Solo Media Forums

[Jeff Kirvin]

PalmOne makes great products, but they consistently prevent the user and developer communities from making them more successful.

Let me give you an example. As much as I like the device and think it's a great move for PalmOne, I will not be buying a LifeDrive. Why? Because I can't run Fitaly on it. Fitaly works fine on the T5 and the T3, but the LifeDrive, which one would think would have the same DIA and PINlet architecture, does not work. PalmOne changed something internally and the existing methods Textware Solutions used to patch into the Dynamic Input Area no longer do the trick. Worse, instead of just not working, installing the T5 version of Fitaly on the LifeDrive sends it into a reset loop (which, I'll point out, can be broken by a warm reset; no need to resort to the dreaded hard reset).

What is Textware Solutions going to do about it? Nothing. Jean Ichbiah, the president of the company, says they're tired of reverse engineering whatever PalmOne changed this time just to make their products work. They will not release a LifeDrive version of Fitaly until PalmOne tells them exactly what changed and how to make Fitaly work.

At the time of this writing, PalmOne has not provided that information.

Another icon of the Palm OS development community, CE Steuart Dewar of Pimlico Software, had no end of trouble in getting his Datebk5 program to work at a reasonable speed on the newer PalmOne devices. Eventually he had to vastly increase the size of the code by adding the ability to autodetect the custom PalmOne databases and write to those instead of the standard PIM databases provided by PalmSource. He had to completely reverse engineer and work around the new DataManager to make Datebk5 work.

The two companies I've mentioned are old hands at Palm OS development, and know their way around the standard APIs pretty well. And it still took them months to figure out on their own what PalmOne changed.

This is intolerable.

PalmOne has to do a better job at working with developers. It's no secret that a big part of the success of the Palm OS platform is the sheer volume of third party applications. While I understand that over 70% of Palm users never install any third party applications, the rest of us do. I use Life Balance instead of Tasks, ZLauncher instead of the default launcher, pedit instead of Memos, the list goes on and on. There is no excuse for programs to break because PalmOne made a change to the operating system and didn't tell anyone about it.

Think about it this way. Imagine that HP made a fundamental change to Windows that prevented Firefox from running. Think there would be an uproar? Think HP would be under some heat to either undo the change or publish open documentation of the change and how it works in the system? So why don't we hold PalmOne to the same standard?

Check out the rest of this rant in the forums!

[Jeff Kirvin]

But it doesn't stop there. PalmOne also has a tendency to ignore another potential resource, their own users. How long have we been asking for the 1k clipboard limit to be lifted? It didn't make a lot of sense to have a clipboard that could only hold 1k of text when we had 4k memos and notes, but it makes even less sense with 32k memos and notes. I've seen pleas in the user community for years begging that PalmOne fix this, but they either haven't never saw those pleas or decided to ignore them.

Alan Grassia, a friend of mine and a moderator over at Brighthand, has been sending PalmOne reports for months of the key issues that appear on the Brighthand forums. PalmOne never communicates what actions they are taking based on information gathered from the discussion boards nor indicates how they are addressing those issues.

Think of what PalmOne could do if they embraced the user community. The NVFS blowup never need have happened and they wouldn't need guys like me to explain the new system to the user community. PalmOne had the opportunity to play up NVFS as a great innovation, get users excited about it, long before the T5 and Treo 650 launched. And yet, now we're on the second generation of NVFS devices and many users still don't understand what changed, why it changed, why it's a good thing (with apologies to Martha) and why they don't want to go back to \"real\" RAM after all.

Imagine the impact it would have had if PalmOne had seeded the biggest loudmouths in the user community (Strider_mt2k, JungleMike, even the infamous Mike Cane) with LifeDrives that would be theirs to keep a week before the device launched (with NDAs active until the launch date, of course). It would have cost them a few thousand bucks to give away a dozen or so LifeDrives, but would they make that up and more in free publicity and influential, calming voices talking up the devices online?

