Garmin has now more-less withdrawn from the Palm OS market

By Tam Hanna

All PDA’s are discontinued

The reason for this is that Garmin plans(and has executed) a position shift away from combo navigators to standalone units and smartphone navigation software. This position shift is done because Garmin feels that the GPS market will move this way - not because of technical difficulties.

Garmins PDA based offerings sold satisfactorily well and made it into stores well too – in fact, the manager told me that the company was happy with the sales. The stability of the Palm OS was not a problem either – we were very satisfied with the stability of the Palm OS platform(sic).

The problems Garmin faced was support for third party apps – Garmin Germany alone hired 10 extra support staff to make the Palm OS and PocketPC work for the users…navigation was working all the time.

Garmin stays active in the Palm OS market with its MobileXT software and Mobile10 bluetooth GPS dongle. Last but not least, retailers are said to still have a bit of remaining stock on most of their machines…