Symbol and Palm OS part ways

Where has the love gone? Symbol Technologies, a company that once enjoyed a very tight relationship with Palm and its platform, has officially announced that it will be dropping Palm OS from its lineup in January. For the record, there's no evidence to suggest Symbol's acquisition by Motorola played a role in the decision; rather, it was apparently based on shortages of required components, Windows Mobile's (arguably) superior feature set for the target demographic, and Symbol's understanding of Access' roadmap for the platform. The last two Palm-based products to roll off Symbol's assembly line will be the (Palm III-based!) SPT1550 and SPT1800 -- both of which have seen their heydays come and go. Get 'em while you can, folks.

[Via The Inquirer]

[lint @ Nov 12th 2006 5:55PM]

After many talks with Symbol's support staff we understand the issue is that for years Symbol has been trying to get customers to move to higher priced and newer Windows models for years.

However the reliability of the SPT 1800 series has kept a large majority of costumers from moving to the higher end models (thus lower margins). This came straight from our customer rep at Symbol.

We are purchasing thousands of the EOLed Palm models to support our application and currently looking to switch to another vendor. We are very disappointed with how Symbol has handled this, but we are hardly surprised the model was definitely long in the tooth.

[Hugh Jass @ Nov 12th 2006 11:29PM]

Who the heck are you? lol. You didn't tell us what company you work for.

[Hugh Jass @ Nov 12th 2006 5:43PM]

Their latest devices are Palm III based because they're ruggedized PDAs used for scanning bar codes and other merchandising purposes. You don't need Garnet and a 312mhz CPU for that. The software these run is standardized for Palm OS 3-4 and doesn't need to be updated because it already does everything it needs to. 33Mhz is more than enough for what these devices do.

[Kriz @ Nov 12th 2006 7:48PM]

Funny how this article's illustration shows a Symbol logo no longer in love with the Palm logo, instead of no longer in love with the PalmSource (Access) logo. People are so clueless about the difference between Palm hardware (makers of the Treo) and Palm software (makers of the OS).

Anyway, no need for panic.

For people who want to pay through the nose for WAN and the Microsoft treadmill, Symbol has a ton of offerings.

For people who need reliable, rugged barcode scanning and want to stay with the Palm OS, a startup called Janam just announced a next-gen PDA with all the speeds and feeds of a Microsoft device and the latest Palm OS at half the price of a Microsoft device.

Looks like everyone is covered.