Palm Pre Operating System and Legacy Applications

Jan 22, 2009 in Pre Operating System

Palm Pre OS, Living in the Cloud

Yesterday I indicated that the new Palm OS would have support for the thousands of legacy applications. The actual answer is more like yes and no. The yes part of the answer is that palm supports having third parties write new applications which will emulate the old applications. There will soon be an SDK available for developers to use to write applications. The "no" part of the answer is the new OS is built on a totally different set of assumptions.

The new Palm OS with its always on connection is designed to be able to access information from where ever it is stored. Meaning that it is not necessary to physically store the information on the device itself. Legacy applications built for previous Palm systems will not be supported directly by Palm itself. You can find more information here: http://developer.palm.com/

For those who have depended on an SD card for back-up (in fear of a hard reset possibility) the ability to retrieve and replace information is now supplied by the internet. Leaving the physical storage to other devices more suited for the job. Here is a quote from Matt Crowley, product manager at Palm.
This quote was taken from his responses on a Facebook forum

Post #11
1 reply
Matt Crowley (Palm) wrote on January 21, 2009 at 9:48pm
Great questions. Thanks for getting involved and sharing your excitement about Palm Pre.

Okay, let me get into some of these questions and comment. Some I can answer, some I can’t. Some you won’t like, some you will. I will do my best here. But whatever the case I do appreciate your input and it does matter.

microSD:
"Design" was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent. We wanted to maintain a slick curved slider design without building out too much thickness. When you look at the two parts of the product and see how thin they really are, you may be amazed that we were able to fit everything in. And yes, all the stuff does fit.

The other advantage of embedded memory is that you have a large amount of storage out of the box for media and files. Including 8GBs of storage on the phone is a large amount of storage for many people, but not all. Yes, not all. We know that not everyone will be happy, but that is one of many decisions that needs to be made and the product goals help define these decisions.