PalmSource frustrates developers with slow Palm OS 5 upgrade path

By Carmen Nobel
IN SAN JOSE, CALIF.

PALM INC.’S SOFTWARE SUBSIDIARY has a new name, but many of the same old Palm OS problems in the eyes of developers and enterprise customers.

PalmSource Inc., the new name of the operating system company announced at the PalmSource developers conference here last week, distributed the beta version of Palm OS 5 to developers, as well as a simulator that runs on Windows-based PCs.

But Palm partners say the company is not giving them enough guidance about how to move from Palm OS 4 to Palm OS 5 and to the ARM platform, which the operating system now supports.

The new handheld operating system, which is due this summer, supports ARM-compliant processors from Intel Corp., Motorola Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc., all of which plan to provide chips to various licensees of Palm OS. Palm 0S4 supports the slower Motorola DragonBall processor.

“What does it say when you move to a new operating system and provide no upgrade path?” asked Felix Lin, vice chairman of AvantGo Inc., in Hayward, Calif. which builds wireless access software for several handheld operating systems. “Ifs a slap in the face for everyone who has tried to build apps on the Palm platform. It’s an enormous amount of work for us. Microsoft [Corp.] is a lot better at this.”

Palm enterprise users, who had to wait 18 months between versions of the operating system, are frustrated as well. “Nobody is building applications for construction companies, so we have to do it ourselves,” said Tommer Catlin, MIS director of Inc., a construction company in San Mateo, Calif. “Palm really needs to get the code out sooner.”

Michael Mace, PalmSource’s chief competitive officer, said that Palm OS 5 was later than it should have been be cause of missteps in its initial development. “Our biggest problem is execution,” Mace said. “The original plan for 05 5 was to build everything at once. I takes too long. It's like boiling the ocean.

Mace said Palm plans to update its operating systems faster. “It won't be another 18 months,” he said of the release to follow Palm OS S. “We would like to be in the six- to nine-month time frame.”

Palm OS 5’s successor will include improved multimedia support, feature that take advantage of next-generation wireless networks (simultaneous voice/data support is a possibility), and better security (support for digital signatures and certificate management).

“Security is why we’re not in love with the Palm platform, at least in the current version,” said John Schaaf, a business analyst at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., of East Hanover, N.J.

Palm also wants to impress corporate customers with third-party enterprise applications. For example, Cutting Edge Software Inc., of Dallas, announced the beta version of Quickoffice Conference, a peer-to-peer data conferencing application that lets colleagues collaborate on spreadsheets in real time using Palm OS-based devices or PCs with a TCP/IP cormection.

• FOR MORE ON PALMSOURCE, GO TO EWEEK.COM.

eweek February 11, 2002  

PC chip giant releases two XScale processors for wireless market, goes beyond ARM-based devices

BY TOM MURPHY

Intel will stake its claim on the wireless device market this week with two new XScale processors, but the big unknown is whether the PC microprocessor giant will be satisfied with less than total dominance in a market where it hasn’t traditionally played a big role.

The two processors mark Intel’s foray into the portable device market and they offer a significant step up in megahertz over ARM-based processors, including Intel’s own StrongARM and other embedded processors now on the market.

The first release from Intel is the PXA-250 application processor, which is directed specifically at the PDA market. The PXA-210 processor is intended for the smart phone market and has fewer bells and whistles than the PXA-250. Intel will announce the sampling of the product, and XScale- based products are expected to be on the market sometime next quarter.

Using an installed based of Pocket PC products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer and others that use Intel’s StrongARM processor, Intel already has a market that’s 3 million units strong and growing like a weed, says Todd Kort, an analyst with Gartner Dataquest in San Jose. But in the near term, Kort believes the OMAP processor from Texas Instruments Inc. will grab the market volume based on its close relationship with Palm and Palm’s customer base, which could range from 13 million units to 20 million units.

In the cell phone market, Texas Instruments is dominant, with Nokia and Ericsson among its OEM customer base.

