Comments on: ALP is here (sorta), but does anyone care?

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:17:22 +0000

If the handset was good size, the basic phone and PIM functions decent and syncable, and I could use a stylus or my fingers to enter data, I would very seriously consider it. I cannot type on my phone’s keyboard anywhere close to the speed I used to be able to attain with Grafitti 1 or 2 on my Palm devices.

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:45:51 +0000

ALP is Linux, Android is Linux. Android is backed by an open consortium and is free. ALP must be licensed. Guess who wins?

By: Ross Gohlke

Ross Gohlke — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:28:34 +0000

Saying there is no more room in the market is like saying evolution stops at reptiles. Let’s wait until mammals arrive on the scene. Let’s not spread the marketing hype emanating from Cupertino and Mountain View that the game is over before it has begun – unless we are being paid to do so.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:06:46 +0000

> What would it take for ALP to gain a
> sizable chunk of mobile handset market-share?

Eh… a cool handset?

There are still a number of successful devices being released with what seems to be completely proprietary operating systems (Sprint’s answer to the iPhone, the Instinct?). It can’t really be that cost effective for the hardware manufacturers to cook/maintain their own OS (in the computer market, no one other than Apple does it). So for those hardware vendors, this is an alternative… not to the iPhone (they can’t get that OS) but to Android. Might be too late (this is ALP 3.0… what happened to 1.0 and 2.0?), and maybe too expensive. Who knows.

By: ACP

ACP — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:34:26 +0000

I wouldn’t be so sure. Both platforms are relatively new in terms of software titles: something in the low thousands for iPhone, and certainly many less for Android.

Palmgear has over 32,000 titles that can be installed on ALP via it’s Palm OS Garnet compatibility layer. Add this to the many titles that might be ported over from the FOSS world.

Playing catch-up? Certainly. Too little, too late? Perhaps not.