This is the age of the Internet. More people than most businesses realize turn to Google and other web sources when researching a purchase. Yes, the geeky brother in law is still important, but a lot of people find their way to Brighthand, 1SRC and other megasites and lurk, seeing what others think. I have friends who sell cars that curse the new Internet-informed customer. Do you really think buying a $500 PDA doesn't deserve a quick trip around Google? How many sales of the T5 and LifeDrive, both very good PDAs if you follow instructions (don't install over an old Palm installation), has PalmOne lost because of the rampant griping of a few folks online?

If PalmOne is serious about staying in business against not only RIM and Microsoft, but the new Nokia 770 and more devices in that vein, they need help. PalmOne needs to have several people in their development department (did you know that 80% of PalmOne's engineers are software engineers?) dedicated to communicating any changes they make to third party developers long before the devices hit the streets. They should also have some marketing folks whose job is to surf the forums all day, every day, actively engaging with the user community and establishing healthy relationships with power users.

Ignore this advice at your peril, PalmOne. You're blowing a great opportunity, but you can't do it forever.

[Anonymous]

What he said!
We can help.


Jeff, your Fitaly woes remind me of a very similar situation -the G1 issue.

Perhaps in THIS area, Palm could loosen up a little bit to create or allow an open standard for the DIA?
That way any input alternative could be used by anyone, making a PalmOS machine even more attractive to newcomers!

Not being technical in this area, I'm sure it's easier said than done, but writing and input styles vary with each person.
Surely there's room for different input styles?

I can switch between them on my TH55: Decuma, Grafitti, or tappable keyboard layout thingie. (Relax, it's just there, it's not about Clie)

...the point is that it's possible, and under OS5 as well.

[Anonymous]

The thing that erks me is what is possible when you look at companies like Microsoft and Sybase. They seem to foster a relationship with their powerusers and end-customers. Sybase has had \"Team Sybase\" for years, and I recall reading or listening to a news article about Microsoft starting up a new group to get the work out about Longhorn at the grass roots level.

palmOne should very easily be able to get the ball rolling with some t-shirts and a handful of free devices for the folks doing the work. I know lots of people talk about how cool palmOne hardware is, but how much cooler would it be if palmOne was an active partcipant?

Alan G

[Jeff Kirvin]

[quote:df2234f4dc=\"strider_mt2k\"]Perhaps in THIS area, Palm could loosen up a little bit to create or allow an open standard for the DIA?

That way any input alternative could be used by anyone, making a PalmOS machine even more attractive to newcomers!

[Anonymous]

Well, for all those who think Jeff is an apologist for Palm One and PalmSource. I hope you can see that he does see another side. For one I agree with Jeff. If PalmOne wants to really grow this potential segement in the market, start talking with the developer and user community. Communicate folks, look at what Microsoft and Apple does. Get into talking with people.

PalmOne folks don't get insular and focus only on your internal environment. You need to build more feedback loops into your system and organization. Look at how strategic planning is really done, get someone to do an environmental scan and start looking why people are complaining.

One of Palm's claims to fame is the number of third party applications that can work on it. That competitve advantage can vanish unless Palm starts talking to the developer community. Come on folks, this is not the White House. You can let go of data once the product is released.
One of your bigger fans.

[Anonymous]

Jeff, you've touched on one of the biggest gripes I have with PalmOne and one that is, along with the refusal to include removable batteries with their devices, making me seriously consider dropping Palm altogether and just sticking with Pocket PC.

I don't understand PalmOne at all. They are developing a reputation for poor quality control, every new device represents a set of new problems and there is no guarantee of program compatibility. Say what you will, the scene on the Pocket PC side is NOWHERE near this chaotic.

Sigh - I really like my T3, and I love the programs I run on the Palm platform. But this business of breaking everything with each new device has got to stop.

Don

[Jeff Kirvin]

Palm Developers Gone Wild:

[quote:b5288f93f6=\"Dmitry Grinberg\"]yes yes i know. 5-way nav is built into the system control code and since i replaced it I have to rewrite it. the problem is that P1 being as nice as they are </sarcasm> do not share the internal structures of the resoruces used for this so if i feel like it i will reverse engineer this and then all devices will have 5-way nav and if i do not then you will have to pick between 5-way or skinUI. i probably wil lreverse it though