Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I was just reading over on engadget an article wondering about where Palm is in the whole gPhone deal, and someone posted an article in the comments, about Palm saying they're not going there. Which, in my mind, says that Palm is going to wither and die. They're hopelessly trying to create their own linux based palm-os, and keep delaying and flailing. They are passing up a huge opportunity by missing the Android opportunity.


So, here's my big suggestion for Nokia:

Buy Palm.

Port their development framework to Maemo, so that the apps easily port over. Nokia immediately gets values like palm's apps, sync infrastructure, etc. by just integrating palm software into Maemo.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

No, please... no.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Aaaarghhh!!!!

The humanity...

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

You don't think having the palm application ecosystem running on top of maemo & hildon would add value to the IT platform?

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Nokia is already the largest shareholder in Symbian OS, which they could have used on the tablet hardware if they had aspired to position it as an electronic organizer.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I didn't say one word about porting the OS. I said porting the application framework.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

You mean the current old one or the new unfinished one? Neither imho sounds very good.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Perhaps this thread should be called "Bad Suggestion for Nokia" :confused:

Nothing personal, please don't take this the wrong way, its just not on my list of wishes and wants. I know we don't see eye to eye on interface, so its not surprising I disagree with this statement.

I never owned a palm, and never wanted to. I played with one a few times, but just nothing there I needed. Perhaps I should have prefaced that with, I have not picked up a palm in a long time.

Now all that being said, to be a consumer device and break of the tech-no geek category, they need to add something in the way of PIM and office applications, printing. I got korganizer, kmail, going, now koffice would be nice.

I am not saying KDE is the answer, but a full suite of software is needed, and that seems to be left to the community to provide.

I personally am grateful for the hardware and to be able to have linux in my pocket, and carry a real linux interface with me wherever I go. This isn't an internet tablet, it's a linux box! :D

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

And having the palm apps run on maemo gets them that. Plus a huge userbase. Plus a larger developer and application ecosystem.


In case anyone is confused, I'm NOT saying adopt the palm OS, nor the palm GUI. I'm saying the API and ABI, but with the maemo/hildon look and feel.

There'd need to be some work so that apps compiled for the palm look and feel run under the hildon look and feel ... but I think most of that would be about screen dimensions, since they both have a single app menu, input that happens separate from the widget areas, etc. And Palm already has devices that work in both portrait and landscape, so it might not be that hard to adapt them to the landscape only mode of hildon (though, it'd be nice if hildon could do both).

I think it would also benefit the Palm community, in that they'd be able to continue to leverage their investments and application expertise. And if they wanted to transition to the hildon API, for more advanced and integrated features, they could so slowly.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I have owned a Palm, and therefore allow me to repeat: Aaaarghhh!!!!

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Well, all Palm is doing is having a Garnet emulator on top of their Linux, that to most programs would look exactly like running on the original device, and their new apps will be in linux just like Maemo apps (obviously, different window manager, etc). Basically it'll do very similarly to Styletap does, though it'll help for Palm that they can freely modify the source code of Garnet now. Honestly, any touchscreen device that adds support to run Palm apps natively would get a huge advantage, why else would StyleTap (for WM and S60) be so popular? If there was a Maemo StyleTap type application, I don't see why anyone would see it as a disadvantage.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Palm and it's OS and apps need to die off to make room for better stuff.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Worst. Idea. Ever.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I don't think a Garnet emulation layer is a bad idea at all. I seriously doubt it will happen, but there are plenty of Palm apps I'd like to run on my N800.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Like contacts and email?

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I would like to run some apps too , like all the medical apps there are. Only thing the clie was useful for me.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

If you want to, for example, make business applications available, how about wine mobile?

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

By the AllSpark no! If there was any doubt Palm is toast, it was sealed today when Google announced their own Linux-based OS. Palm has been working on their own Linux OS for 3 years now, they're still working on it, and recently announced it wouldn't be ready until 2009. During that time, Nokia, FIC, and now Google have developed their own Linux-based OSes, and Nokia has released 3 devices based on it. Palm's ingenuity in UIs has long been overshadowed by their inability to put together a modern, well, anything. Nokia, please let Palm die already.

