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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FR1 who wrote (111)	2/27/2000 6:50:00 PM
From: Tony Harper	Respond to of 6784

I don't know who makes the screens. The whole device is contracted out. But your second question "will phones kill PDAs? In the U.S. it will be a long time coming. I know of nobody that travels that is in love with their cell phone in the U.S.. In Europe, they only have a small area to cover, they don't have the problem we do. They claim we will have support as good as Europe in 5 years, don't believe it, more like 7-10 years. Our market is too fragmented. We have a lot of consolidation to do before we will solve the wireless thing here. JMHO Tony

To: FR1 who wrote (111)	2/27/2000 9:32:00 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6784

Franz, The question that I have is regarding the Palm OS. I have been awaiting the introduction of a color LCD screen for some time in the Palm platform. It seemed that the only reason not to have a color screen was the energy consumption issue as outstanding battery life has been a big plus for Palm users. With the Palm IIIc I expected more multimedia features and support of a removable flash memory solution... Message 12969572 ...and was disappointed when it didn't happen. The article in Barron's suggests that the 16 bit Palm OS may be holding it back. Is this the reason multimedia was left out of Palm IIIc??? But Palm faces serious problems, not the least of which is that the visionaries who created the Palm Pilot in the first place, Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, left the company last year to start rival Handspring. Then there is the Palm operating system, which is rapidly becoming outdated. The problem is that Palm runs on a 16-bit operating system in a world that is rapidly migrating to 32-bit systems. The difference between the two in terms of speed and efficiency is enormous, as anyone who's upgraded his children's 16-bit Nintendo game player to a 32-bit Sony Playstation can testify. Competitor Psion, on the other hand, runs on the 32-bit EPOC operating system. Why not simply rewrite the software? In a word: cost. By some estimates, the work involved in upgrading the Palm operating system to run on a 32-bit processor would take 100 man years. Ausdauer