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Palm Responds to the iPhone
Several people noted a NYT piece about Palm's response to the iPhone. Essentially, their response appears to be to hire a former Apple engineer and a couple other folks -- while also pursuing plans to perhaps sell the company. Nothing like a dual approach to the problem.
Someone needs to come up with a serious contender to iTunes. Until that happens, no one will touch Apple in the new 'convergence' world.
Somehow I get the impression that the iPhone's future... destiny, if you will... is already determined, and anything Apple's competitors might do at this point is more or less irrelevant. Nothing is going to steal the iPhone's thunder if it turns out there actually is a market for it. And if there isn't... it'll sink without a trace, as will any rivals.
As cool as I think the iPhone is, I'm currently leaning toward the second option. Too expensive, too little demand.
Whether you like or dislike Apple or their products, Apple is a catalyst for change. Personally I applaud Apple's entry as it may encourage all phone makers to reevaluate their UI. The UI on my phone sucks but they all equally suck.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The problem with all in ones is they implement each feature shoddly or make ridiculous compromises.
Camera? Sure 0.3MP. Memory? Sure 1MB. etc...
Sure some phones now come with mini-sd slots and what not. But still, if I want a camera my 5MP Canon will do much better. If I want an MP3 player my iPod will do much better. If I want a processor in a box, my laptop will do much better. There is a difference between "doing a lot of things" and "doing a lot of things well."
Combine that with lack of choice [in most markets] and people are easy prey for the doo-dahs and whatnots.
For me, when I bought a phone I looked at some key factors.
1. quadband so I can use it anywhere
2. relatively small
3. decent standby life
Anything else is frivolous and hardly gets used.
Unless you see phones with a 4MP camera, 128MB of ram, 500 MHz ARM, etc... it's hard to say they're really "replacing" anything.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Palm seems to be very proud of the fact that they hired an ex-Apple engineer, which seems rather silly considering that Apple has thousands of them. It gets better when you consider that ex-Apple in this case means that he last worked for the company about ten years ago. No story here, unless the subtext is that Palm OS is going to start looking like System 7
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
All in ones are not the future. All in ones are good for a few things. Playing music, showing photos, making phone calls. Would you want to do photo editing or management on an iPhone? Would you want to do video editing or web browsing or email only on an iPhone? Of course not. You want a nice big screen and a real keyboard and mouse to do those things.
What Apple gets, and what I think is the future, is making all of these things work together. The iPhone syncs to your desktop at home. The Apple TV gets its content from your desktop at home. It's not about replacing your computer, it's about extending it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Good points. Should point out that many phones TODAY are capable of sharing files via bluetooth/usb. It's mostly the telco's that lock the phones down so you have to use airtime to transmit files (or worse, only buy content from their services).
So you'd need to see BOTH the telco's and hardware designers lose their greed.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Palm is dead. Over 2 years ago Palm sold its OS to the Japanese "Access" corp that makes so many Japanese phones and their most popular web browser. So Access could finish their long heralded "Cobalt" OS, and switch to a new OS which was Linux, under Cobalt (retained as just GUI and compatibility layer). They were supposed to release Linux (+ Cobalt GUI) phones last Fall, before anyone had heard about the (real) iPhone.
But they didn't. Just as Palm let the Blackberry come from behind and eat the market Palm created, Access has let PalmOS keep it from even reaching the market before Apple is eating it, without even a released product.
It's all too bad. The PalmOS approach, focused simplicity on tasks, designed as a tough peripheral, with the most natural interface, writing on the screen, was the right paradigm. Handled properly, it should have forced all computing, whether workstation, mobile, phone or mediaplayer, to "just work", adopting many of its friendliest innovations. Now that job, as usual, is up to Apple.
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make install -not war
I went into a big box computer store recently, to buy a cable for a PDA I'm developing for. I was shocked; a few months earlier thre had been about twenty feet of counter space devoted to PDAs. Now there was zero -- just two shelves under the counter, maybe two feet wide, half for Palm, half for HP iPaqs. In its place was now twice the retailspace, devoted to iPod accessories.
While the industry had been busy competing to offer "updated" PDAs, Apple has kicked the entire lot into retail obscurity. They can't even, as entire industry, hold their own against fashion cases for the iPod Nano. Apple is a company that has carved out a niche by not only ignoring, but flagrantly defying industry "wisdom", which comes from a group of people far too focused on what each other is doing.
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series. Palm has the customers and retail channel (for now); the sentiments quoted above say that they should use them to innovate within the bounds of the PDA or smart phone paradigm. But we have reached the point where the value of the next "PDA innovation" is not enough to get you on base -- not in a game where a base hit consists of a $200 retail purchase by a consumer.
The true destiny of the PDA is not to accrete laptop like capabilities. It is to become a cheap commodity. The world needs a Palm m505 for $19.99; not a Life Drive (just discontinued last month) for $399. That is the true meaning of convergence: PDAs have become marginal appendages to phones; their job is to sell phones.
The idea that PalmOS should become more like PocketPC and accrete new features only makes the situation worse. As the sales of PDAs plummet, both Palm and PocketPC will suffer, but PocketPC is destined to drop even faster.
The problem for a company like Palm is not that money cannot be made with a product whose fundametal retail value is destined to plummet. The problem is that money cannot be made with a conventional tech company culture, which is biased towards on stuffing as much features and functionality into a product as will fit. The best thing would be for Apple to buy a nearly moribund Palm for a song.
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