"It appears that the opportunity is larger on the Palm side of the PDA market,” Kort said. “But the only vendors making money right now in the PDA market are Microsoft, Compaq, HP and Intel.”

The main issue right now in the PDA market is battery life, and Kort doesn’t believe Intel’s XScale processors and the entire feature-rich Pocket PC platform offer enough operating time to make them attractive to those used to their Palm-based PDAs and cell phones.

Meanwhile, Intel is promising that the power consumption of XScale products has been vastly improved over the company’s StrongARM processors.

The company is going after the high-end of the PDA market with the PXA-250, according to David Rogers, communications manager for Intel. The processor will enter the market with many other ARM-based processors vying for the same sockets. The PXA-250 will start sampling with a variety of peripheral functions on-chip. Most notable is the capability to interface directly with the 802.11 wireless protocol.

Intel believes that the 802.11 ports being installed in airports, cafes, universities, businesses and other public places will create a demand for portable devices that can access the networks.

The perception is that the PDA market is saturated, as unit volumes flattened in 2001, but Intel platform architect Laurie Pegrum says the company wouldn’t enter a market without a significant upside in growth potential.

The PXA-250 has been tweaked up to clock speeds of 250MHz to 400MHz. “This is a significant leap in performance for this space,” Rogers said. The StrongARM processor it replaces had a clock speed of 200MHz.

“At those clock speeds, Intel’s XScale processors may be overkill in the short term,” Kort said. “The OMAP processor will be good enough for the low end of the market.”

Still, the capacity to upgrade the Pocket PC may give rise to its long-term potential. Kort says Palm relied on the low-performing Motorola DragonBall processor for too long, which stifled the Pilot’s market-growth potential.

The high clock-rate frequencies might cause portable device developers to wince because they have a real concern for battery life and operating times. Most of the incumbent processors Intel will be trying to unseat will be operating in the 50MHz to 100MHz range.

But Intel has prepared to combat that perception with power-scaling. If the applications processor is running basic data applications such as an address book, the clock cycles can be scaled back. If the application calls for the host to execute an MPEG-4 video, the processor can be spiked up to 400MHz for the initial download. Once the video starts playing, Intel says the processor could be kicked down to save battery life.

Intel will offer both processors with an extensive set of tools, including device drivers, system debug software, compilers and a development environment. To start with, both processors will be able to run code that was written for ARM-based processors.

But Intel is hoping to meet applications developers halfway by providing baseline functions they can incorporate into their programs. This is intended to save the developers time in getting their applications to market.

Intel marketers insist that what they are selling is an architecture and not just silicon, partly to distinguish themselves from the XScale processors they sell into I/O and network infrastructure equipment. Intel calls them processors based on XScale technology. But both the processors being launched stilt use ARM-based instruction sets that have been around for years..

Electronic News February 11, 2002
www.electronicnews.com

BY DAVID MANNERS

Of all the ways of making money out of intellectual property (IP), by far the most lucrative is processor cores.

Microprocessor licensors ARM and MIPS are the two highest-earning IP companies, and another one, ARC, although not yet a high-earner, picked up cash worth nearly $200 million from a successful stock market launch.

But, as the history of the semiconductor industry has shown, it’s easier to design a microprocessor than make money from it.

Everyone agrees that the secret to making a business from licensing cores is to take ownership of a product area as ARM has done in mobile phones.

“If you’re strong in a particular market segment, even if a customer can get a better solution from another source, they are reluctant to change because of the software development cost,” said John Hall, VP of European operations at MIPS. “We try to dig deeper roots into the areas we have and then look at prospective new markets where there is an opportunity.”

This is something all microprocessor vendors share — the wish to own a market segment — then expand into others.

“We ask industries if there’s a demand and, if there is, we then look for a partner with which to fulfill that demand by developing IP that can get the ARM core into new industry sectors,” said Peter Hicks, ARM’s manager for IP Solutions. “There’s no point developing IP if there’s no demand for it, and we wouldn’t develop IP without a partner.”

