CeBIT: Samsung showing off a smartphone running on Palm 5 OS

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

CeBIT: Samsung has been showing off a smartphone running on Palm's latest OS

Equipped with a colour screen, camera and MMS client, the Samsung SGH-i500 is the first phone (for the European market) to use the latest version of PalmSource's OS, which runs on ARM-based chips such as Intel's Xscale.

While Palm OS smartphones have been available for some time, they've virtually all been for the US CDMA network standard, the only exception being Handspring's Treo series of phones. The Treo hasn't yet been updated to use Palm OS 5 and still uses the Motorola Dragonball processor.

The SGH-i500 is a clamshell design phone with a 320x320 pixel, 65,000-colour TFT touch screen. A 333,000-pixel digital camera is also included, and a small sub-display on the casing allows you to see a preview when taking a photo of yourself. There's also a built-in fill flash for the camera, unusual for a camera phone. Other features include a SD card slot, USB Hotsync connection, and a WAP 2.0 browser.

The SGH-i500 has around 200 hours standby time and 200 minutes talk time.

Albert Chu, vice president business development for PalmSource, the developers of Palm OS, said that while "Palm OS-based smartphones have a 75 per cent market share in the US," the penetration into European markets was far less. PalmSource is aiming to remedy the dearth of GSM-compatible products based on its OS by setting up a European research and development centre in France. This centre will focus on wireless systems such as GSM and GPRS.

Chu added that Palm OS 5's great strength was that running on ARM-based processors meant there were multiple chip manufacturers who could supply vendors of Palm OS 5-based devices. PalmSource has no prescriptive reference designs, so designers were free to innovate with different form factors for their products. One such example is the Fossil PDA watch.

Negotiations with UK networks are still taking place, so Samsung was unable to give details of availability or pricing for the SGH-i500 at CeBIT. Details of services available for the SGH-i500 were similarly thin on the ground, although Chu commented "Many different network services are possible, such as network HotSync, or over-the-air application delivery."

[Guest yatpeak]

Interesting, but I can't understand why they'd go for Palm as opposed to Microsoft, just my opinion though.

Wyatt

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Interesting, but I can't understand why they'd go for Palm as opposed to Microsoft, just my opinion though.

Wyatt

To quote my own quote... ""Palm OS-based smartphones have a 75 per cent market share in the US..." so, it's not exactly a new phenomenon... just new HERE. But surely, the rationale is easy enough to understand. Back when Windows 3.0 was released, the software I used more than almost any other was a budget DTP package called "Timeworks". It was re-released in a Windows 3.0 version, and an updated GEM version (an early DR Mac OS clone GUI that Apple went to court over, and won - it remained the Atari GUI.) I had BOTH versions running on a then-sexy 386DX20. With Windows' massive overhead, compared to the tiny GEM overhead, the resources remaining to actually run SOFTWARE was massive, and Timeworks for DOS was blisteringly fast compared to the sluggish Timeworks for Windows. Mobile smartphones generally run on low-power chips (unlike laptops, people expect better than two hours of use before the battery runs out) So, the choice is between an OS with a low resource footprint - making it fast on any given hardware - or a sawn-off version of Windows that's then sawn-off even more, and runs like wading through cold treacle on the same hardware. Win98SE will (just about) run on a 486SX66 with 8 meg of RAM. It's a fairly GOOD operating system. But it's totally inappropriate for that particular hardware. DOS and Win3.11 is a better combination. Sooo... until they start putting Pentium 2 or equivalent chips into phones, you have the choice of Win9X cut down to the barest essentials and running slow, or something less ambitious running at an acceptable speed. There's even been sufficient demand that Linux-powered PDA's are being released, allowing you to chose not only the hardware... but also giving you the choice to pick your OWN "balance point" betwen speed and functionality.

[Guest yatpeak]

Sorry about that, I was tired and didn't read it fully.

Thanks,

Wyatt

[Guest MECX]

i bet the palm phones are soo much faster than ours--there is also alot of software that could possibly be transfered over from the palm PDA's--i would like a play with one of these phones when there released.

[Guest Syvwlch]

I have a budy that has one of these Palm-based phones.

It's kinda like the reports from the P800/SPV flamewars... it's much more PDA-like than phone-like. It's big, flat, and you look daft holding it to your face. Has a touch screen, and runs all the palm apps on it.

Oh, wait a minute. Sounds like an XDA, doesn't it?

In other words, it's the battle-field next door, where PocketPC and Palm slug it out, with Phone Edition, and whatever the Palm variant is called.

