>Is the general feeling from Palm that the switch to ARM based devices is
>a true switch over or merely an expansion of the Palm platform?
Jeff, you should probably get a copy of the PalmSource talk on this topic.
It would clear up at least a good number of the questions you've had (many
of which I've not had cycles to answer, sorry).
Short answer is that it depends. Not all new OS and device features would
work on 68k devices, for sure, but some would be able to do so from a
technical perspective. The question of whether to make that subset run on
both old and new OS revisions is a business and marketing decision. So it
could be anything from just releasing bug fix PRCs for 68k devices, to
having a full flashable OS release that did everything that the hardware
would let it do.
The ARM chips will let us improve many lower-level (and higher-level)
things in the OS, and add significant new capabilities. A slide in the
PalmSource talk gives some suggestions of some possibilities. I can't say
more than what's in there, at this point.
But if there was a software improvement that's "just" a PRC, that does
something really neat that didn't need something new from the new OS, then
presumably it'd be possible to have it running on 68k devices as well. If
you put that on top of 4.0 and it was significant enough, could you call it
4.5 (or whatever) and say it was a new OS release? Sure. There aren't black
and white definitions of what constitutes an OS release. It'll come down
to meeting the needs of the customers in appropriate ways.
Are the ARM chips in general superior in enough ways, such that it wouldn't
make sense to do new 68k devices after production lines etc. have time to
change? I'm not an expert in this area, but I think it has significant
benefits and the answer to that might well be yes. But who knows what's
ahead for the 68k line - they might make some incredible improvement and
have one 10 times faster for 1/10th of the cost and size. Nothing is set
in stone, even if an exec stood up and said "we're 100% ARM from now on",
they don't know everything. But will a majority of new devices in X months
be ARM? I'd imagine so. When will a majority of customers be running ARM?
One can only estimate that.
>I am trying to get a sense of to what degree a new PalmOS device based
>on a 68K core would be in denger of abandonment.
Well, that word might mean different things to different people. Will 68k
hardware be supported at the 1-800 numbers, and will there be tons of
software that'll work on it, and will there be lots being happily used
worldwide? I think that'd be a pretty obvious "yes". Will there be
flashable OS upgrades? Perhaps, perhaps not, but then you'd be implying
that non-upgradable devices are by definition abandoned as soon as they
ship. Which would be a rather extreme statement, but one that some people
enjoy arguing about :-)
In short, same old fast-paced computer economy, ring out the old, ring in
the new, and support users and developers along the way to a degree
determined by business and market requirements.
Whew, I'm wordy today. Time to write code.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
