2005/049 A long-time PalmOS user defects. I've been using PalmOS devices for almost a decade. In that time, Palm has lost sight of the original developer's vision -- the vision that made them great -- and has begun practicing repulsive corporate tactics. As a result, they've lost a fan, and a customer. Russell Sean ser@ser1.REMOVETHIS.net

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I have rebelled. I have thrown off the oppressive shackles of a cruel, faceless lord. I've given up on Palm. My decision is long coming, and requires some history. You can probably skip down to The Middle if you're not enthralled by my writing style. It starts back in the early 90's, when I owned a Newton and was the president of the Oregon Java Interest Group. I carried that thing around, like a brick-filled daytimer, dutifully entering purchases and scribbling in the horribly slow character recognition system. At one of the OJIG meetings, somebody showed me his PDA: a Palm Pilot III, and I couldn't believe the difference. Here was a PDA that didn't require major lifestyIe adjustments. It was convenient to carry, had good character recognition, and an unbelievable battery life. Shortly thereafter, I bought myself one, and it became my constant companion until Palm released the Palm V. Palm took a good design and made it better with the Palm V. It had more memory, faster CPU, and a slimmer, more stylish package. It was the perfect PDA. Except for the fact that I kept having hardware problems, especially with the power button. I exchanged my Palm V at least three times in as many years, and finally gave up, depending on software and the other hard buttons to turn the device on and off. Still, I was a satisfied customer, and I had more than one person comment on the fact that I could write on it quickly without even looking at the device. Around 2002, I shifted gears. I had recently moved to the East coast, and a new generation of PDAs was out. In addition, my Palm V had given up the ghost, refusing to turn on under any circumstance. I treated myself to a Sony Clie T665C. The T665C was nice in some ways; it had a higher resolution, color screen, wasn't much thicker than the V, nor much wider... but it was taller. Still, the lure of audio support was too much to resist, and I purchased one. This was a mistake. First of all, that difference in height did make a difference; it was just too tall to fit comfortably in a pocket. Also, Sony has this arrogant drive to reinvent every technology, and fitted the Clie (as they were fitting everything) with their proprietary Memory Stick. As an aside, I still think the Memory Stick is a waste of money, but whatever; I simply don't buy their sticks, and I avoid products that use Sony's formats. The Clie was Ok, but was crammed with so much proprietary software that I wasn't happy with it. The battery life was awful, it didn't handle MP3's very well, that stupid Memory Stick was a constant irritant, and the buttons were painful to use.

Then Palm released the Tungsten T: cue heavenly choir. This, I thought, was the ultimate device. I still hadn't caught on to the fact that the trend in PDAs since the Palm V had been in the wrong direction: they've been getting larger, not smaller. The Tungsten T had a bright, beautiful display, a powerful CPU, oodles of memory, a Secure Digital slot (not a CF, but we can't have everything), decent IR and even BlueTooth. Even as I write this, I have the Tungsten, and carry it with me everywhere, and use it almost hourly. The best things about the Tungsten are what you notice when you compare it to the Clie. The Clie was designed by Torquemada: the buttons are, as I said, small, hard, and literally painful to use for an extended time. There is a switch to disable the keys that always seems to be in the wrong position. It came with an anemic little stylus that has, probably, the most uncomfortable design possible; almost as if they were sitting in a room going, "What can we do to make using the Clie truly hideous?" It just isn't convenient to use. In comparison, the Tungsten is chock full of good UI design: the 5-way rocker is sheer genius, moreso for the fact that they hooked the central button to the clock, so you could check the time just by pressing it when the PDA was off -- it would display the time and then shut itself off after about 10 seconds. There is a little button on the side that is hooked to the voice recorder, so if you're driving and want to make a little note, you don't have to fire up the Palm -- just press and hold the little button, and the Palm turns itself on and starts recording, and stops when you let up on the button. There are dozens of little things like this that show that not all of the good UI designers have left Palm. But it has downsides. First, it is big. Not too big, and not as awkward as the Clie, but big enough to be cumbersome; it is no Palm V. The software is fraught with bugs; the demon inhabiting my Tungsten is that the digitizer is constantly decalibrating. And what did Palm say when I called them about this? "Deinstall everything but the default PalmOS software." Uh uh. No way. PalmOS is useless without the add-on software; that's like saying your computer is perfectly stable, as long as you don't turn it on. And sometimes, rarely, a database will get corrupt in such a way that the device can't boot fully; it boots, gets almost through the initialization process, and then crashes and has to be rebooted. The only fix is to wipe the device and restore your data, and hope that you hadn't done anything significant (like get an address card beamed to you) since your last sync. In other words, the PalmOS itself is getting more flakey. So, I've acquired the opinion that Palm hasn't produced a really exceptional product since the Vx. They've given up on the philosophy that made them great. Every Palm user -- well, every one who knows anything about Palm Computing -- knows the story of founder Jeff Hawkins, and how he is said to have carried around a block of wood that he whittled on until it felt comfortable to hold. He'd walk around the office pulling this thing out of his pocket and tell the developers, "we have to get it this small." For a while, Palm went in the right direction; the Palm V was even smaller than the original Palm Pilots, and what it gave up in comfort it gained in portability; it could easily share a back pocket with a wallet. And the battery lasted literally weeks between charges, with regular use. Despite the great success Palm had with the early devices, at some point the company started copying the PocketPC. The PDAS started getting bigger, crammed with features largely unneccessary in a PDA -- unneccessary when it comes at the cost of stability and size. What we have now is the Tungsten T5, the biggest of them all, and no sign that they'll reverse the trend. And what idiot at Palm decided to copy an (at the time) unsuccessful platform? They let Microsoft define the playing field, and once you do that, you've lost. Microsoft will crush you, crush you, I say! Apple competes with Microsoft by never, ever, letting Microsoft set the rules of the game, and Linux competes by... well, by not playing by any rules whatsoever. Palm gave Microsoft the ball, and the only reason why it is still in the game now is because (if I may mix my metaphors a bit) by now it takes the MS steamroller a long time to swing around, and Palm has been barely staying ahead of it. It helps that the steamroller keeps breaking down.