As a result ARM has been moving into automotive applications, computer areas such as disk drives, peripherals areas such as printers, and consumer areas such as the Gameboy Advance. “MIPS is trying to find a discontinuity in wireless to displace ARM, and ARM is trying to find a discontinuity in games to displace MIPS,” Hall said.

This is an ambition shared by ARC, which sees an opportunity to move into the mobile market at the moment when handset manufacturers merge the DSP and the processor into a single chip. That opportunity will be driven by super-low-cost phones —say when the Chinese market takes off, or when embedded cellphones, say in household equipment, in-car electronics, handheld terminals or supermarket scanners—start to become ubiquitous.

ARC’s advantage in that situation is that its core can be configured as an integer processor, or a DSP, or as something in between. MIPS sees the opportunity to displace ARM in mobile as coming at the 3G stage.

“The next generation of mobile phone needs an application processor as well as a CPU and a DSP,” Hall said. “No one thinks it will be one processor. There’ll be a baseband chip, a DSP and an applications processor. In applications there’s little legacy software, so there’s an opportunity for a new architecture.”

ARM itself seems unfazed by this rivalry, probably because it does not see itself as a mobile house anymore. “More than 50 percent of our royalties are from non-mobile,” said ARM Chairman Robin Saxby. “That has helped us in the downcycle.”

The key to entering a new market segment is to provide serious value-add to the customer plus reduced time-to-market. “Lots of IP becomes commoditized very quickly, so you need to find serious value-add. So it’s very important to make, the right decisions about that" Saxby said. "Design methodology and tools become more and more important. It’s becoming increasingly important as an IP player to invest in that area.” As a result, ARM’s sales of design tools are doubling every year.

However, although agreed on providing value-add to the customer, here the companies differ on the approach. Whereas ARM and ARC seek to produce “platforms”—a mixture of a core and applications functionality—MIPS believes in extending its core to embrace an application.

“MIPS is not going to make platforms,” Hall said. “We just want to be a components supplier. Our experience is in the core and providing extra functionality to the core. We go back to the foundations and say, ‘The foundations of smartcard architecture is not right, and we’re going back to build the foundations.’

“If we’re in a new product area we ask, ‘Do we need to make architectural changes?’ In smartcard the answer was ‘Yes’ —so we extended the architecture,’’ Hall said. “In cost-sensitive applications, gates are the key thing. As a general rule, you need less gates (and) the MIPS core-plus-extensions approach is an extremely efficient way of doing it through the architecture.

“Smartcard is the most cost-sensitive embedded application,” Hall continued. “Gemplus asked us to put the micro and the encryption on the same core. They’d asked ARM to do it, but ARM refused. But we developed an extension called SmartMIPS which allows the bundling of cryptography, making it capable of performing crytography algorithms very quickly and easily with a small die size.”

MIPS has three extensions: SmartMIPS, graphic processing and code compression. ARC, taking the platform approach but with limited funds available for market development, is looking at providing platforms in three initial areas: Bluetooth, MP3 and voice-over-Internet Protocol. Other areas being developed ire LI VJJ and digital cameras.

So the microprocessor cores business is emerging rom its infancy to become a serious and pervasive sector of the semiconductor industry. Can licensing cores be as dynamic a business as selling chips? “We want to grow as fast as Intel and Microsoft grew,” replied Robin, “and, to date, we have grown that fast.”.

David Manners is and editor with Electronic Weekly, a sister publication of Electronic News.

Electronic News February 11, 2002
www.electronicnews.com

Observers say pressure is on to release next operating system.

• BY JOHN COX

SAN FRANCISCO — Network executives will get a chance to hear Palm’s top executives lay out the company’s direction at this week’s PalmSource conference.

It could be a turning point for Palm, which is being hit with several challenges all at once:
• It’s in the midst of a reorganization;
• The new version of its operating system, rewritten for the powerful ARM 32-bit microprocessor, is still not out;
• The recently unveiled Palm i705 wireless handheld has met with mixed reviews, judging from comments in newsgroups and on Web sites;
• Competition is heating up, not only from archrival Microsoft and its PocketPC 2002 operating system, but also from Palm’s licensees, such as Handspring and Sony;
• The stock price has dropped since August from a 52-week high of nearly $29 to less than $5.

