Getting to grips with my first Palm OS PDA
Original article date: July 2002
I have spent the last month getting to grips with my first Palm OS PDA.Two things have struck me: the first is that the pen-based interface I always swore I’d never touch is actually quite handy if you have to take notes halfway across a departure lounge while walking with a hands free cellphone; secondly, the PDA is pretty under-featured compared with my good old British Psion Series 3A. The built-in database sucks, the built-in ‘to do’ list is almost unusable, and there is no built-in spreadsheet at all (though, of course, all these things can be bought from third party vendors).
But the upside? Well, it has USB connectivity to my PC, and complete synchronisation with the company’s contact management software. This means that I have 5000 customers and possible customers in my pocket at all times, plus my synchronised diary, job list, and a passable email writing facility. In other words, it is supported.
Though all these things are just about available for the very latest Psion PDA, a lot of things aren’t – such as files downloaded from Mapquest.com after a route search, or the up to date American Airlines flight timetable.
Psion, you see, made a key mistake with its PDAs. Its software ran on its hardware, but no one else’s. Its forays into licensing the OS came too late, and the Palm OS pretty much stole the market.
Some believe that the Microsoft mini OS that runs on machines like the iPaq will eventually mean the end for the Palm OS. I don’t think so. Palm has learned the lesson that for a computer to survive, the OS needs to survive, and that’s far more likely if it is licensed widely to other hardware manufacturers. And if Psion learnt this too late with its PDA business, then it has at least shown that it’s learned the lesson with its Epoch OS: hence the Symbian venture to put Epoch on the world’s cellphones.
But here’s a question: why hasn’t the same lesson been learnt in the industrial control world? Why hasn’t the “Palm OS” of PLCs been born and taken over? And before you say IEC 1131, that’s a standard, not an OS. I’m thinking more in terms of choosing hardware on reliability but knowing that the software platform will be what exactly you know and love whoever you buy from. And you’ll immediately know how to program it. Of course you’ll have a range of software options to control your hardware: there’ll be lots of IEC1131 compatible ladder-based offerings, and maybe a good Java implementation or two. And you’ll write code for one machine, and use it for many machines, even if the next customer specifies a different hardware vendor.
I think that Microsoft has tried to muscle in on this with its WinCE forays, but could you see yourself actually controlling a line of presses with a WinCE based controller? The OS I’m after needs to come from someone with a reputation for understanding real-time control, and must be rock solid. Maybe QNX or Microware could pull it off. But to do so they need implementations on all major players’ platforms, plus a good load of applications to launch it with. Perhaps the industrial market just isn’t big enough for anyone to dare.
And while the various vendors still sell on being different, perhaps there’s too much of a gulf between what the users really want, and what the vendors are prepared to offer.
July 2002