Palm purges staff, chops products

Palm is laying off up to ten per cent of its staff and cutting some product offerings as the company faces increasing competition in the smartphone market. The ten per cent figure comes from a tip-off received by Valleywag, who were able to confirm that the company is indeed laying off staff and would be dropping some projects …

[Nigel Wright]

Palm's o/s still is nice

It's functional, elegant and fairly reliable. You can get things done with it quickly, whereas Windows Mobile seems to take a multitude of steps to do simple things and is slow and clunky.

Palm's real weakness is multi-tasking (not than WinMo does it well-cos it doesn't). It also suffers in comparison to WinMo because Windows is what people are used to.

[Rob Haswell]

IMO PalmOS are still the best phones

PalmOS has that great balance of a clean, functional UI and extreme usability. Decades of fine tuning has gone into making it the best PDA money can buy, literally. I bought my 680 outright and it was worth every penny.

[Craig Vaughton]

Last chance saloon

I've gone through a number of Handspring and Palm products, from a Visor to a 680 and the OS is still one of my favourite phone/PDA OS to use. Friendlier than my Blackberry and far less annoying than Wince.

Trouble is as handheld technology moved on, the OS struggled to keep up. Palm OS 3.x was generally rock solid, but by the time 5.3 or whatever it was arrived with my 680, it was creaking at the seams, leading to numerious lock ups and reboots.

I genuinely hope Palm do manage to survive long enough to bring out a new OS, otherwise, they'll be another company who had great ideas, but couldn't move quick enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry.

[SImon Hobson]

Re: Last chance saloon

I agree, I've a Treo 650 myself and been using Palm devices for about 15 years. They really do not have long to get this out before their market has moved on.

WiFi, proper Bluetooth, Exchange client, and a few other minor things - they need to sort all these out to stand any chance of keeping their users.

I won't use Windoze, and there's lots to dislike about the iPhone - but the way things are going the iPhone is starting to look very attractive (if only it weren't on O2). I'd guess they've about a year at most - once people switch (and go through the new environment learning curve), they won't switch back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaporware

I think I will have my copy of Duke Nukem Forever before the new Palm OS sees any beta testers. I've heard this one for literally 4 years now. Remember when it was going to be (ooooh!) Linux-based?

[David Edwards]

All I want....

Is a tungsten TX with a phone in it and a camera. Thats all...all of the tings that palm need to do to make a perfect business PDA phone have been around for years yet they never put them in the same package (my mate had a Cle that was close to perfection) . And NO I DONT want a tiny keyboard or windoze. If I want to type ill get a little bluetooth one. PLEASE!