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No more Palm PDAs? We lose a great reading device
January 7, 2009 | 9:47 pm
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By Paul Biba
With the big announcement of the new device and OS coming from Palm shortly, I went over to the Palm site to see what was new. The site has been completely redone and is rather attractive. However something is missing.
The only thing on the site is phones – no PDAs. No Palm TX. I did a site search and there are accessories for the TX, and other units, but no mention of the units themselves. You can’t buy one from the Palm store either.
What a shame. The TX was a great reading device and I still use mine on occasion. The last time I saw Ed Colligan, the President of Palm, I suggested to him that the TX should be re-marketed as an e-book reader. He looked at me rather strangely!
Is it the end of an era? We’ll have to wait and see, but it certainly looks as if the Palm PDA has been put to sleep.
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Comments:
This is really horrible news. Sure, phones are great. But a cheap PDA with good battery life, that you don’t mind reading on because you don’t have to worry about depleting your batteries just before the important call comes in, and that you can use for occasional writing as well, is also valuable.
I still use both my Palm IIIxi and my HP Jornada regularly (as in several times a week each) for reading and writing.
I understand the wish to consolidate gadgets–in fact, I believe, ultimately, that we’ll all be equipped with a computer attached directly to our brain and projecting to our retinal nerves. Still, this is a sad moment–and possibly a rough moment for eBooks. You shouldn’t have to pay $100 a month for a data plan to be able to read books.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Hmm, this sounds very familiar.
(I’m currently considering getting my Dad a used Clié 415 from off Amazon for e-reading. I find it a little hard to sympathize.)
Well, I suppose it is a sad day, but hardly unexpected and I think, hardly the disaster that others are making it out to be.
The basic fact of the matter is that Palm is a sick company. It has sat on its old products and its old OS for way to long. As a result, we can’t even be sure there will be any palm products this time next year.
With respect to dedicated PDAs, well, I am not sure it is really dead. Rather, it has been replaced by more capable units. Smart Phones are the most obvious example since they are the ones whose use still most closely mimics the original PDA’s functionality, but they are hardly the only one. The iPod Touch and the Nokia internet tablets are both essentially scaled up PDAs as are a number of PMPs.
This is sad, but not unexpected. On the plus side, a whole lot o TX’s may appear on ebay and buy.com and other discounters unloading the last pallets from Palm’s warehouses, at low, low, low prices…