PalmOS was a missed opportunity
A nine-year waste of time and money
Editor's note: This was originally published on March 16, 2008.
Someone showed me an early Palm Pilot. I was hooked immediately and bought my own a few days later.
In those days, a Palm Pilot had a lot of deficiencies. Memory was limited to 8MB, the screen was a paltry 160x160, and switching between programs was slow and cumbersome. But it was worth it for the novelty of having a touch screen computer small enough to fit in a pocket.
Some years later I heard about the Palm Treo, and picked up a Treo 600. Having a PDA and a phone together was the right idea, and the possibilities of an internet-connected Palm platform seemed endless. I installed the development tools with the intention of building a side career as a Palm applications developer.
The Treo 600 was fun for a little while, but it didn't take long for reality to sink in. The camera was too crude to take any kind of worthwhile picture. The screen, though color, was still only 160x160. Memory was only 24MB, and the applications were old and familiar — not in a warm way but in a way that makes you wonder what they'd been doing for the past five years.
Writing Palm applications was a shocking revelation. If you wrote Windows code in the Windows 3.1 days, you'd be right at home writing code for Palm OS because Palm is every bit as crippled and clunky as 16-bit Windows running on top of DOS. Cooperative multitasking, no memory protection, limited memory space. Dereference a nil pointer and crash the entire device.
I bought a new Treo in 2007, but it was only marginally better than the first one. The screen and the camera were a little better. The memory situation, the applications, and the programming tools were the same. The web browser stunk, third-party apps were terrible, and the whole thing was just too slow. Often it locked up or crashed when I was trying to do something basic like answer a call.
Watching Palm devices evolve was like watching the PC revolution in slow motion. What PCs gained in a year took the Palm people a decade.
In the meantime, Apple gave us a phone with a real computer in it — and a user interface that genuinely makes sense. When I used a Treo to browse the web, I expected it not to work at all; if I managed to get what I needed, I felt a deep sense of having pulled off something remarkable. With an iPhone it just works.
I hate being wrong, and I hate seeing so much work go down the drain, but it’s time to be honest: Palm blew it. With a ten-year head start, they could have owned the mobile market, but they squandered their advantage. Mobile is now Apple’s game, and while I may wax nostalgic for my Palm Pilots and Treos of the past, you can bet that Palm isn’t getting any more of my mindshare or my money.
I remain an enthusiastic iPhone user and iOS app developer to this day.