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gummycat
10-21-2004, 10:35 PM
I am about to return my T5 and it is unfortunate. It is very close to being a great device. The tablet fullscreen and the new battery are GREAT!! It has a lot going for it. But then you pulled a Sony and added some kooky feature that taints the experience (e.g. No landscape or cpu horsepower on the TH).
I would have been thrilled if you (PalmOne) had just skipped the whole idea of the "USB storage" concept on the T5. The impact it is going to have on the software community is really sad. I got a sense for this when the T3 came out, but figured it was just waiting for Cobalt anyway... but a year later and you do it again... only worse.


The amount of time spent by developers to work around your kludges and bugs should be charged back to you. The work they will need to do is mostly for a loss as it is mostly to appease people like us (who know there actually is 3rd party software) who do not represent a new sale and simply want to upgrade to a new device. Almost every single marketing campaign you put forth speaks so proudly of the thousands of 3rd party programs and developers, and yet this is how you thank them. Shame. Shame. Take a look at your competition. Look at what mistakes they made in the past (and continue to but are at least beginning to moving in the right direction). Learn from it. Heck, learn from yourselves. Take a look in the mirror from a few years back. You spoke so proudly of how you were simple and your platform made developers lives so easy. Your beloved 3rd party developers are being loyal to their customers by supporting this flow of kludges. Why can't you be just as loyal? The economy may be tough, but it's not going to get any better for you if you skimp corners and rush things to market.


It has been brought up in these threads that the typical poster on this site is not your target consumer. If this is true, you are sadly missing a big part of why you have grown to begin with. Word of mouth. I have personally directly contributed to more than a hundred people buying your platform/devices. It was an easy sell because I believed in them and find them to be invaluable tools in the workplace. Devices and decisions like this make the sell harder... because I do not believe in them. Maybe I am giving myself and others like me too much credit in our "Palm Market Influence". Maybe. Maybe not. It's getting harder to sell someone on the simplicity of Palm when you release devices like this and sitting next to it on the display counter is a PPC (ugh) with hardware specs to make any person jealous for roughly the same price.


I have a question and it may, admittingly, be naive of me... why not just put a darn standard USB slot in a device. Then, just provide a software driver for it to support a few standard USB devices (keyboard, USB Storage Key). Developers could even add drivers to support any devices you do not support out of the box. Imagine how cool it would be to use any USB device you wanted (with the appropriate driver of course). Now, I know USB specs require a certain level of voltage coming through the slot, but with the bigger battery maybe that's not so bad. It's like bluetooth. Use it when you want (and take the battery hit), but turn it off when you do not (no battery hit). You want to use a USB keyboard from your PC... voila, you want to use a USB storage key WITHOUT bringing some goofy cable with you?... voila. etc. I'll admit, I am a software developer and not a hardware guy, but if you ask me, this gives you even more of an ultimate laptop replacement, instant compatibility with existing devices and let's developers decide if they want to take advantage of it rather than forcing them to support some buggy memory configuration that you will never fix yourselves.


If I sound bitter, I do not mean to. I like PalmSource/PalmOne a lot. I want you to succeed. I want you to get back to real solutions that provide true value and real innovation while maintaining compatibility and simplicity.
I would be remiss if I did not give credit, though, for the effort being put forth on the new Palm Development Environment based on Eclipse. Bravo for this, PalmSource. It's a great step forward. It beats the pants off of the FalchDev environment I spent money on but later found the company was going under (I was too cheap to buy CodeWarrior... live and learn).


Here's to hoping for a return to your roots,


Mike
jjesusfreak01
10-21-2004, 11:05 PM
Great Post! I agree completely. Back to the roots, this is true innovation.
Abosco1
10-21-2004, 11:29 PM
Sorry, but I didn't get anything useful out of your post. Why can't you just say in *one sentence* why you returned the T5? Say in another sentence what features you wanted instead?

If you want to write a rant, at least put in some paragraphs so its easier to read.

-Abosco
jjesusfreak01
10-21-2004, 11:52 PM
If you wanna critisize, register!
GadgetGuru
10-22-2004, 01:04 AM
Abosco, this is not a why I returned the T5 thread. It's a what went wrong at PalmOne thread.
gummycat
10-22-2004, 07:47 AM
Abosco,

I hear you. I have another thread where I mentioned I bought this from Staples. I was going to add this there, and just limit it like you said. But as I wrote the response, it grew and grew such that it seemed the topic was shifting and thus warranting a new thread. It didn't do my point justice to just say things in one sentence (not sure when that became a rule). I am a software developer (although not professionally for Palm Apps), and this kind of change would not be tolerated in the Java community from one version to the next. I wish we knew for sure who was to blame, though. Is it PalmSource, or did PalmOne tweak things poorly to accomodate their hardware idea?


