Date: Friday, April 27, 2007 11:02 AM

Dear Motorola Good Technology Group Customer:

If you have users running Good software on Palm Treo 650, Treo 600, Treo 700w, or on Cingular 2125 & derivative devices (see below for common branded names), please be advised of Good’s software update and technical support phase-out timeline described below.

With the upcoming release of Good 5.0 in mid-2007 which adds significant new functionality, these 32MB handhelds do not have adequate memory to run Good 5.0 efficiently. As a result, Good version 4.9.3 is the last client software version that will support these handhelds.

—–

In other words, an era has come to a close because the devices that started life as Palm, became Handspring, and then Palm Handspring Treo will no longer have functional messing software. In the same week that Motorola Good sent me this message, my Treo 700p has started crashing, mysteriously restarting and having difficulty finding the nearest cell tower. It is, in other words, no longer serving the purpose for which it was designed and for which I bought it.

Our little firm is now motivated to move off of our Treo 650 and 700p’s (mostly purchased in the last year). Even though the 700p is still supported, it doesn’t send the right message to stop supporting devices. Instead, we are going to adopt Blackberries, either the 8800 series or Pearls. This will be expensive because of the wireless operator’s ridiculous contracts that penalize you for deciding to switch devices less than 18 months after buying one. But the Blackberries work better as email readers and as phones. And we don’t think RIM will end support for its own devices.

Two things happened in the past year:

1) During the past year, Motorola bought Good Technology Inc. Since it bought Starfish in 1998 from Philippe Kahn, it has been unable to build decent client software for its own devices. It did do a deal for Good to put its Goodlink software on the Motorola Q device and discovered what it had missed all along: That Good software actually works pretty well (if supported).

2) During the past year, whoever is running PalmOne or PalmSource or whatever the heck the organization is now called that is supposed to be managing what started life as PalmOS threw in the towel and decided to let the old devices go.

The culmination is the official end of the Palm Era, started by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky in 1996. Whatever device comes to market going forward with the Palm logo on them will be just another Windows Mobile device and won’t have anything to do with the spirit of whatever Jeff and Donna started.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 10:13 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.