Not that a few stray rounds won't fall our way :)

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Surely the key issue here is that Windows was NOT designed to work on the minimal hardware found in a mobile phone. Hell, the first version that took off (Win 3.0) did so by a slice of amazing luck - it wouldn't run on a 286, and cheap 386's were the byproduct of a coincidental price war between hardware component makers. Running Windows on a phone is always going to require a MAJOR loss of functionality. Palm, Symbian, Epoch... all started out as OS's written specifically for PDA's. One might reasonably expect them all to do the job better on a mobile phone than something else with a built-in fake Windows front end GUI. Horses for courses: nobody is going to want to use Epoch or Symbian on a Pentium 4 system. Trying to get Windows to run on a low-power ARM chip makes about as much sense. Having said that... how long before Microsoft starts blowing its trusted old "compatibility!" bugle - and warning of dire consequences if ALL the software you use doesn't come from the same source (i.e. them!) The UK government put that tired old warhorse to the test last year when investigating alternatives to MS Office. Sun Office files are as compatible as the need to be with Microcsoft Office, and "retraining" staff to use the new (and significantly cheaper!) product takes all of 20 minutes. Henceforeth, 50% of new purchases of office software by HMG will be from Sun, not Microsoft - at an estimated saving of £9m. When the government has shown that the emperor's cloths aren't there, one has to wonder if industry will follow. If they do, then one of Microsoft's few profitable areas will dip into the red for the first time.

[Guest Syvwlch]

The point is, if you don't have enough power to run your OS on a device... wait a year or two.

We now have a cool 100-200 MIPS in handheld devices... woulda boggled our minds a few years back.

You're quite right that WinCE has issues on small platforms, but the platforms are growing more and more powerful...

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Back when Windows 95 first came out, I ran a cottage industry using an early version of Partition Magic and IBM's OS/2. I'd reduce the size of the primary partition using PQM, create an extended partition at the end of the drive, then start to install OS/2 - enough to install the bootmanager and create and format a new primary partition in the free space. The reason was simple - although at the time the official line was "It's impossible", customers got a PC that could run DOS and Windows 3.11 OR Win95. Why would anyone want to? Well, back then, there were almost zero applications that ran faster or as reliably under Win95 as they did under Win3.11 (Specifically MS Office 4.3) There was, in other words, almost no logical reason to run Win95 at all. (reflected in slaes - they broke records for the first wek - when people were buying based on hype - then dropped off a cliff.) BUT people WANTED Win95. No logic or reason - they just WANTED it, because it was new and sexy. My solution gave them a machine that booted into a "DOS and Win3 or Win95?" choice, and enabled them to do their REAL work under Win311... but were able to play with Win95 and boast that they'd got it. How times change: "I've got a phone with a sawn off version of a sawn off version of Windows!" I've just upgraded from a Motorola T2288e (one of the first WAP phones) to an Alcatel 303. The new phone has a couple of extra features (larger ring tone choice, alarm clock, easier-to-use phone book, "vibrate" ring...) and cost £20 at Tescos. (Special offer with £50 worth of groceries) Virgin unlocked it for free, and now it shows the Virgin Logo when you switch on, and Orange's in use. For email and web access, I've got an ADSL link; as a "charter member" of the V21 ADSL service I pay just £20 a month. For any notes I might make I've got the fastest truly random access solid-state piece of kit on the market - and it's truly TINY. It's called "paper", and I can usually be putting my biro back in my pocket before most PDA users have finished booting. I'm reasonably convinced that 90%+ of PDA and Smartphone owners are fashion victims - just like those early Win95 adopters.

[Guest ClintEastman]

The phone in question.

Source

Bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger......

[Guest Syvwlch]

Big Ron,

i think we'll find, over time, that there are compelling reasons to move to pervasive communicating devices that we carry with us. These reasons will have little to do with things like taking notes or sending email, because, as you so rightly point out, we already have tools to do so, some of them millenia old.

Some of these reasons may even be good for society, and not so good for you as an individual.

I agree WIN95 didn't perform better than Win 3.1, and certainly not better than OS/2! But remember that was when we really started to get on the internet. It was the first time the windows in Windows opened on the outside world, rather than cushioned us (however lamely and shakily) from what was going on inside our PCs...

My first W95 PC was a laptop, and, tho it didn't have my first modem (had one before to direct dial to friends and stuff), it had my first AOL account. It was a real love affair. Just like the previous ones, and the ones since, and my Palm, which I retired a full year before I got the SPV... rediscovering Paper!

It's the paradigm shifts that come with the new versions that are interesting to watch, with MS. Not the functionality or solidity.

Look at XP : Media Center Edition, TabletPC, and the appearance of WinCE SmartDisplays to connect to XP's RDM.

But, in the end, I agree, the early adopters come for the hype, and are fashion victims, and we WANT the technology to surprise us, and suddenly, after a DivX film we didn't need to watch, or a GameBoy game we coulda played on the GBC gathering dust at home, change the way we live in a very fundamental way.