Is Palm OS losing its dedicated followers?

With the advent of the Treo 700w, even Palm seemed to have rejected their own Operating System in favour of Windows’ mobile platforms. But why have Palm’s once dedicated supporters started to turn away from their beloved OS? Well for starters it has been almost two years since the last big upgrade to Garnet was released, and another one isn’t due this year at least. On top of that Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems are emerging with higher compatibility and greater multimedia possibilities.

While Palm is still the dominant force in the states, they hold only 4% of the worldwide market, while Windows Mobile boasts 6% (statistics from zdnet). As far as the analysists can tell, the main problems are that Palm was never designed as a video and multimedia system, and doesn’t come with a Java virtual machine, meaning that devices and software that rely on these are being signed to other operating systems. For instance Google developed Google Maps for Mobile applications in Java so it could run on as many devices as possible – but for Palm users to run the applications they have to download a program from Palm’s site and install it on their devices.

Treo sales are as high as they have ever been and with 3rd party companies developing software for the Palm platform regularly and widely, it doesn’t look like the good ol’ Garnet system will be disappearing just yet. There’s a reason Palm have held their grip on the market for so long, and I don’t see them letting it slip without a fight.