subject: Palm Web Information [print this page] Palm Web Information Palm Web Information
The death of those Palm contains been much talked about for the past few years. When Windows Mobile stepped up the game with version six.1, the Palm OS just couldn't keep up. They tried a few tricks, such as refurbished interface for the Centro, but to no avail.
By the time the Apple iPhone came on the scene with its incredible computing experience, Palm was beaten. The company that started the trend of personal digital assistants (PDA) suddenly seemed as and if it was at the wrong end of the shotgun, waiting with a blindfold and its last cigarette.
But there were rumblings within Apple about a mutiny. Clearly there was a rift within the development team for the iPhone. News started trickling through the grapevine about lots of Apple developers being poached by palm. What was palm thinking?
The answer came at this year's Consumers Electronic Show, as the company unveiled a new touchscreen device - the Palm Pre - and a new Operating System to go with it, the WebOS. If you were enamoured when you saw the iPhone OS, wait till you get a load of Palm's offering. The WebOS, for me, was love to start with sight.
In a demonstration video, the WebOS was faster, slicker, better looking and seemed more user-friendly than any operating system I have seen. One of the most talked-about features is it's ability to multi-task, running a number of applications at the same time without slowing down the device. The iPhone, as you may understand, doesn't support multi-tasking apart from a few choose tasks.
The ability of the WebOS to multi-task so effectively lies in it's construction itself. While Windows Mobile and other operating system require programming languages such as C++ to develop applications, Palm has based its platform on basic Internet development tools such as CSS, HTML and javascript. This makes the applications plenty less resource hungry and a large amount faster to run.
The reliance on such basic languages includes also made the WebOS a hit among the developer community, which consists of noted that it is the easiest major phone platform to code on. Hopefully, this means iPhone will not be the merely smartphone with a lot of applications.