(That said, I'd love to have a Palm Tasks-like app on the N8x0. Along with Contacts and Calendar apps that worked right.)

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

And how is that different from what I've proposed (other than it wouldn't be "-like", it would be the actual thing, running via a compatibility engine)?

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Well, most importantly, running Palm apps via compatibility layer would look horrible on an N8x0 screen. Assuming such a layer could do the pixel-doubling Palm devices do, the app would still show up as a 320x320 app in the middle of the tablet's 800x480 screen. That alone is enough to make anyone not want to use it.

Secondarily, as much as the Palm apps "just work," the unfortunate reality of the situation is that the Palm PIMs are aging less than gracefully. The simplicity of the Tasks and Calendar apps has been complicated by multiple dialog boxes with odd behaviors, and the Contacts app on the Treo has a near-horrible list view that I dread having to use.

Finally, current Palm OS barely has a "framework" of any kind; it's a mishmash of Palm OS 5 (Garnet), the long-dead OS 6 (Cobalt), and various hacks Palm put together on the way. Remember my statement about Palm and Linux: 3 other companies have implemented Linux-based mobile OSes in the same time Palm has been working on theirs, and theirs is still 2 years away. Why? It must be the leaden baggage that is Palm OS. It's become a poison, and Palm, Inc. a victim to it's own success. Nokia buying Palm would only infect the fast-developing Nokia with Palm's failure. Best to take what usability lessons can be learned and let it die peacefully.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Well, as far as I'm concerned the PalmOS application user interface is way better than gtk or anything running on Winmob devices. Go into edit mode? Just tap on the item. No buttons needed, no walking up and down menu hierarchies. And so on. Yes, I would like to have the API available for the NIT. If it's feasible? Could be that it isn't, or Access (and before that PalmSource) wouldn't have spent years on it without getting there.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

In terms of apps I think you'd be better off copying the Psion ones (i.e. calendar, todo, etc.).

If you want a runtime to support lots of pre-existing apps then what about porting the OPL runtime. Source code is available (written in funny Symbian C++) for anyone who fancies it.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Absolutely, the EPOC R5 built-in application suite is the de facto minimum standard for any mobile device. And it's 12 years old.

Agenda and Jotter were fantastic. And Data, Word and Sheet are all excellent applications to have - and gave a really rich and functional device out-of-the-box.

Having a port of ER5's Agenda with some standards-based synching OTA (e.g. SyncML) would be my idea of nirvana. I might have to give the latest GPE a try, admittedly, since it's been a while since I used it last.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

You're confusing Application Programming Interface with a User Interface. You're also confusing the past and the present.

One of the things I always loved about Palm devices is exactly what you describe: just tap and start writing. In Date Book, an event is created; in To-do, a todo list item is created, in Memos, a new note springs into existence. But "Date Book" is not the Garnet "Calendar"; to do anything with that calendar event or Tasks item, you have to go into Palm's annoying dialog boxes. Palm's UI has gotten cluttered in recent years, and it needs to be cleaned up.

Although choice of API influences User Interface, they're different animals. There's really no reason (AFAIK) why someone couldn't write a GTK-based calendar app that allowed you to just start typing to create a calendar event; it's just that no one has. But GTK is relatively consistent across platforms; a GTK app on Linux runs more or less the same way on Windows (Pidgin comes to mind), and with some caveats, on Maemo. Palm changes things to Garnet with every new device, so just because your app works on all devices today doesn't mean that it will run on Palm's new device tomorrow. This isn't because they've introduced any new features though; Palm OS "5.4.9" has been running every device they've made since the LifeDrive.

My point is, Palm is toast. Their OS is old, bad, spaghetti code. The mobile Linux community should learn from their UI successes (and mistakes) and make their own apps. Trying to bring the current Palm crud to Maemo is only asking for headaches. Nokia buying Palm (the original topic of this thread) would be throwing away money, as the software in question would be useless on Maemo or Symbian and the people in question have been working on the computer equivalent of an evolutionary deadend.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Actually, that is quite impossible on the 770-N800 (maybe not on the N810): You cannot start typing unless you have selected an editable area first. As Sean Luke pointed out, this is also one of the weaknesses of Maemo as a handheld platform.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Yeah, the N810's keyboard does offer advantages there. For instance, I can just type into fields over rdesktop without touching the screen.

