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Palm OS out the Window

Posted on 22 Nov 2005 at 16:33

Mark Needham assesses the PDA market following Palm's decision to 'surrender' to Microsoft

I've been using the 650 for a month now. At first, I was delighted with how easy it was to set up to receive my work emails. My Treo 600 could be set up to sync with my Yahoo! email account, which was fine, but the 650 can be set to pull email from an Exchange server at preset intervals. Sometimes, I've even found that email arrives onto my Treo before it appears on my desktop PC! But the 650 isn't the most stable machine I've used, and when it crashed - thus withholding my PIN number when I was at the head of a long queue at the station, trying to buy a ticket with my Chip-and-PIN credit card - I began to wonder about moving on to the Orange SPV 500 smartphone. Derek Cohen, director of online survey company Demographix, is a long-term Palm user who's done just that. When I asked him what his favourite Palm device of all time was, he waxed lyrical about the Palm Vx: 'It was sexy to hold. It was fast. It had decent memory for the time. And it definitely passed the shirt-pocket test.' But when I asked what he uses now, he had to admit that he'd succumbed to the 'why carry two devices with you' argument and had switched to a smartphone.

Stuart McKnight is an old friend and one-time Palm enthusiast - when he worked at a large investment bank, he tried (and failed) to get his employer to reimburse the cost of his Palm V on expenses. Nowadays, he's managing director of the corporate finance boutique Ascendant (www.ascendant.ltd.uk) and has moved on to a BlackBerry. His former employer now gives out BlackBerrys to all corporate finance staff and requires them to be carried at all times.

But now the Treo can receive email itself, maybe it will start making some impact on these corporate chequebooks.

Stephen Colvin is president of Dennis Publishing Inc, New York, and he recently replaced the mobile phones of all his sales and marketing staff, plus some senior executives, with Treo 650s running GoodLink email synchronisation. In issuing a unit that's both an email device and a usable phone, he feels that he's jumped ahead of competitors that issued BlackBerrys to their staff last year: 'The software that comes with the unit, VersaMail, is useless,' he told me when I asked about reliability, 'but GoodLink is great.'

If you're one of the people who've stuck with Palm through thick and thin, please email me at feedback@widget.co.uk to say whether you'll be staying loyal to Palm devices, even with a Microsoft OS. Or are you one of those Palm users who looks back with nostalgia at the Palms of yesteryear, but now uses a BlackBerry?

Hosted email

A survey I read recently by Forrester Research, 'Take up on Outsourced Services', claimed that just under 20 per cent of small or medium-sized business owners were thinking of outsourcing their email services, which surprised me. I've always thought of our email server as something that sits in the corner of our basement, rather than some remote bought-in service. But when I was talking about Palms to my friend Stuart, mentioned above, he also told me how he'd come to outsource his email service. He'd just finished a fundraising project for a software developer and was relaxing at the pub with his client, talking about the need for archiving. 'Do you back up your email system?' asked this client. 'Of course', replied my friend staring at his shoes. 'Every day?' the client persisted, with a wicked gleam in his eye. 'What would happen if your email went off the air for a week and you lost all records since the last time you backed up?'