Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.
Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270
As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.
With the Centro it was pretty amazing when they dropped a maps application later on - as it didn't have GPS. In built up areas they managed pretty impressive accuracy just by cell tower triangulation.
I'm very split about the Centro. I used one for a while, but after years of Symbian phones, I just couldn't get over how poor the hardware and how dated the OS were in comparison, even though having all of my old Palm OS applications on my phone was great.
Nokia's N-series had GPS, Wi-Fi, and good cameras years before that and it was hard to lose all of that; Symbian had proper multitasking, persistent storage, and Unicode support; and between native Symbian and J2ME apps, the software ecosystem wasn't half bad either.
Aesthetically, I'll always be a fan of Palm OS, but I couldn't bring myself to actually use it as a daily driver due to all of these limitations.
Yeah, well people are misinformed. Unless there was something for the Newton that turned it into a phone, IBM was first to market in 1994 [1] The IBM Simon made calls, did data, had a paid 3rd party app, etc.
Besides Palm, Symbian (Mostly from Nokia, but some other companies made Symbian handsets), RIM's Blackberry, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile (with handsets from many OEMs) had established smartphones before Apple. Of course, the iPhone had much better sales, and changed the market in many ways, but the category was 12ish years old when Apple entered. Hardly inventing or first to market.
And, in any case, Japan had tons of what should be considered early smartphones. I was astonished the first time I saw one (and this was obviously before the iPhone). For some reason the iPhone managed to kill off the local Japanese industry though. Japan youngsters (and not only youngsters) are very fashion-oriented, which had more to do with the change than anything else.
The problem was the UI on the Japanese smartphones was completely unusable. Just how to go back to the previous menu differed between the different functions. I was there, I migrated my mother-in-law from her “galakei” to an iPhone. She went from barely even being able to take a picture (there was a dialog after each photo asking where to save it!! Wtf) to instant messaging and playing Pokémon Go.
Speaking of WAP, I actually found Palm.net very interesting.
Unfortunately, the Palm VII was only available in the US, and having to dial up via serial cable or infrared using a mobile phone kind of ruined the spontaneous information lookup aspect of it.
Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
I think it was their lack of vertical integration that did it. there were too many pieces that every developer needed to do, that made it really hard to make apps for it. compare that to the app store where Apple just takes a 30% cut, which is steep, but they do things for that 30%. On the consumer end of things, the actually affordable data plan with att at launch, which is more vertical integration, rather than letting the carriers do their thing, is what did it, imo.
Samsung SPH-i300, 7 years before iphone 1, and iphone 1 didn't even have apps.
I loved that thing. Audibl.com player app, 3rd party apps to integrate phone dialer and contacts db, internet... 14.4k internet but internet! email, browser, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client, thousands of random apps for every little thing like today, color grid icon home screen, touch screen, sdcard, in 2000 or 2001.
I'm going to blame it on Palm's flat refusal to move onto PalmOS 6. Every time a new device came out and it was still on PalmOS 5 the whole community was like "what the fuck are you doing?"
Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.