But the way every app should work on the tablets, IMO, is that a cursor pops up in the first or default editable field in any and every app upon opening. It frustrate sme that this is not the case.

Just don't get me started on lack of a dedicated tab key on the N810... : /

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

And my point is: no one has.

Whether or not "someone can" is like discussing the capabilities of vaporware that hasn't even been designed yet, much less delivered. It's irrelevant.

What is relevant is: there IS a base of productivity apps out there. There IS a user community out there that is hanging on to that base of applications waiting for a new thing that will support them. If you want to discuss what someone could do, someone could steal both of those things by providing a compatibility layer to fill the gap until that application community ports to a new native platform. Give them a direction, that is solid, usable, and has promise, and you can bet that they'll take it.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Let's be realistic here, it would be far easier (less man-hours of work, licensing, etc.) to write a calendar app than to try converting the Palm API and from what you're saying you also need a binary compatibility layer so that some of the closed source apps (like the PIM apps) could be run.

Therefore you'd be better off petitioning Nokia to release a set of PIM tools if that's your main concern.

In terms of the application developers, if they see a toolchain that is reasonably easy to use, and the Nokia devices build up a reasonable following (in the same way that Psion and Palm did) then these people will simply change language/tools and write for the Nokia instead.

I do think that the controlling factor here is whether a given developer has one of these Nokia tablets. People don't write applications for platforms/devices that they don't own (unless they are similar enough e.g. 770 vs n800 vs n810). So my conclusion is that the more people buy these devices, the more applications will be written (which is reasonable I think). It's a shame that there's no official OS2008 for the 770, which is now very cheap and a good way to get developers to try the platform and move over from something else like Palm.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

I'm not as confused as you think.. I'm totally aware of the difference between UI and API, but I deliberately didn't make that distinction in my posting. The reason is that there is _nothing_ in the GTK+ API that can be used to give you the PalmOS UI. The whole GTK+ API is defined with another philosophy in mind, which is the traditional menu/hierarchical UI typical of most desktops.

As for the Garnet Calendar and Tasks - I'm still simply tapping. I'm not certain what exactly you're refering to, but maybe you're using it differently. For me the calendar couldn't be simpler to use.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Palm OS does actually have a paradigm that I wish maemo had: Useful core apps (e.g., PIM, life organizational stuff) that sync from the device to any computer and then can be altered on the computer (via PalmDesktop) and synced back to the device.

Functionality, gracefulness, age, love/hate Palm aside, this is very user-centered. Apple has succeeded in this as well with iTunes being their PalmDesktop.

If the ITs had a platform-independent desktop app that synced with a number of useful core apps (calendar, email, todos, contacts, mp3s, photos, video, etc.), plus it could be upgraded without losing all of that stuff (yes, I know this will happen with OS2008, but Palm has been doing it for decades), I think it would be very well received.

So, in this regard, I can see why the original poster felt led to begin this discussion.

Tim

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

And ultimately, this is where we differ. There IS a base of productivity apps out there, and it's dwindling more each day (why do you think PalmGear is being rolled into PocketGear?), there IS a user community out there, but again, it's dwindling more every day as people desert Palm for better, more advanced devices. And Palm OS is NOT solid (ask a 700p owner), increasingly LESS usable, and has no future. (Or were you talking about Maemo there?)

Ultimately, if one wants Palm apps on Maemo the best bet would be to talk to ACCESS, since they've actually gotten the closest at getting a Palm-compatible layer (GHost) running on an ARM/Linux platform. Maybe someone could convince them to port ACCESS Linux Platform to the tablet platform.

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

*cough*cough*
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/13/v...tablet-hoozah/
*cough*

Re: Bold Suggestion for Nokia
 

Let us know how well it works.