All these pressures will come to bear on newcomer David Nagel, CEO of the recently formed Palm OS subsidiary, who makes his first appearance this week before thousands of Palm developers and partners. The audience will look for evidence Palm still has a vision of hand- held computing that relates to the needs of enterprise network users.

Observers expect Nagel to lay out a clear roadmap for the transition of the current Palm OS to a 32-bit chip architecture and detail how Palm will address nagging security issues, improve wireless connectivity and ensure that its products work better with corporate databases and applications.

One major announcement for developers will be the release of reference applications for the Palm OS. A joint effort by Palm, Kada Systems, Oracle, Sybase and Hexaware Technologies, the applications use embedded databases, and Kada’s synchronization software and APIs to let developers more quickly build custom applications for line-of-business functions such as customer relationship management.

“Palm used to have the opportunity to command the enterprise [market] says Ken Dulaney an analyst with Gartner. “But it lost that through bad management." Dulaney cites the spinoff from parent 3Com, Palm’s IPO and several top-level turnovers, all in less than five years, as culprits.

“The PocketPC is interesting to enterprise IT because it ties in well with Microsoft software,” Dulaney says. “What Palm has to do now is view Microsoft as less of an enemy and, instead, build systems that tie into Microsoft [platforms already entrenched in the enterprise]

“Palm has had an unwavering commitment to the enterprise, but the focus has been fragmented," says Kevin Burden, an analyst for IDC.

Take security for example. Palm announced last November that RSA Security’s highly regarded encryption software would be associated in some way with “future versions” of the Palm OS. But Palm never spelled out what that would mean. Today security for Palm applications in the enterprise remains a matter a stitching together an array of products and technologies.

For a range of enterprise applications, the Palm OS doesn’t have the muscle that’s needed. Multithreading, which lets an operating system simultaneously handle an array of tasks, will finally be introduced with the ARM-based Palm OS.

“Proper multitasking will allow a more stable system and allow a new breadth of network/wireless applications to appear’ says Russell Bulmer, a software engineer, and long-time Palm user, with Conigma, a wireless services start-up in London.

Bulmer and others expect Palm will include with the ARM- based Palm OS an emulator that will let users run existing Palm applications on the ARM devices, which are likely to appear in the latter half of the year.

Network World 2/4/02 www.nwfusion.com

PALM SOLUTIONS GROUP FUTURE HARD TO READ

PALM RECENTLY ANNOUNCED THAT IT HAD FINISHED forming a separate, mobile operating system entity called Palm Solutions Group. And although the corporate structure intended to market and develop Palm OS is complete, it's not clear how this venture will fare.

I’m sure Palm will welcome a change from the ever shrinking margins of the hardware business to the greener grass of a software-only model, but it’s not yet clear whether the upcoming Palm OS 5.0 will be the franchise player that Palm is hoping for.

Palm built its business on simple, low-priced organizers and has always dismissed its competitors as too complex and encumbered by bloated, desktop-inherited code.

And yet Palm is picking through the remains of defunct desktop operating system company Be for multimedia special sauce and is dropping its signature 16-bit Dragonball-based platform for a 32-bit ARM-based one in line with those of competing systems Windows CE, Symbian OS and Linux.

Granted, the excellent BeOS is no ancestor to be ashamed of, but will the new ARM-based operating system that Palm has promised to deliver sometime this year have what it takes to make it? The refusal of Microsoft, Symbian and the Linux community to stay out of Palm’s sandbox will make it difficult for Palm to maintain its hegemony in the handheld space.

In a market softened by Palm’s hardware liquidation and threatened by low- cost, Linux-based organizers of the future, makers of Palm OS devices have found it necessary to differentiate their higher-end devices by adding more features.