So we come to today. Months ago, I dropped my Tungsten one too many times, and lost a couple screws and a bit of cosmetic plastic, and the back of the sliding base was loose and making me nervous. I started syncing a lot more often. Also, by this point, I was getting tired of lugging around a cell phone and a PDA, and them not talking to one another just added insult to injury. I had started thinking about getting a Treo 600 when I heard rumors about the Treo 650. At that point, it existed only as rumors: better resolution, faster CPU, and the coveted BlueTooth. All this, and in a reasonable package; certainly no bigger than the Tungsten T, and, hey, I'm willing to put up with a little more size to consolidate the devices anyway. So, uncharacteristically, I waited patiently for the Treo 650 to be released. When it came out, it was everything I had hoped for -- and yet, I watched it for a little while longer to make sure it isn't flawed -- for example, by some idiocy such as Palm screwing up the filesystem so that the effective available memory is a fraction of what it should be -- they'd never do something like that, would they? But they fixed that, and I was finally ready to buy... but I'm with T-Mobile, and T-Mobile doesn't carry the Treo 650. And what's more, I'm happy with T-Mobile, and don't want to switch providers -- certainly not just for a PDA. We've been with T-Mobile for almost a decade, and I've changed my PDA three times in that time -- in fact, my cell phone is older than any of my PDAs, and says "Voicestream" on it -- from before the merger. And customer service only got better after the merger. That, and T-Mobile has Catherine Zeta-Jones as a spokesperson -- yowsa. I'm cool by association. But T-Mobile is slow in getting devices like the Treo, so I called T-Mobile and they told me that, indeed, the Treo 650 comes in a GSM model that will work on their network, so everything would be hunky-dory if I bought one and slipped in the SIM card -- as long as I make sure and get an unlocked phone. Things are looking good, when at this point, my ancient cell phone chooses this time to develop a crippling LCD flaw that renders everything but the little lock icon in the lower left-hand corner unreadable. Definitely time to take the plunge, and I've got my credit card out, ready to spend the $600 for a new Treo 650. I call Palm and tell them I'd like to buy a device, and confirm the price of ... $700. What? $700? Where'd that come from?? The guy on the other end explains that the price I saw on the web site was an "error", and that the correct price is $700. So I say, thanks, but no thanks, and go online to do some research. The short version is that rumor has it that one (or more) of the carriers contracted with Palm to carry the 650 pressured Palm to raise the price, to encourage people to switch. As far as I'm concerned, Palm's made a fatal error. It was difficult to justify the $700 price on the Treo 650, especially when the Tungsten T5 -- which is arguably a better machine, but lacking a cell phone -- is only $400. There's obviously some strange markup going on here; Palm is trying to say that the reason the unlocked version is so much more expensive than the version you get with one of their contracted carriers is because the carrier is absorbing the cost to get the normal 2-year contract. That's bullshit, plain and simple, because even an existing customer on one of the "preferred carriers" -- one who may no longer be under contract -- can still get the Treo 650 from Palm for a full $150 less than an unlocked version. So, Palm is artificially jacking up the price to appease their carriers, and this is evident on their website as they, at every turn, encourage you to switch from your carrier to one of theirs. I'm not playing that game, especially in light of the fact that I have grave concerns about the direction the quality of the PalmOS, of their device designs, and of Palm's customer support, has been taking. I'm certainly not going to pay $700 for it.

So what did I do? I ordered my first non-PalmOS PDA in ten years. I purchased a Symbian-based Ericsson P900. Symbian is a PDA OS that is very popular in Europe, although less so in the US, and has a vast array of available third-party software -- much like PalmOS. The Symbian is more of a general purpose OS than even PalmOS, and the P900 has a built-in Java VM. While I'm not a big fan of Java these days (that's another essay), I am, after all, a Java programmer by trade, so this is convenient for me. Plus, the P900 gets consistently good reviews, having won awards for best 3G device and so on, has a touch screen and character recognition -- all of the stuff I'm used to in a PDA -- and in a decent form factor. I've even read reviews saying that the P900 is as good a gaming platform as the Playstation 1. I'll bet solitaire screams on it. Still, I'm a little scared. I know Graffiti, and have a decade worth of data in my Palm. I'm unsure about being able to find equivelant applications of the ones that I depend on for the Symbian OS, or that they'll be as good, or that I'll have real trouble porting the data to the new platform. What if I hate the Symbian OS? What if? What if???? But Palm has driven me away; to paraphrase technology pundit Michael S. Malone, I smell the scent of decay on Palm. They've diverged from the recipe that made them successful, and they're pulling stupid stunts that are alienating many of their most devout fans -- such as myself. Palm has, through their shady business practices, at least temporarily lost a customer. Maybe someday I'll go back to Palm, but maybe -- if Symbian is any good, just maybe -- I won't.