James's Weblog

Obviously there’s the whole thing about the Palm Pre versus the iPhone, but Palm has had a tradition of following Apple’s moves, even ignoring the direct comparisons between the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton.

It’s a shame that Cobalt was stillborn; I think an upgraded version of Palm OS would have been exactly what I wanted. (ALP could be it, but it still hasn’t shipped on any actual devices, and being so late to the party, I suspect it might end up suffering the same fate as Cobalt.)

After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

(more…)

Several months ago I finally set up a simple software page to make some of the programs I’ve written available for download.

Then, in August, I mentioned one of my Palm OS applications in a comment on mytreo.net. The editors preferred it to the competition and added some of my programs to their download section (not with my permission, but I don’t mind):

• Card Autorun download page from mytreo.net
• Moxy download page from mytreo.net

As of this writing, both programs have perfect 10.0 ratings. Yay! (There is some slight bias, however, since Michael apparently gave one of them a 10.0 rating without having actually tried it. Jeffrey thinks that maybe Michael just knows quality software when he sees it.)

My Moxy program also got briefly mentioned about 43 minutes into some random podcast.

I bought a Treo 650 this week, and it’s awesome. It’s even inspiring me to do some programming for Palm OS again. Unfortunately, getting back into that groove is really hard.

I wrote a lot of great code while I was at Sony, but of course all that code is Sony-owned and outside of my grasp. To do any Palm OS development work again, I’d need to rewrite everything from scratch, which is demotivating because I’d be redoing work that I had done already and—since I’m now rusty at this—work that I had done better. It makes me feel like my life is progressing backwards.

Sony announced yesterday that they will not release any new CLIÉ handhelds in the U.S. this year:

Sony has divulged that they will not be releasing any new Clie Handhelds products in the coming fall. Sony will be suspending new Clie product development for the US while they reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market.

Sony has issued a press statement in which they announce they are going to reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market and will not introduce any new Clie handheld models in the us this fall.

While certainly significant, I think most web sites have blown this out of proportion a bit:

• It’s only for the U.S.. I expect that Sony will continue releasing new models in Japan.
• It’s only for this year. Palm OS 6/Cobalt will be out late this year, which will be a good time for Sony to get back on the saddle.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the news; Sony’s poor sense of direction was one of the many reasons why I quit. The writing had been on the wall for a long time, but Sony was too busy not listening to customers to read it.

It’s a good idea for Sony to re-evaluate their PDA plans, to do some soul-searching, and to find themselves. They can’t even figure out what the “CLIÉ” acronym stands for. Originally it meant “Communication, Link, Information, Entertainment.” After a year or two, I guess the Sony heads realized that it made no sense (especially considering that the CLIÉ line had no wireless communication abilities, had few accessories to connect to, and for the most part wasn’t very entertaining), so they changed it to the even more enigmatic “Creativity, Lifestyle, Innovation, Emotion” (or “Create Lifestyle with Innovation and Emotion”, depending on whom you ask). “What happened to the ‘Entertainment’ part?” we wondered, since that was the only part that (should have) made sense. Furthermore, all of the model numbers are prefixed with “PEG–“, which somehow stands for “Personal Entertainment Organizer.” Maybe it’s comprehensible in Japanese.

How did Sony manage to get itself lost like this?

Bad drivers. I’ve already complained about the management and its inability to ask for directions.

Poor steering. What do you expect from a huge, 18-wheeled corporation? The CLIÉ handheld line is stuck; Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue its original goal for mobile entertainment without intruding into the markets of its PSP and iPod-wanna-be products. Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue the smartphone market either—one of the last bastions of hope for PDAs—because Sony-Ericsson already is entrenched in the cellphone space. Instead, CLIÉ models are shoehorned into hybrid entertainment/network-communicator/PDA roles. In many respects, they’re good PDAs, but they’re lackluster as music players, gaming devices, and digital cameras. They can’t excel in any single area without competing against other Sony divisions, so they’re instead doomed to well-rounded mediocrity.

Miscellaneous happenings:

• Sony had a very restrictive Internet proxy server; it didn’t allow ssh, newsgroup access, or instant messagers (AIM worked eventually, though). I had the “bright” idea of resorting to a dial-up ISP with my second phone line. (I split a cubicle with someone else. There was a telephone line for each of us, but we shared one instead, giving us one extra.) Of course, businesses don’t have flat-rate local calling plans like residences do, which isn’t something I realized until after I had racked up many hundreds of dollars’ worth of telephone charges. Oops.

• One day, on my way to the bathroom, I overheard part of a telephone conversation: “Sony. S-O-N-Y. Like the televisions.” I could only wonder what planet the other person was from; who hasn’t heard of Sony?

• Sony provides an emulator for the CLIÉ handheld. It’s based off of PalmSource’s standard Palm OS Emulator, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For anyone not familiar with the GPL, the gist is that any derived work must have its source code available. (This is a gross oversimplification for a number of reasons, but it’s close enough.) Sony sometimes was delinquent at providing the source code. (Developers want tools available yesterday; GPL zealots say nothing should be provided without source. There’s no pleasing everyone.)

  Eventually, one of my worst fears came true and someone submitted a story to Slashdot about the lack of code. We were used to receiving hate mail, but were we prepared to deal with a gajillion emails from angry, GPL-crazed Slashdot readers?

  We received only one email about it. The complainant didn’t even understand the GPL all that well.

• After too many incidents of rolling into work at around noon-time, my manager instituted a policy: If you can’t make it in by 10:30 AM, don’t bother coming in at all. Uh, so rather than showing up late and putting in 8+ hours of work, I should take the entire day off from a job I hate? Okay.

• I wasn’t there for this, so this is second-hand information: apparently, after I left Sony, they almost hired another person named “James Lin” to replace me. Bizarre. Some cheap Chinese knockoff, no doubt. I wonder if they would have tried to pass him off as me in emails. (Not that Sony didn’t have enough James Lins working for them already; Sony’s silly Microsoft Exchange mail server regularly got confused and sent me mail intended for other James Lins.)

Incidentally, for anyone who ever wanted to know about the meaning and design of Sony’s “VAIO” name: The Origin and Philosophy of VAIO(R) PCs. The “VAIO-let” color scheme is a clever touch.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that kind of thought or ingenuity went into the oft-mispronounced “CLIÉ” name.