Future Treos
So the Treo 700p has been pretty much confirmed. It is basically a Treo 700w running PalmOS. PalmOS 5. Geeze, this is pretty much the same OS that the first Palms (then called Pilots) came with. Sure, nowadays they run on ARM processors and emulate Motorola 68K processors (all the productivity benefits of coding and C and all the performance benefits of scripted languages.. err, wait a minute). But it still lacks memory protection and multitasking. Windows 95 brought the end of resets on crashes and the begining of multitasking to the desktop (for the most part). And it was good.
I don’t know what Palm should do. For some reason noone likes PalmOS 6. It appears to be backwards compatible and would solve my problems with the Palms. But that’s probably the issue — it would solve my problems, and I’m probably not representative of their users. The average user probably doesn’t mind the resets once in a while. And since they probably don’t use many third-party apps, it probably doesn’t happen nearly as frequently. And the average user probably doesn’t realize that they can’t multitask. The built-in apps maintain state pretty well.
My prediction is that the Treos are going to Windows Mobile. They now have inhouse expertise, and future versions will feature more modifications and better integration with the hardware. The reason for building the 700p and, say, one more improved PalmOS 5 based Treo is to appease the Palm diehards and to allow time for engineers (inhouse and third party) to ramp up on Windows Mobile. I’m betting one of the many Treo models this year will also be a low budget PalmOS 5 based model — but this one is a gimmie, Palm has pretty much admitted to this one. PalmOS 5 will probably live on a little bit longer on the Palm PDA models as those are more consumer oriented.
Hey, at least the Linux port to the Treo 650 is making progress.