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Handspring Delays Treo, Plans To Drop Organizer Line
backlonthethird writes: "http://www.palminfocenter.com has the scoop on Handspring's triple announcements yesterday. CEO Donna Dubinsky says they're dropping "Organizers," (i.e. visors?), and most of their new Treos are going to Europe because of a parts shortage. At least their losses this past quarter aren't as bad as people were expecting--they claim profitability by this Summer. What the heck is going on over there?"
Yeah, they'll stop making Visors one day... color me stunned. Sony stopped making 10" B&W TV sets at some point too...
The Treo is a nifty little device which is an evolution of the Visor. Integrating a phone makes sense, integrating wireless makes sense. If Handspring decides not to make a device that *only* does PDA type functionality, that's probably a good business decision. Sure they're still be a market for a limited device like that, it just won't be Handspring making it. But as the technology changes, and component prices come down, it'll be generally expected that a device have more and more features. Handspring is just acknowledging that fact.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Donna has referred to organizers as a "dead end" several times before now. I can't blame her, since she's right. With the hardware getting better and better all the time, and Microsoft's PocketPC basically owning the high-end of the market, she can see where the road will lead. When the hardware finally does catch up and the price falls, no one will pay $100 for a Palm when they can get a PocketPC for the same price that runs their cozy Windows OS and does almost as much as their laptop.
:)
So what does Handspring do? They go sideways. Start merging their devices into cell phones and other WiFi solutions, and hopefully expand the market in a way Microsoft's lumbering embrace-and-extend strategy won't be able to engulf for another year or two, buying them some more time to figure out where to go next.
In a bizarre way it reminds me of The Nothing relentlessly following Atreyu across the countryside in The Never-Ending Story.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Now if they'd just work on getting the transporter functional, phaser operational, and making one-piece miniskirt outfits come back in style, I can start living the life of Kirk.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
And the funny thing is that they are being killed by a better product.
No, they're being killed by a different product. The Palm OS machines are intended to be inexpensive, practical organizers -- not undersized laptops or $500 status symbols. Palms trade things like MP3 playback and glitzy graphics for battery life, light weight, small size, and low price.
Palm OS devices are incredibly practical to someone who needs a powerful organizer for their work -- which is why medical professionals love them. For some kid that's looking for a fancier version of a Gameboy to impress the other kids, the PocketPC machines may be appealing:
Dudez, im righting this email on my iPaq and listening to a Rancid MP3! iPaqs rule! Palms are seriously gay!
The grown-ups will continue to buy Palm as long as they are available.
The US is a relatively small market for mobile technology, that's why. Around 20% of the world's mobile phone users are in the US. That means the other 80% are elsewhere in the world and more than likely using GSM.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Handspring has just destroyed the Springboard and Visor markets with these statements. I am lead programmer for Shine Micro Shine Micro, maker of the SM2496 DSP module for the Visor, and we have been working hard to bring our product to market. Currently it is in Beta testing, but it now appears that we are going to have to redesign for a different platform, or dump the project entierly.
The quote was that the will be exiting the PDA market "but not today". That doesn't provide any kind of reassurance to any of the Springboard deleopers who have invested a great amount of time and effort into what is now a dead product line.
Yes, all product lines are finite. But you usually don't have the manufacturer announcing this fact prematurely. I don't see any reason for someone to buy a Visor or a Springboard module now that they know that the support will not be there sometime in the near future.
It sounds like Handspring is turning into a fancy cellphone company. I don't think that they will survive this move. The Visor and Springboard are a good product and would have carried them far into the future (just look at Palm).
Brian Lane
Lead Programmer
Shine Micro
Maker of the SM2496 DSP module
Remember Lexington Green!
Unfortunately, once you start using the "start button" etc, you'll find out that the Desktop metaphor has scaled very, very poorly.
All my friends use Palm (save this one guy). The trouble is they all use old PalmVs and the like, and see no need to upgrade; Palm has hurt itself by making a perfectly adequate product from its first few generations. (Like, once it added the backlight...)
I was playing with that one guy's iPaq, and even he couldn't explain how to use part of WinCE; specifically opening a document (I forget if we wanted to open it in pocket IE or whatever, but all the usual manipulations of the "filesystem" didn't do the trick, plus the "magic synching" sucked much ass), and then manipulating one of the menus of his GPS map program so that all the directional arrows were visible (not to mention dialog boxes that were scaled to be 3 times the width of the screen, so you had to scroll just to be able to hit OK)
I don't know about the future; it will be a race of Palm getting itself out of some technological corners its painted itself into, and hardware becoming powerful yet battery efficient enough for WinCE to make sense, with Microsoft making improvements to their basic organizer functionality.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
nobody's upgrading? My old Palm still works fine.
sulli
RTFJ.
I liked the idea of the handspring modules...But they have never really taken off, and are hard to find in the stores. (and really expensive) -- I long for the day I could just simply take the PCMCIA modem or NIC card out of my laptop and use it with my "state of the art circa 1996" HP 200LX .. And in 2002 I am spending $100+ for a 33.6K springboard modem for my Handspring (granted you can find them in the stores -- hint, you may have some luck on the closeout table right next to the returned items that have been marked down .5%)
The palms are even worse -- I dont think the external devices have been compatible with the next gen models since day 1. (I.E. my palm V modem will not work with my palm m505 -- etc.)
If ever I have seen a market that was begging for a little standardization -- the PDA market is it.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.