of engineering one step further.
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Thier software is dated as well… the good old franken-garnet Palm OS 5.X, and anything that makes Palm OS even useful is 3rd party software apps like blazer and P-tunes (now incorporated into the factory ROM) and many other third party apps. Without them you have a palm pilot from 5 years ago and phone with poor battery life.
Palm is a terrible company. There used to be good companies producing licenced palm devices, but they were bought out by palm or forced out of buisness by palms crappy buisness practices. I dont HATE palm devices, I HATE anything that keeps terrible buisnesses in buisness.
Agreed, the software is also extremely outdated and old, most of which was written when their current programmers where in grade school. But then again, palm is no longer operating the development of their own “palm” operating system which could only mean one thing, it’s gotta get better from here! 🙂
Shadow,
I’ve been looking for info on the treo and you seem like a veritable expert (treocentral articles, etc etc)
I was wondering, is it possible to use the 650 or the 700 via a bluetooth or direct connection and piggy back off my phone’s Dataplan?
this way idon’t have to spend 60bucks a month on the PC card…
any thoughts?
That’s exactly what BT Dun is all about. The 650 supports it natively on most carriers, and the ones that don’t you can use my hacks. For the 700, sprint supports it I know…
shadow,
Do you think it is possible to change the 650 to a WM 5.0 since the 700 series now has it? or has this already been done?