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Hands Down, Palm is Now Number Two
jamesl writes "InformationWeek reports that the number one PDA operating system now comes from Redmond, 48.1% last quarter (41.2% a year ago) compared to 29.8% (46.9% last year) for PalmSource. The big gainer was RIM, up to 19.8% from 4.9%. Linux ... a valient 0.9%, off slightly from last years' 1.9%.
The article has some thoughts about where the market is going with phones taking on more PDA functions."
I think it was from the stagnation of palm. They had the number one spot for so long they rarely made any large changes to their os. When Microsoft came out with their os for mobile devices palm tried to catch up and wasnt able to
I'd quote from the linked article but it seems to be slashdotted so I'll quote from an infosync article:
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5526.html
"It should be noted that these percentages apply only to the handheld market, which for the purposes of this study excludes the widely-popular palmOne Treo 600. The Treo line has had a long history of reclassification, and often bounces back and forth between different market categories in different studies."
Gartner has had a long history of producing studies that suggest Palm is losing to Microsoft. Their latest tactic seems to be to exclude the best selling Palm product from their studies.
http://nyamenation.org/
They're still releasing devices with PalmOS 5 which is the saddest apology for an operating system I have seen. Writing PalmOS GUI code is hard - there are so many legacy features you need to check for and deal with. It's clear that the whole thing has just accreted without planning over the years. The current schizophrenia between 68000 and ARM is a nightmare with the worse endianness horrors you've ever seen. I won't even mention proper OS features like memory management, multi-threading and so on.
Customers have been begging for proper wireless support on Palms for a long time and Palm have failed to deliver. A device, today, without at least 802.11b, is a dinosaur before it's born. What the hell are the Palm engineers doing over there?
The software that delivers with the Palm is a little pathetic. Not even a file browser. And main memory has a completely flat file hierarchy so that even with a file browser it's hard to find what you want. No word processor (well, there's an awful 3rd party thing).
It's no surprise they're losing the war. But it needn't have been like this. They had the advantage. And they simply sat on their laurels.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think there's a huge segment of the handheld users that are project managers, managers, analysts, etc. These people depend on (because of market penetration) Microsoft products such as Excel, Word, Project, and Outlook.
It would make sense that the the most popular "take with you" version of these would be on a PocketPC running Microsoft CE.
If Palm had wanted to remain on the top, they'd have had to offer *seamless* integration with these products, but how can they when they're competing with the company that MAKES them?
This is the a great example of how a monopoly can be used to extend into another market via a "one-off" mechanism.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
RIM Blackberry is strong, but IMHO that's only due to 2 things:
- a keyboard
- an easy to use system
- unmetered email
Ie. it tries to serve customers instead of thinking about milking them dry. Not that it's not they long term goal (maybe) but they provide a decent service for a decent fee.
But that's just a functionnality-based success. Any WinCE, Palm or Zaurus call plan which would offer the same functionnality would quickly become as big. Time to think about new functions too - say unmetered instant messenging (like SMS but free!)
Note to cell phone operators : stop thinking about milking your customers dry. Start thinking about offering services, such as voip roaming (ie if my cellphone finds a wifi network, use sipphone instead of $lousy_gsm_provider - especially when roaming abroad !)
This is IMHO the key to success. Then whatever hardware or operating system that goes along, if it is not too lousy, will grow.
The Zaurus 6000 could have become big. The user interface needed only minor tweaking. If only it had had GSM built it (smartphone like) + some good voip software + a call plan where email and instant messenging would have been free...
The market is lagging not because of lack of functionnality or technical capabiliies (GPRS makes possible to receive calls at the same time you have a data connection on a multiplex-capable GSM phone) but only because a shared monopoly between shitty operators prevent this innovation from appearing. "what if it eats my profits?" is wrong spririt. With the same mentality horseless carriage ie cars would have never existed. "it will eat every competitor alive and grow my market share and thus skyrocket my profits" is right.
Where's entrepreunership and risk taking? I just see deep-coma business !
That's free advice from a disgruntled french cellphone customer.
why would you think a PDA wouldn't need to multitask? I want a PDA that I can leave my mp3s playing in the background while i compose a document or spreadsheet. I don't want the whole device to freeze while it checks my mail.
Storage also is not an issue anymore, since flash memory prices have dropped so much it's like a $5 difference between including 64MB and 256MB.
If you're just looking for something to store contacts and text files, you can get a brand new Sharp YO-P20 Handheld Organizer for about $20. If you want a small, portable computer that will allow you to do most of your desktop functions quickly and relatively cheaply, buy an IPaQ or Dell Axim.
Getting a PDA only for storing contacts is WAY overkill.
Note: I'm a Dell Axim owner. There's just something cool about being able to be outside mowing the lawn while streaming mp3s over 802.11 to a small device in my pocket.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Remember smartphones, the growing market segment (unlike the shrinking PDA segment)?
p ?r eport_id=222287&t=e&cat_id=20
4
"2003 was a breakout year for mobile operating system vendor Symbian Software, which shipped 6.67 million operating systems worldwide--an 88 percent market share of advanced OS-based handset sales. Before 2003, the Symbian OS was resident on only five handset models--all but one from Nokia. At the end of 2003, the number of Symbianbased handsets remained modest, at 11 models from four vendors, with five more scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2004."
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.as
http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?id=388
This one Palm did to themselves. Palm had half a dozen years to turn PalmOS into a modern, reliable 32bit operating system, instead they are still shipping handhelds that emulate bits and pieces of an old 68k design, don't multitask properly, and make it hard allocate more than 64k at a time. Apparently, PalmOS 6 has been released, but neither PalmOne nor Sony are even bothering to make handhelds with it; it's too little too late. The only thing that has kept the platform alive is the fact that there are lots of good applications for it and that kept the original GUI more or less intact.
All Microsoft had to do is show up to the party. WinCE isn't a great operating system, but it's a lot better than PalmOS. The thing that has been holding PocketPC back is its awful UI.
My hope would be that PalmOne (the hardware part of Palm) explores some new ideas: Symbian is a great system they could ship right away, or they could adopt one of the Linux-based PDA environments and port a PalmOS emulation layer to that to run all the Palm legacy applications.