The Gadgets Page

The news in the air is that Palm is dead. They created the Palm Pilot and STARTED the palm computing revolution a decade ago, but what are they doing lately? With their stock plummeting, there are people out there saying that Palm is dead. Even Joy of Tech commented on it:

• The Joy of Tech comic… Desert Palm.

Considering that Palm was at CES for only one day, didn’t have a booth on the convention floor and only a suite at the Venetian, I’m not surprised by the lackluster earnings. They MUST have known that they were hurting for funds and that’s why they skimped on CES this year.

Here are Kevin Rose’s thoughts on this subject:

Palm IS dead, but they have been dead for a LONG time. It just took the tech world nearly three years to NOTICE their decaying corpse. I knew they were dead when I wrote this entry about putting video on the Treo.

• Gadgets Page » How To Put Your DVD on Your iPod or Treo

It took me a LONG time to just figure out how to convert a movie file and put it on my Treo. If you look at my face in that video, you can just SEE the frustration and exhaustion from dealing with this issue. Instead of an easy way that just worked, I had to jump through hoops, search for software and even write a whole tutorial so I would remember how to do it again.

When Apple released the iPhone and I was able to just download a movie and immediately put it on my phone, I heard the death rattle of Palm from across the country. I imagined all those years of being betrayed by Palm. They made machines that had the capability of playing music and video, but made it so convoluted, complicated and inconvenient that I was never able to get it to work consistently.

That was in JULY of 2007! Palm died a long time ago, folks. It just took you guys three years to notice the smell.