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Originally Posted by Gatton
Uh oh. And here I was thinking of picking up a Z72  Pretty interesting read. |
I think the "dead end" that Marty is talking about is, from his perspective, something that we come to down the road a bit. He believes ACCESS will deliver Palm OS for Linux (under some name that won't have "Palm" in it, of course) but will eventually decide to give it an end of life. It's still a matter of speculation what the reason for that decision would be. Does he believe they'll have trouble selling it to device vendors like PalmSource apparently had with Cobalt? Does he think they'll decide they can do better by focusing on their own way of doing phone applications on Linux, which uses NetFront as a GUI engine? And if so, what would be the reason they decide that? Some kind of technical limitations with Palm OS for Linux? Something that takes nothing away from Palm OS but makes the NetFront application engine inherently more promising, either technically or from a marketing standpoint? We don't know and Marty can't tell us.
I found it somewhat frustrating talking to Marty about this because the NDA meant he couldn't really explain why he held the opinions he did. So I had no way to evaluate whether his skepticism about the long-run prospects for Palm OS would be considered justified by an objective person party to the same information. He's obviously very knowledgeable and I think he's a good guy, but he's also human and he just went through an unhappy separation from PalmSource. The fact that he has been so publicly vocal with these negative opinions leads me to believe there's some emotion involved. I learned a lot in talking with him and think his judgment in many topics we discussed is probably very sound, but on the question of the fate of Palm OS I consider his proclamations to be yellow flags not red ones.
Definitely food for thought for any Palm enthusiast, but I suspect that even Marty would be quick to tell you that the concerns he has shouldn't keep you from buying a Palm OS device today.