Research In Motion's Blackberry has emerged from pager-world obscurity to become the handheld of choice for a fast- growing group of mobile device users. Handspring's Treo communicator (reviewed online at www.eweek.com/links) and Palm's expected i705 wireless PDA suggest that Palm OS vendors get the message—these are products that stand to take off as availability of 2.5 G-bps wireless network services spread.

Try as it might to stoke interest in its operating system group moving forward, Palm may find that slick, wireless hardware devices are what it will take to keep the company afloat. e

Technical Analyst Jason Brooks can be reached at [email protected].

eweek January 28, 3003  www.eweek.com

WIRELESS DEVICES

Palm to unveil 0S5

PALM’S NEXT-GENERATION operating system, 05 5, which uses the ARM-compliant Omap family of processors from Texas Instruments, will be unveiled at PalmSource the week of Feb. 4 in San Jose, Calif.

Several Info World sources in the development community say they are both pleased with some of the new features and disappointed at what the OS still lacks. Palm officials declined comment last week.

Three significant improvements include improved performance, the capability of using multitasking and multi-threading in applications, and compatibility with current applications.

On the negative side, Palm will not leverage the multi- media capabilities recently purchased Be OS meaning that capabilities such as accessing MP3s will not be available. Perhaps most aggravating to Palm users is news that so-called hacks - utilities written by third parties to expand Palm OS capabilities - will not be supported in OS 5. For example, it is a hack utility that allows users to touch the title drop-down menu. "We told that every single hack will not work in the future," said on developer.

But 05 5 will give Palm some enterprise-level capabilities, a source said. “The multithreaded features will allow the development of peer- to-peer wireless applications for dataconferencing. In a warehouse, workers counting the SKUs [stock- keeping units] with a laser scanner can beam them into a spreadsheet and keep in sync with other workers in other aisles,” he said. Faster performance will also mean that when executing a function on the Palm, the user will not have to wait to regain control of the handheld, which can take as long as 10 seconds with the current OS.

Backward compatibility will be addressed in OS 5 by running the older OS in emulation mode. “Some of the old programs will run faster, some will run slower, and some won’t run at all,” said another developer. By deploying an ARM-compliant processor, the OS will allow Palm to gain a foothold in the cell phone market.

Developers said users will see Palm devices running OS 5 in the third quarter of this year.

— Ephraim Schwartz

www.INFOWORLD.COM 01.02.02

Company CEO says little innovation, failure to roll out i705 led to poor past year; eyes partnerships

By Carmen Nobel and Matt Carolan

PALM INC. IS HOPING TO MAKE 2002 the year of the enterprise, but the success of the handheld device company lies precariously in the hands of corporate customers who have a lot of choices these days.

Palm's interim CEO, Eric Benhamou, said late last month that the company had made mistakes in 2001 but had definite plans to turn itself around this year.

“2001 was an especially difficult year for Palm,” Benhamou said. “We simply did not innovate enough. You should expect a steady stream of innovative solutions from Palm in the months ahead, starting with several major new products to begin shipment in the current quarter.”

The Santa Clara, Calif, company has been battered by an ongoing price war with rival Handspring Inc., of Mountain View, Calif.; the sour economy and the failure to roll out by the end of last year the long-awaited i705, which combines a PDA (personal digital assistant) with always-on push e-mail capability. Benhamou said the i705, which will be available this quarter, will be a data-only device that runs on Ericsson AB’s Mobitex network technology.

Potential customers said the device is a step forward for Palm.

“Information push is critical,” said Christopher Bell, chief technology officer of the People2 People Group, a Boston-based media services company. “The pull style of the Palm VII just isn't good enough.”

But in the time Palm took to develop the i705, competitors also created attractive choices. Handspring’s Treo, a device due to the public this month, combines push e-mail, a PDA and something the new Palm lacks—a phone.

“It depends on pricing, but I suspect that if the service costs are anywhere near each other, I’d pick the device with voice and data over the data only,” Bell said.