In a nutshell, the main reason I returned it is DateBk5 and Shadow Plan. These programs are the number one reason I have a Palm. I still can't rule out that I will buy a T5 at some later point once the kinks are worked out. I DO like the T5. It's just unfortunate that the work is left to the developers like this. Hence my desire to start a new thread.


Regarding the lack of paragraphs... I edited my post four times and could not get the carriage returns to stay. As you can tell by my posting stats, this is not something I do often, so maybe I am missing something basic here. Feel free to offer a tip!


Thanks!


Mike
Sleuth255
10-22-2004, 10:58 AM
Heck, I thought it was a pretty good rant myself!
Sid
10-22-2004, 01:25 PM
Abosco,

I hear you. I have another thread where I mentioned I bought this from Staples. I was going to add this there, and just limit it like you said.
<snip>
Regarding the lack of paragraphs... I edited my post four times and could not get the carriage returns to stay. As you can tell by my posting stats, this is not something I do often, so maybe I am missing something basic here. Feel free to offer a tip!


Thanks!


Mike
Mike, don't feel obligated to respond to unregistered posters. :)
BTW, your post was thoughtful and interesting.
matrix42
10-22-2004, 02:11 PM
Great rant, I totally agree!, I have sympathy for the developers who now have to spend time fixing stuff instead of evolving their offerings. I find it appalling that P1/PS did not give anybody a heads up on this (or did they?), I think they released the T5 as an experiment, you know let your clients pay for and test the product! and to generate some revenue at Xmas time. Hopefully they will patch up the Treo 650 so it will not suffer from same software problems as the T5 or perhaps that was/is the T5's purpose in life!!
Whateverinny
10-22-2004, 02:16 PM
Sorry, but I didn't get anything useful out of your post. Why can't you just say in *one sentence* why you returned the T5? Say in another sentence what features you wanted instead?

If you want to write a rant, at least put in some paragraphs so its easier to read.

-Abosco

I see no purpose in posting something like that, especially under an anoynomous identity.

Gummycat, your post was insightful and intelligent. I completely understand your position, I worked for many years in the IT industry in Project management, and the truth of the matter is that there are so many cross purposed factors that go into product development, that the most serious issues often get ignored only to be escalated down the line for developers to clean up. Technology development is often guided by accountants and the manufacturers, and it is the developers and consumer's that suffer. I have led so many projects where my strategic insight and that of my programmer's was utterly dismissed by executive management. And then several years down the line they come back and pointed fingers at us. If you remember Y2K and that whole mess, well that was a prime example of what happens in the computer industry.

I think what you explained is all too true and it was extremely well written.
GadgetGuru
10-22-2004, 04:41 PM
Interesting to see that with all this PalmOne bashing, no one from there had shown up to defend their product. Not here, not at PIC, not at Brighthand. Only Ben from Palmsource is left to fend for Palm. If this were about bashing Microsoft, you could almost be sure, that there will at least be a few Microsoft MVPs depending what they see as their turfs.
Whateverinny
10-22-2004, 05:08 PM
PalmOne is just like Microsoft: planned obsolesence, horrible customer service, poor documentation and/or manuals, incompatability issues, the constant need for patches, once you can get the product to behave one week later something different goes wrong and FINALLY the money to pay their marketing department's to make consumers believe their product is the cutting edge and the others are inferior.

Oh well, I love being an American, but capitalism does have its downside.
clie_wannabe
10-22-2004, 05:46 PM
Sorry, but I didn't get anything useful out of your post. Why can't you just say in *one sentence* why you returned the T5? Say in another sentence what features you wanted instead?

If you want to write a rant, at least put in some paragraphs so its easier to read.

-Abosco

stand by your word and register!!!
Spiral
10-22-2004, 10:38 PM
Abosco is an old user http://www.1src.com/forums/member.php?userid=6920
Sid
10-23-2004, 11:00 AM
Interesting to see that with all this PalmOne bashing, no one from there had shown up to defend their product. Not here, not at PIC, not at Brighthand. Only Ben from Palmsource is left to fend for Palm. If this were about bashing Microsoft, you could almost be sure, that there will at least be a few Microsoft MVPs depending what they see as their turfs.
That would give credability to the many criticisms, and PalmOne does not want to do that, IMHO, PalmOne, if it has even read any the criticisms, is hoping that the majority of its target consumers do not frequent the Palm discussion sites, once again, just my opinion.