Comments on: No more Palm PDAs? We lose a great reading device

By: pond

pond — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:57:40 +0000

This is sad, but not unexpected. On the plus side, a whole lot o TX’s may appear on ebay and buy.com and other discounters unloading the last pallets from Palm’s warehouses, at low, low, low prices…

By: Bill McHale

Bill McHale — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:34:09 +0000

Well, I suppose it is a sad day, but hardly unexpected and I think, hardly the disaster that others are making it out to be.

The basic fact of the matter is that Palm is a sick company. It has sat on its old products and its old OS for way to long. As a result, we can’t even be sure there will be any palm products this time next year.

With respect to dedicated PDAs, well, I am not sure it is really dead. Rather, it has been replaced by more capable units. Smart Phones are the most obvious example since they are the ones whose use still most closely mimics the original PDA’s functionality, but they are hardly the only one. The iPod Touch and the Nokia internet tablets are both essentially scaled up PDAs as are a number of PMPs.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:17:36 +0000

Hmm, this sounds very familiar. (I'm currently considering getting my Dad a used Clié 415 from off Amazon for e-reading. I find it a little hard to sympathize.)

By: Rob Preece

Rob Preece — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:58:58 +0000

This is really horrible news. Sure, phones are great. But a cheap PDA with good battery life, that you don’t mind reading on because you don’t have to worry about depleting your batteries just before the important call comes in, and that you can use for occasional writing as well, is also valuable.

I still use both my Palm IIIxi and my HP Jornada regularly (as in several times a week each) for reading and writing.

I understand the wish to consolidate gadgets–in fact, I believe, ultimately, that we’ll all be equipped with a computer attached directly to our brain and projecting to our retinal nerves. Still, this is a sad moment–and possibly a rough moment for eBooks. You shouldn’t have to pay $100 a month for a data plan to be able to read books.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com