To encourage sales of the wireless device, Palm intends this year to launch a full, behind-the-firewall server for enterprise customers, Benhamou said. Last month, Palm acquired ThinAirApps Inc., a small New York company that markets such a server.)

“If this machine is priced at where Pocket PC wireless devices are, then no sales,” said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc., a San Jose, Calif., consultancy. If they can get the thing to $250, it will do well [but only if] they can get enterprises to put in the servers to deliver corporate e-mail.”

Palm plans to align with four enterprise software companies to create wireless corporate applications. A partnership with Siebel Systems Inc. that will implement Siebel’s Sales Handheld 7 software was announced in October. Other partnerships will be announced by summer, Benhamou said.

Benhamou also discussed the progress of the company’s plan to internally separate its platform software business into a legal subsidiary, separate from the hardware and solutions group. He said he expects an “external separation” of the software unit this year, either through third-party investments by strategic partners or through an initial public offering. e

eWEEK January 7, 2002 www.eweek.com

Palm’s results in 02 better than expected

PALM, THE TROUBLED INDUSTRY LEADER for handheld device hardware and software, in December reported a lower-than-expected net loss for its second quarter, on higher-than- expected revenues. The company also elaborated on its strategy for selling devices to the enterprise and its plans for structural separation of the hardware and software divisions.

Palm announced a net loss of $36.6 million, or 6 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial/First Call expected a loss of 7 cents per share. e

eWEEK December 31, 2001 Volume 18, Number 50 www.eweek.com

PALM LINE TO TAP TI CHIP

Planned OMAP-based wireless devices welcomed, but observers concerned about product delays

By Carmen Nobel

INDUSTRY OBSERVERS ARE PLEASED that Palm Inc. has chosen a vendor to provide processors as a first step toward next-generation handheld devices, but analysts and users remain concerned about Palm’s track record on product delays.

Palm announced early in December plans to ship later in 2002 a new generation of wireless devices based in Texas Instruments Inc.’s OMAP (Open Media Applications Platform) processors, which will include core technology from ARM Holdings plc. and will run Version 5 of Palm OS.

“This could be a really key product for them, but I don't think Palm can afford another product delay,” said Michael Steinberg, president of New England Palm Users Group, in Cambridge, Mass.

Palm is already late with a wireless handheld device based on Palm 05 4, intuitively named the i705. As with previous Palm handhelds, it will run on the Motorola Corp. Dragonball processor, but it will include new e-mail alert features. First due in the middle of 2001, the launch of that product has been pushed back until the beginning of 2002.

By the same token, the industry was hoping that ARM-based devices running Palm 05 5 would come out sooner than the end of 2002. When Palm, of Santa Clara, Calif. announced the relationship with TI, of Dallas, Palm stockdropped, and many analysts

attributed his to the due date of the devices.

“Another year?” asked Ken Dulaney, in analyst at Gartner Inc., in San Jose, Calif. “They said to me [originally] that they thought the release would be more aggressive than [the fourth quarter] in [2002].”

The upcoming devices will support TI’s OMAP, which enables wireless abdications to take advantage of up- coming high-speed wireless networks. At the heart of the processor will be technology from ARM.

Handspring Inc., which licenses Palm OS, has already announced plans to build products based on OMAP, as have cell phone manufacturers Ericsson AB and Nokia Corp.

In March, TI invested $100 million in the development of applications based on the platform, and analysts suspect that TI gave money to Palm, too.

In early December, Palm announced that an anonymous investor had given $50 million to Palm; officials would not comment on whether TI was that investor.

Customers have been champing at the bit for products based on Palm 05 5. “It’s supposed to be multitasking, which is a big deal,” Steinberg said.

Palm 05 5 was designed to run on processors based on technology from ARM, of Cambridge, England. Motorola and Intel Corp. have been competing with TI to provide processors for Palm OS devices ever since Palm announced plans to build devices based on ARM technology last summer. All three companies manufacture ARM processors.

eWEEK December 31, 2001 Volume 18, Number 50 www.eweek.com