To even my surprise, Palm confirmed not just one, but all three important predictions that I made in this PalmInfocenter article published last May:
- Palm is creating their own next-generation Palm OS by combining the old OS with a Linux kernel. This is not an announcement that they are adopting the ACCESS Linux Platform, rather this is an operating system that Ed Colligan says they have been working on for "a number of years"—by one now-credible report even longer than PalmSource themselves have been working with Linux.
- They are turning to the server side with a new focus on web services and web applications. Innovations in the web experience, web services and "simple web applications" were mentioned over and over during the presentation, which followed closely on an Opera agreement to deliver a Palm OS port of Opera 9 for future Palm products.
- Palm is adding the capability of updating both software and system firmware over the air. In the industry parlance this is called FOTA (Firmware updates Over The Air) and Palm sounds like they might be a fairly early adopter.
Details were very sketchy on all three points, but if you listened closely and know a little about Palm's history, I think you can fill in some gaps here and there. By the way, there's no transcript for Analyst Day,
The first area Ed Colligan identified as a "primary focus" for Palm is delivering "the fastest, most compelling web experience... with connected web applications." He said that Palm believes there is "enormous innovation to be done" in this area and said that toward this end they are building a "connected application environment." Normally the "connected application environment" for the web is called a browser. But for all the talk about "simple web-connected applications" the speakers seemed to be avoiding discussion of the browser, except when discussing Palm's past leadership in this area. While I believe that Palm wants to continue to improve the browsing experience (and Opera 9 will be great for that) something tells me this is not the whole story.
Another clue: when you hear someone from Palm talk about an experience being "fast" they usually mean it. Responsiveness has always been a hallmark of the Palm experience and I believe that an important part of the company's bold decision to tough it out and develop their own successor to the Palm OS was the sense that Palm had not been able to deliver the kind of snap that users expect as they tried to innovate on the old platform. Now, browser based applications running on high-latency wireless networks—even simple apps—are not typically what you would call fast. Certainly not by Palm's standards. Nor is there probably a whole lot that Palm can do to make HTML pages download and render faster in the browser, short of using AJAX and DHTML, which smartphones simply do not have the resources to do at this time.
So where am I going with this? Well, some Palm developers may remember an interesting technology that Palm (then Palm Computing) introduced with their first wireless PDA, the Palm VII, back in 1999. This device (and it's successor the i705) ran on the fairly large but horribly slow (19.2kbps) Mobitex pager network on which Palm built a network service called Palm.Net. The slow network wasn't the only barrier to a reasonable web experience: Palm devices at that time ran on 16MHz processors with 8MB of RAM, making the parsing and rendering of HTML pages slow enough to be out of the question for all but the most patient (or desperate) mobile user. Palm's solution to these severe constraints was called "Web Clipping." Bear with me a moment as I explain why I think this technology—or a successor to it—could very well be the centerpiece of the web services product strategy that Palm talked about so much during Analysts Day.
Web Clipping was a web technology, so from a developer standpoint it involved no native C code; rather there was a tool for "compiling" HTML forms into a Palm Query Application (PQA) that was installed directly on the device like any other Palm app. On the device a PQA was almost indistinguishable from a regular Palm app: it had its own application icon in the launcher and it displayed a form instantaneously upon launch with widgets that looked identical to those you saw in a native Palm application (even though the form was designed in pure HTML). But when you entered some data you wanted to retrieve (say a highway for which you wanted traffic information) and tapped a button it would submit the request to a server (going through the Palm.Net proxy) very much like a browser. The response was displayed in a simple browser designed to receive compressed, possibly transcoded content from the proxy.
This technology had several advantages over a regular web application and I think most of them apply as much today as they did in 1999. First, a Web Clipping Application (WCA) is a single-purposed app so there is no URL for the user to enter: it's compiled into the PQA. Second, the form for entering your query to the web doesn't have to be fetched from the server: again, it's already on the device so it comes up instantly. Third, the PQA didn't use HTTP to make the request, which involves lots of time-wasting "how do you do, how are you, fine and you?" over the network before it gets down to the business of giving you your data. Instead it uses connectionless UDP which dispenses with the formalities and just grunts "gimme this." It's up to the proxy to translate this rude but efficient request into polite HTTP and send it along to the appropriate web service. Result: your request gets to the web much faster than when you click a button or link in a browser. Finally, the Palm.Net proxy compressed the response it got back from the web service before sending it back to the device, again, speeding up response time. Everything was designed to be fast, which was the word we heard used at least three times during the presentation last week while describing the experience Palm users will have on the web.
Palm.Net was shut down in the summer of 2004. I can surmise a couple of reasons for this. First, the cellular data networks were so much faster and bigger than Mobitex by that time that the Palm.Net infrastructure had been completely outdated. Second, for better or for worse, the new smartphones were all coming out with full web browsers, as everyone thought you needed to approximate the desktop browsing experience as closely as possible to make the web interesting to users. People are only now starting to see that this is wrong. Ironically, if Web Clipping were being introduced in 2007, it would be referred to as a "widget platform" and considered to be cutting edge "Mobile Web 2.0" stuff like what Nokia just announced. Which is to say that Palm was ahead of their time. A modernized Web Clipping platform could use an awful lot of IP (including patents, I expect) that Palm already owns and give credibility to the claim that they were going to deliver web experiences that are "unique to Palm." Obviously there is more to the web than just querying for information, but I do think that's the lion's share of of the mobile web experience that people want today. And they want it fast. Fast search, faster access to RSS, faster startup of streaming media, faster access to location-based services, all integrated into the system—aren't these "simple web experiences" what you look for most often on your mobile, as opposed to web surfing?
More analysis of Palm's Analyst Day statements before the weekend. For now, I'm pressing my luck and predicting that Palm's idea of a unique, fast, simple web experience will be a next-generation version of a technology they abandoned in 2004. Back to the future, baby!
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